A bit of an irregular essay this week. I’ve been working on some Horus Heresy stuff, but there’s nothing ready to publish yet – it’s the big flagship essay, to go out when I finish the series. Probably won’t be ready for six months yet. Maybe more. I’m currently reading Born of Flame – a short story anthology centered around the Salamanders. It’s the fiftieth book in the series. There are sixty-four books in total, and my goal has been twenty books a year. That means three years to read the whole series, plus maybe another six or twelve months afterwards to finish the later essays. Call it a four year project. I started in early 2022, so two and a half years in – and we’re on track. Fifty books. Some of them not very good. Year two was a slog. I’m thinking a little about – you know, what I’m doing with my life. There’s some reflecting. I can’t think of many other instances where you’d read this many books in a sequence. The Wheel of Time series is famously long, and that’s – what, fourteen? You could go to the old Enid Blyton adventure books – Famous Five, Secret Seven – still only about fifteen or twenty of those. It’s a dork-ass project. I don’t regret it, but it’s pretty stupid. There’s probably some interesting stuff to say about the practice of repetition. Reading one book, and then picking up the next one. Tish Harrison Warren has a 2016 book titled Liturgy of the Ordinary. It’s about the theology of making your bed, or sitting in traffic – about the everyday as spiritual practice. It’s a book about repetition. It’s about the fact that you’re going to do more or less the same thing every day, forever. You may as well do it with a sense of purpose. If you’re a reader, you’re probably going to read books forever. You may as well spend three years reading a single series. Is that a long time? Sure, but you were going to spend that time reading anyway. It’s not shocking because it’s a long commitment: it’s shocking to think that you would still be doing the same thing three years from now. But this is it. We find ourselves in the present moment, and three years later – yeah, we’ll still be here, and it’ll mostly be the same. We’ll still be buying groceries, cooking dinners, cleaning the bathroom. We’ll still be reading. The way we spend our days is the way we spend our lives. It’s just this, forever.

The Horus Heresy is very much a series about doing the same thing forever. The setting, and the 40K setting more broadly, is one of total war. Society is totally mobilized towards the war effort. There is nothing except the war. Individual human needs – aesthetic needs, practical needs, the personal desire for fulfilment or joy – it’s all subordinated to the driving force of conflict. The same thing forever, and not even for yourself. The characters are largely replaceable. Each Space Marine has their own identity, but there are so many (and they die so quickly) that it’s barely worth learning their names. They are individual soldiers sent through the mill – ground down by the same machinery. As Romano Guardini says, the machine enacts control “by taking [things] out of a special living relation to what is individual and creating an artificial order into which they all, more or less, fit.” Here repetition is a punishment, a judgement against humanity. It is dehumanizing. It creates inhumanity, makes us inhuman. The individual conflict faced by any specific soldier is less a unique situation and more an expression of a repeating pattern, the same forever that every other soldier is put through in every other front across the galaxy. There are sixty-four books in the Horus Heresy. Sixty-four conflicts, sixty-four battles that are all really the same battle, unending. There are eighteen legions, but they really are sort of the same. Sixty-four books – really one book. Really the same conflict, the same problems – different people, but all fed through the same grinding machine. It’s a horror series. It’s our horror. It’s the horror of the labour market, as Amber Husain would say. It’s the horror of now, and the next now, and the next.

One response to repetition is the mythic. We were talking about this last week, with Elden Ring – it’s the same patterns repeating over time as an expression of something greater. The individual instance manifests but does not exhaust the underlying mythos. We find ourselves in the present moment. It’s the only place anyone has ever found themselves. It expresses but does not exhaust the human condition. The struggle continues. There’s a very small Elden Ring YouTube channel called ‘TrashZora’. There’s maybe a thousand subscribers, and one of the more popular videos is Finlay’s heroic walk. There’s a character in the game who historically carried the wounded demigod Malenia across the world. TrashZora made a real-time video showing that entire walk in first person. It takes about three hours. There’s one pretty funny bit where he gets spanked by an Oracle Envoy and dies, but – you know, it’s also a three hour video just walking through this world. It’s a long time, but – isn’t that sort of the point? This is where we find ourselves. You’re going to go to sleep, and tomorrow you’ll wake up, and it’ll be the same thing again. Repetition. We take hold of it and make it meaningful, or we don’t, but it’s all that’s left to us.