Warhammer 40,000, or 40K for short has been a setting that I’ve loved since I was but a pre-teenager. Essentially, it’s a science fiction setting that takes place in the far, far future of the year 40,000 with humanity most of the galaxy in a very manifest destiny type of fervour. After 20k years of having colonized most of space, humanity declined, and now the Imperium of Man (It’s called the Imperium because 40K likes being almost Latin) is a massive, brutal, and endlessly struggling state that fails to maintain itself. There’s non-stop, constant war with alien races, demonically possessed humans, and humans that rebel because they’re plain sick of being extorted. It’s a grim take both on the prospects of Empire but also humanity and governance as a whole. There’s so much depth to the parallels that I’ll have to break this topic into two parts. This part will just be a broad overview and endorsement of the Horus Heresy novels. There’s one set-piece that takes place in the setting that is a modern, science fiction take on Paradise Lost with many similarities (as well as differences). The story of the Horus Heresy. In it, the Emperor of Man, the God-like warrior-king-scientist creates 18 Demi-Gods called Primarchs as his sons to unite all of the human colonies into his empire. After a mostly successful unification of humanity, the Emperor flees to Earth to invent more cool stuff for humanity, and places his most trusted son, Horus, to lead the rest of the Primarchs in the final steps of the unification. Horus, unable to deal with the stress of having to be the proxy of the Emperor and realizing that he would always have to serve as the second-most-high being in the Imperium, decided to rebel against the Emperor. Skipping a long, long, long war, essentially Horus and all of his defectors after the war are brought so low that they have to make pacts with Gods of Chaos in order to remain powerful enough to survive without the light of the Emperor’s protection in space. There’s a lot of differences, but a lot of similarities to Paradise Lost. Horus’ rebellion is clearly similar to Lucifer rebelling against God. The was against the Imperium is often referred to as the “War in the Heavens,” which may or may not be the reason I chose that part to do my presentation on. The main fighting force of the war are superhuman warriors known as “Astartes.” Interesting, as in Paradise Lost, one of Satan’s ilk in book 1 is specifically referred to as Astarte. The Emperor ends up dying of wounds sustained in battle, so that’s not entirely accurate to Paradise Lost, but Horus ends up having his entire essence deleted from the universe, forced to live on in his warriors who take up his grim cause and swear to destroy the Imperium forever. This post is getting unnecessarily long, and I may break my dissection down into three parts, but for now, that’s the gist of it. Dude has tantrum in space because he’s overly-ambitious and has a mind to make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell.