Author: sapteuq

Strait to hell, boys (US/Israeli War on Iran, Day 20, March 19th 2026)

Since this war started I’ve been paying attention to news reports with a few key questions in my mind. ‘Will the Iranian people rise up in support of the people bombing them?’ was never one of those questions. The first hours of the conflict, when the Iranians fired back forcefully, settled in my mind the question, ‘Will the Iranian government fold?’ They didn’t, and now they won’t. But I’ve been wondering: will Iran reach a point where it can’t launch missiles and drones to significant military effect anymore? The Iranian government would not surrender at that point, so what then? Will the US reach a point where they are not making progress anymore with the bombing, where the costs threaten to pass a tipping point? Would Trump call it off? Or what other means would the US pursue, probably alongside continued bombing? Some of these questions are being answered as we speak as the war transitions to a new phase.

Previous posts in this series: What advantages does Iran have in this war? (US/Israeli War on Iran, Day 4, March 3, 2026) and The Machine War (US/Israeli War on Iran, Day 12 – March 11th 2026)

Battle of Hormuz?

An image of the Strait of Hormuz from Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of NASA. Iranian countryside in the foreground, Arabia across the strait.

As far as this war goes, the Strait of Hormuz is now the primary focus of the world’s attention. I see potential for a pitched battle to develop in the straits of Hormuz. In other words the US may try to force the straits using naval and air power. To what end?  Not only for economic reasons, but for reasons of prestige, power projection etc. Such a battle would be difficult for Iran as they don’t have air superiority. But US vessels would be vulnerable to attacks from the shore and from drones, including naval drones. Could the US force a way through? Most likely yes, but at serious cost. Could it guarantee the safety of civilian shipping for even, say, one week following the end of such a battle? Let alone for years to come? They would have to control the entire shoreline at all times, requiring a massive commitment of resources and personnel. Actually making the strait safe means occupying a decent chunk of Iran. Occupying part of Iran means fighting a ground war.

I wrote the above days ago. Today I read this:

The US operations being contemplated include securing safe passage for oil tankers through the ⁠Strait of Hormuz, a mission that would be accomplished primarily through air and naval forces, the sources said.

But securing the strait could also mean deploying US troops to Iran’s shoreline, said four sources, including two US officials. Reuters granted the sources anonymity to speak about military planning.

Jesus Christ.

A ‘Battle of Hormuz’ scenario would draw the US into a painful trap. In a battle like that, Iran could bring its strength to bear much more so than in the current air war, because it would be a question of military power in coastal waters and on the ground. The war would move from air, the favoured element of the US, to water and then to earth. Specifically Iranian soil, where the Iranians would have a massive advantage in terms of numbers, personnel, local support and knowledge. The US would not be able to defeat an Iranian insurgency, and I have my doubts about them even winning a conventional war in this situation.

If the US does not attempt to force the Strait of Hormuz, and just watches as more and more countries cut deals with Iran to get their shipping through, they will be accepting a defeat on the global stage. They may well sit back and try to wait Iran out. I’m not alone in half-expcting this; on March 13th we had Elliot Abrams, former high-ranking diplomat, weighing in with the opinion that Trump will ‘call off’ the war in ‘probably a week or two.’ That does not strike me as implausible. Or, in the circumstances, unwise.

Attempting to force the straits would be a wild thing to do. But launching this war was a wild thing to do. US leaders, given their volatile public profiles, could well go for crazy plans as a way to salvage wounded pride, but only end up committing more and ultimately losing more. They have already blustered their way into a strategic dilemma.

The other depressing fact to remember, though, is that US military power is so huge that these volatile leaders could make every imaginable blunder and still be cushioned from defeat. One fifth of the world’s oil might just have to move through a warzone for a few decades while Iran is torn apart and its people suffer. Stupider things have happened.

I’m throwing in a second Strait of Hormuz image simply because you can make out Dubai’s Jumeirah palm in this image. Image from Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of NASA.

Missiles and drones

Another key feature of the last few weeks has been that Iranian projectile and drone launches have fallen to a low but consistent plateau.

I want to draw attention to this article by Muhanad Seloom which makes an argument that the US and Israel are winning the present war. He points out how badly the US/Israeli air campaign has damaged Iran’s capacity:

‘Iranian ballistic missile launches have fallen by more than 90 percent from 350 on February 28 to roughly 25 by March 14, according to publicly available data. Drone launches tell the same story: from more than 800 on Day 1 to about 75 on Day 15.’

The weak spot in his argument comes at the end. We can all agree that the bombing campaign has been vast in scale, hitting many thousands of targets in Iran and seriously damaging its military production. But then Seloom asks, ‘What prevents Iran from restarting production? The answer requires a post-conflict framework that does not yet exist in practise.’ I simply don’t see what post-conflict framework, short of military occupation, would prevent the Iranian state from rearming.

The article also acknowledges that communication from the Trump regime has been ‘poor’, a reference to the mishmash of strategic aims that have been declared to the world. I don’t think it’s just communication. The real problem lies in what is being communicated. There was no strategy beyond the assumption that the Iranian government would immediately collapse or surrender. Maybe the Trump administration will move the goalposts and declare victory. But as I’ve said before, the Iranian government is in a position where it can say when the war ends.

The other point is that Iran, even with a diminished capacity, is still launching enough missiles and drones. Just today they hit a power plant in Haifa. The censorship regime prevents us from seeing much. We have to extrapolate from the limited data we can see. The New York Times found 17 damaged US facilities in the region using satellite data. Daily news reports bring us news of mounting horrors in Lebanon and further bombings across Iran, but there are also still regular reports of Iranian missiles striking targets in Israel and across the Gulf.

The US leadership with their sadistic and bombastic speeches are signposting their own untrustworthiness. So I don’t believe their boasts about how much of Iran’s military capabilities they have destroyed. And it seems plausible to me that their air campaign passed a point of diminishing returns a week or two ago. There is a part of the Iranian military capacity which the US cannot hit. Iran is big; there are sites the bombers cannot find or reach. In spite of boasts that they have destroyed all air defences in the country, I would bet there are heavily-defended areas that the Americans are shying away from. Meanwhile a part of what has been destroyed can be restored.

I assumed for a while that Iranian missiles and drones would run out. What’s actually happened is that a massive supply is stuck in a bottleneck of launching capacity. Their machine war has plateaued to a level that is low relative to February 28th. But it’s still going and it’s not going to stop for a long time.

Proxies/Allies

We should consider a scenario where the US, while continuing to bomb Iran, also arms and funds various opposition forces within Iran.

In the first week of the war the question of Kurdish and Baloch insurgents was more to the fore than it is now. With various Iranian Kurdish parties declaring an alliance and with autonomous Kurdish regions now in existence in Iraq and Syria, it’s likely that, at the very least, some Kurdish forces in the northwest of Iran will make some moves. The Balochs in southeast Iran are another national group who might be willing to join the fight. Showing the Iranian leaders’ alarm at such a prospect, they carried out drone strikes in the early days of the war against Kurdish-held outposts.

On March 5th interesting remarks from a Baloch leader were quoted in The Guardian: “I think [everyone] who is against the brutal cleric regime would accept support from the US but it should be a consistent support that resolves the issues of minorities – unlike, for example, when the US gave support for Syrian Kurds and then betrayed Kurds.”

The US lacks moral authority and trust due to its (bipartisan) fickle treatment of proxies in the past. Of course, a tenet of Trumpism seems to be that a great empire doesn’t need trust or moral authority. As a result, these groups within Iran are reluctant to fight in spite of their aspiration for independence. Hard to blame them! Joining the US and Israel wholeheartedly would be very unwise, given Trump could hang them out to dry “probably in a week or two.” There is reluctance on the US side too, because Erdogan does not like the sight of Kurdish people with guns. The same goes for Balochs and Pakistan.

Also, to what end? The purpose of promoting insurgencies would be to distract Iranian ground forces. But unless the US actually tries to occupy the Iranian coast, there is nothing to distract them from. It’s a waste.

The developments toward a regional war, especially in Lebanon where the civilian death toll is now approaching that of Iran, and the continuing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and genocide in Gaza, deserve more attention than I have been able to give them in this post. So there we have it for Day 20 of the war, as I see it: potential for a pitched battle around the straits, Iranian barrages continuing at the same rate while the far greater US/Israeli bombardment sees diminishing returns, and mixed signals re the development of insurgent movements on the borders of Iran.

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The Machine War (US/Israeli War on Iran, Day 12 – March 11th 2026)

Following on from last week’s post, I want to thrash out from uncertain evidence where things stand in the war as of today. Day 12 is a landmark because twelve days was the length of last year’s June conflict between the same antagonists. The day has come and gone with only the most unconvincing signals from the US president that there might be some dim prospect of a peace deal. But as I said last time, the basic strategic situation is: it’s the Iranian side who get to say when the war ends.

But it may be the end of the beginning. I think we are getting on towards the end of the first phase of the war, a machine war mostly of missiles, bombs and drones. The main questions in this first phase of the war are: what do the Iranians do when they run out of missiles? What do the US and Israelis do when they run out of interceptors? And who runs out first? A missile-interceptor gap in favour of Iran would mean a sudden ramping-up of damage to Israel, Gulf oil infrastructure and US bases. A gap in favour of the US means Iran’s chief offensive weapon is spent.

Where are we now?

Where do things stand right now in relation to this question? Almost nobody who knows anything valuable has any incentive to tell the truth. Here I will sum up the contradictory stuff I’ve read from various more or less non-credible sources.

  • That there are x5 fewer missiles than expected because Iran has lost so many launchers to air strikes.
  • That the US is pulling military hardware out of places like Korea and Ukraine to throw it into the Iran situation.
  • That the rate of Iranian missile fire has slowed a great deal since the start of the war.
  • That in comparison with last year’s 12-day war, fewer Iranian missiles are being launched – but they are causing more damage with the population of Tel Aviv being forced to run in and out of bunkers all the time.
  • That the Iranians are tricking enemy pilots by literally painting warplanes on runways.
  • That Tel Aviv is being hit really hard in the last four days, that the “Iron Dome” is breaking.
  • That US/Israeli planes are swarming the exits to Iranian bunkers, blowing up anything that pokes its head outside.
  • That civilian life in the Gulf has returned a good deal of the way to normal.
  • That Iran has pivoted to blowing up oil facilities in the Gulf.
  • That these attacks on oil facilities are not Iranian at all, but Israeli false flag operations (If the Gulf countries choose to do a deal with Iran in the future, they can all pretend to believe this).
  • That Iran is still holding back its biggest missiles.
  • That Iran can churn out Shahed drones at several times the rate that they are destroyed, and that these drones can do enough damage to make a big difference in the war.
  • That Iran can fight on at a fraction of the financial cost that the war is imposing on the US.
  • That the US side are not actually worried about running out of interceptors, only about leaving Ukraine exposed by overcommitting to Israel and the Gulf.
  • The US has not lost vessels. But that could be because their navy is hanging back and not committing itself to combat.
  • That the entire Iranian navy and air force have been destroyed, and 80% of air defences destroyed.
  • That 17 US installations in the Middle East have been damaged.
A Shahed drone shot down in Ukraine. Image courtesy of Npu.gov.ua

All of the above cannot be true. But some of it is. We have to use our own judgement. It appears to me that while the balance of fatalities is massively against Iran, the war is proving to be a massive logistical, political and economic challenge for the US.

What do we know for sure?

The outstanding fact of the war is that there has been a slaughter of civilians in Iran and Lebanon. Next in significance is the blockade of the Straits of Hormuz, the mere warning of which has led to economic turmoil around the world. Moving on from warnings, today three ships were hit by Iranian weapons in the straits.

Incentives to de-escalate are not there. An initiative by the Iranian president to mend fences with the Gulf States was blocked by the military, with strikes continuing, for example on a desalination plant in Bahrain the very next day. Yesterday I saw multiple headlines about Trump saying peace was coming very soon, and I just find it both funny and irritating that there are still journalists hanging on every word out of Trump, as if this is a man who weighs his words for even a second before vomiting them up, or stays true to them afterwards.

The US/Israeli bombardment, with its toll in civilian lives, can carry on for, in effect, as long as the US population will continue to pay for it and to tolerate it morally. But Iran will run out of missiles or of launching capacity sooner than it runs out of resolve. From a two-sided air war it will become a one-sided bombing campaign like what the US did in Korea and Vietnam (without unseating a regime). The 12-day duration of last year’s war could indicate that this first phase, this machine war, might be reaching its limits. But assuming the two sides are better-prepared this time, it could go on for another week or two.

At the end of that period, a missile-interceptor gap in Iran’s favour would mean an episode of more serious damage being inflicted on US bases and on Israel. Such a ‘Tet Offensive’ moment, especially so soon after the outbreak of war, could have a huge effect on public opinion and mood. A missile-interceptor gap in favour of the US would, on the other hand, settle the air war into a one-sided conflict until such time as the Iranians can restore capacity – if they can restore capacity at all under such pressure.

Next post I intend to explore what a second phase of this war might look like, assuming that the first is coming to an end. To finish today, a note on the Iranian regime.

Iran: strengths and weaknesses of the regime

I said last week that Trump, Hegseth, Miller et al are fools. The Iranian leadership, on the other hand, are reactionary and ruthless, but they are not fools. Unlike the American and the Israeli leaders, they cannot afford to be fools. The Islamic Republic is deeply imbedded in society through a nearly fifty-year history. Iran’s strategic doctrine of distributed “mosaic” resistance and multiple designated successors for every position is an impressive response to the last quarter-century of a US and Israeli doctrine of blitzkrieg and assassination. In the future, the current war could be written up as an epic of resistance that could supply the clerical regime with a whole new legitimizing narrative that it can spin decades of mileage out of.

For what it’s worth, I don’t support the Islamic Republic regime – and I think any regime that Trump might install (or Biden, Obama, Bush or Lincoln, while we’re at it) would be a lot worse. A new regime emerging in a genuine way, from a popular uprising such as the Women, Life, Freedom movement, or from Iranian labour, would be a different story. To me this is a very simple point. It’s not complicated at all. Some people insist that any criticism of Trump’s idiotic war is a defence of the clerics. On the other hand I’ve noticed a semi-ironic identification with the Iranian regime from people who are simply relieved to see some powerful entity standing up to the US and Israel at long last.

Even taking into account the rounding effects of irony, I think this is unwise. Already the clerical regime is directing its propaganda appeal to the anti-Israel layers of MAGA more so than the progressive anti-war left.

Anyway, I don’t feel any need to wring my hands, accompanying any remarks with a token condemnation of the Iranian government for the sole purpose of covering my arse. That’s not why I’m writing this. But a relevant point, for my purposes, is to look at how the nature of the Islamic Republic might inhibit its ability to fight imperialism. On Drop Site News a week ago I heard an Iranian official using this war as a retrospective justification for the killing of thousands of protesters by the government in January in operations that were extraordinary in scale and ferocity. On the contrary, there must be severe confusion and demoralisation in the armed forces and among the public following the winter bloodshed. This kind of war demands the full mobilisation not only of the armed forces but of all of society.

I’m going to leave that point very general because of weaknesses in my knowledge of Iranian culture and politics. But as a general rule the nature of a regime has profound effects on how it fights a war. We can’t put the clerical authoritarian regime in a box and forget about it for military purposes. It will tell.

What advantages does Iran have in this war? (US/Israeli War on Iran, Day 4, March 3, 2026)

The long-predicted US/Israeli war against Iran has begun. I will be at the anti-war rallies, just so you know where I’m coming from. But this post is going to address a simple question in a factual way with as little rhetoric and moral judgements as I can manage. So I regret that I’m going to be mentioning various reactionary chancers as if they are serious people whose words mean anything.

That question: What advantages does Iran have in the current war?

I don’t know who’s going to win this war. The advantages enjoyed by the US are obvious, and include a military organisation of peerless strength, practically unlimited material resources and the vocal support of governments around the world. But it strikes me that Iran enjoys many advantages that are not as immediately obvious but that carry great weight.

1: Home turf

This is not a war between peers of equal strength. But it is not ‘superpower versus dysfunctional geopolitical minnow’ either. This is a global empire versus a regional power.

It is obvious which side is stronger. But the stronger power still has to apply its strength effectively. Here, the aggressor’s supply lines are stretched while the defender has its resources and its population right there, to hand. The US has to bring its personnel half-way across the world and keep them supplied. An important regional power, with a well-educated population of 92 million and a strong military, can leverage this advantage.

On the other hand, the US has a vast apparatus of bases half-encircling Iran. There are 40,000-50,000 US personnel under Central Command (Centcom, covering the ‘Middle East’, Central Asia and Egypt). Centcom has existed since the early 1980s and has fought several wars. Bases housing up to 10,000 personnel have histories going back decades. So the war is not ‘US versus Iran, on Iran’s home turf’. It is Centcom (and tiny but heavily-armed Israel) versus Iran. This diminishes Iran’s ‘home turf’ advantage but not entirely. This apparatus of US bases has to be sustained from outside at great expense. If it expends a lot of munitions or loses a lot of soldiers or machines, these have to be made good across those long supply lines.

2: US military assets can become political liabilities

It’s not, in every situation, a good thing for the US to have a wealth of targets within range of Iranian strength. From his statements about the war possibly being over in two to three days, it’s clear Trump wanted another ‘one and done’ spectacle in Iran: strike hard, receive capitulation, declare victory, pick another country to shake down next. Hegseth’s remarks today acknowledge it will be a longer affair but insist that it won’t be Iraq.

If we can say that there is a ‘Trump doctrine’ of quick wars – one-night stands or weekend flings with no strings attached – then that doctrine has been exposed for its serious weaknesses. It demands that Trump pick his battles carefully, which he has not done on this occasion. And that goes back to those US bases.

On Day Two of the war I wrote the following note for this post: ‘It’s going to be the US asking for peace, this week or next – and Iran saying no, we won’t stop hitting Israel, hitting your bases, until we are convinced we are secure.‘ That’s in essence what has happened since I wrote that note. Trump made tentative peace overtures, the Iranians said no and kept shooting, and Trump and co started making different noises, saying the war would be four or five weeks, not three days.

Those US bases, to be clear, are a net negative for Iran. But in this situation, they are hostages. They mean that Iran can hit back, with no shortage of targets. The war ends when Iran says so, or when it has nothing left to throw at those bases. This is not a weekend fling. The US is committed, even though it didn’t want to be.

3: Iran’s back is to the wall

The US struck Iran without warning, in the middle of negotiations that appeared to be going well. Negotiating in bad faith and assassinating a leader who enjoyed considerable authority and prestige in his country and beyond – these things come at a cost. The twelve-day war last year (when Israel and Iran traded missile strikes until the US waded into the fray and bombed Fordow) saw Iran’s government take a moderate and cautious posture. This time Iran has retaliated, apparently without holding back.

I don’t know enough about Iran to advance a sweeping thesis about how its people will rally behind the government. The lack of military mutinies during the recent protests is an important sign that though the regime is widely hated it is not on the brink of being overthrown. Based on historical examples, I’d say that even many who hate the government would temporarily set aside their differences and get behind the war effort.

4: The US does not know what it is doing

The strategic aim of Israel is clear enough: destroy Iran as a regional power so as to institute US/Israeli hegemony unchallenged over southwest Asia. For this aim, regime change is not necessary. Chaos will suffice. Civil war will suffice. But Israel does not have a hope of achieving these aims without strong, active US backing.

So, does the US share Israel’s strategic aim, or is it in this for different ends? My impression would be that most of the US ruling class, beyond Trump, even beyond the Republican Party and into the Democratic leadership, supports this basic strategic aim. But unlike the Israeli population, the US population emphatically does not support this. Open pursuit of such sweeping war aims would lead to political crisis at home. Hence fake war aims concerning the protests which were crushed months ago and a non-existent nuclear weapons programme (which Trump apparently destroyed last year anyway, if anyone can remember that far back). There is a lazy conflation of conventional missiles and nuclear missiles. Even at that, nobody is fooled. The half-arsedness of the case for war is striking in comparison to the elaborate efforts made in 2002-3 to win public consent for the invasion of Iraq.

The US is in a longer war, like it or not. Iran has rejected peace overtures and escalated, because the Trump regime made a sham of diplomacy. Trump will escalate in turn, because he is not ready to make concessions and appear weak. Both sides have an incentive to escalate well beyond where we are now. But the Iranians know what they are fighting for. The Americans don’t.

And what are the US options for escalation? As I see it:

  • Bomb Iran on the scale that they bombed North Korea or North Vietnam
  • Foment civil war
  • Use nuclear weapons
  • Invade and occupy the country

The first two probably won’t work, but they will try them more likely than not. The third and fourth are obviously more than the US public will accept. That’s not to say I rule them out. Neither Trump, Rubio nor Hegseth has ruled out ‘boots on the ground.’ They would be fools to try and occupy the country, even with the aid of hypothetical Iranian allies (who have not yet materialized). The mountains of Iran would be the tomb of Trumpism. Then again, they are in fact fools.

5: US allies may not be as steadfast as they appear

The Gulf States and Jordan have adopted a public posture condemning Iran. But privately there must be fury toward Trump. They wanted the talks to result in lasting peace because peace is conducive to tourism and commerce, which are existentially important especially to the UAE. So will we see these Arab states kick out the US military bases? I doubt that. But I don’t think they’ll join in the war either.

At the same time, many will want to keep on good terms with the United States. There is widespread hostility to Iran in these countries. There is a basis for a perspective of staying in with the Americans and enduring several years of war in order to see Iran defeated. But then what? A collapsed Iran would be a source of endless instability and violence. Right now it’s all condemnations of Iran, but I’d say there’s a ‘Wait and see’ approach in terms of practical actions. If Iran doesn’t fold quickly, and I don’t think it will, the Arab governments might push the US for peace.

Open questions

This is a new and strange kind of war, an air and naval war, very technical on one end (ballistics, trajectories, etc) and very visceral on the other (devastating explosions, death, terror, destruction). It hinges on technical questions about the capabilities of missiles and drones and of the systems designed to intercept them. There are key questions here which only people with specialist knowledge can answer (I don’t have specialist knowledge). A good place to start for that: Military Realism has written on the limits of missile defence as well as about some of the technical questions relevant here. Meanwhile vital statistics and facts on Iran can be found in this detailed profile by Joseph Shupac at the Geographic Investor.

There’s a remarkable story about 2002 wargames conducted by the US military simulating a war with Iran. Retired Marine Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, playing as the Iranians, defeated the American side using, crucially, motorcycle messengers and small boats. It was partly with this in mind that I asked here on January 31st ‘how would things go in the US if some hundreds or thousands of naval and air personnel died in a couple of days?’ We are four days into the war, and US fatalities are in single digits while 500+ Iranian civilians have been killed according to the Red Crescent. It is unclear to what extent US facilities and materiel have been damaged. The advantages I have listed here will count for little if Iran is simply unable to impose sufficient costs on the US in particular. But there are costs other than human lives: in buildings destroyed, supplies spent, trade disrupted.

I have questions that the next few weeks will probably answer, but in the meantime I’d appreciate any comments that can address them. Can Iran sink US vessels? Can Iran withstand the economic cost of war? China and Russia joining the war seems very unlikely, but will they throw lifelines to Iran? What is the size of Iran’s arsenal, how much of it can be destroyed by air strikes, and how quickly can it be replenished? How much of that arsenal can the US and its allies absorb with interception systems – can they hold out for a few more days, or is it weeks or months?

Here is, not a prediction, but a scenario: three years from now the price of everything is through the roof. 50 Iranian refugees are being moved into a disused hotel down the road from your house. All the Trump admirers in your town are calling this an invasion.

Here’s another scenario: within the next couple of months, spooked by damaged bases, spent munitions, economic shocks and an anti-war mood, and with the Iranian state failing to collapse, the US backs down instead of escalating. The world is spared the many terrible consequences of the collapse of Iran into civil war and chaos, or of another long war on the scale of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Trump shakes hands with the new Ayatollah and declares that he’s a wonderful guy.

The “AI” Bubble (News comment, March 2026)

What explains the scale of the hype around Generative AI? Why the massive construction of infrastructure, the feverish promotion, and the vast amounts of wealth invested? Why are layoffs, the proliferation of child sex abuse material, and environmental destruction all tolerated? What does all this mean, when three-plus years into this bizarre cultural experiment, Open AI and similar companies have not turned a profit, and when the end product is so underwhelming?

They still can’t do hands

The answer is: Steve Jobs. Around 2010 the whole world was told a very persuasive story about Steve Jobs. The story goes that this genius came along and invented the iPod, iPad and smartphone, transformed everyday life and opened up vast new frontiers for investment and profit.

Capitalism needs a new Steve Jobs every ten years or so to keep the show on the road. It’s not just that there’s a million tech entrepreneurs out there who all want to be hailed as geniuses and to get uber-wealthy. It’s not just that the public is primed to expect this story to unfold again and again. That’s all in our heads (which is not to say it doesn’t matter). The biggest part of this is that capital needs a place to go.

All those rich people, all those funds, need to have a new Steve Jobs that they can throw money at. They don’t want to invest in unexciting, low-profit, bread-and-butter things, even if they might actually improve the world and empower their fellow human beings. They want tech things that sound exciting and radical but that don’t challenge capitalism in any way.

The Great Irish Famine according to Generative AI

For a while it was crypto. E-vehicles and space travel, which unlike crypto and AI are actually worthwhile things, have been hyped and inflated in the same way in recent years (the gall and illiteracy of SpaceX when they called a basic orbital rocket “Starship”!). Now it’s AI and they are going much harder. 

Hype to an extent creates its own reality. This thing has enormous momentum. But the rules have changed. It’s not the 2000s or the 2010s. The low-hanging fruit that you can grab, the digital commons that you can enclose, are scant now. People who have bought into the AI hype are not convinced by the product itself (how could anyone be?). They are convinced because they believe they are in a familiar story, a story about genius, enterprise, tech innovation, changing the world, getting rich. So did (do) the crypto people. When the reckoning comes their first reaction will be “That wasn’t in the script.”

Before the Fall: A Delayed Conclusion

Hi folks, this post represents me putting a rough-and-ready finish on a job I left half-done a while back. You’re reading a long-delayed conclusion to my series Before the Fall: Notes on The Dawn of Everything. I have now finally finished Graeber & Wengrow’s fascinating book and can offer my thoughts on the back half of it.

I had far fewer problems with the book as a whole than I had with the first few chapters. Experts who have criticised this book have generally thrown in a few nice comments as well, and it’s easy to see why. The Dawn of Everything, as the name suggests, is sweeping. I feel a wide range of people will find things in it that they really like even if they can identify places where they think the evidence is thin or where the reasoning invites a ‘well… not necessarily.’

Via Wikimedia commons: ‘National Museum of Anthropology – Teotihuacán. Reconstruction of murals in a patio of the Palacio de Atetelco in Teotihuacán showing coyote warriors.’ Photograph by Wolfgang Sauber.

It’s often argued that inequality and power structures are necessary in any sufficiently large population; once you go past a few hundred people, the argument goes, you need governments, ruling classes and bureaucracies. Graeber & Wengrow disagree, and this is the strongest point in the back half of the book. It’s demonstrated most clearly in their survey of early cities around the world (such as Teotihuacán and Mohenjo-Daro) that had egalitarian features. Outside cities, it’s also obvious in the clan structures of indigenous North America, imagined communities as big as a city that linked disparate strangers across vast distances.

I agree with the authors on this point around scale and have for a long time, and it was satisfying to read their arguments and examples. I can exercise power through my membership in unions, campaign groups, political parties, and through my vote. The late David Graeber would scoff at how limited these powers are, but the point is that these are powers I exercise precisely as part of a large collective, not as an individual or in a small group (and better versions of my union and my democracy can be pointed to or imagined). People can be powerless in a small, intimate group – an abusive family, a house share under a controlling landlord, or a tyrannical workplace – and powerful in larger collectives of the kind I just mentioned. In fact larger workplaces tend to have more power than smaller ones. It’s a bit like blaming environmental devastation on ‘too many people’ – what really decides the question is how the people are organised, not how many there are.

Via Wikimedia Commons: Español: Palacio del Sol visto desde la Pirámide del Sol, Teotihuacan, México. Photograph by Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata.

Another idea that comes under fire is what I call tech-tree thinking. This assumption is there in the architecture of videogames but a lot of writers also assume that societies ‘develop’ or ‘achieve’ certain upgrades like agriculture or democracy, which provide a buff to their stats, while some other societies ‘fail’ to do so. Humans dabbled in agriculture without committing to a full-on farming life for many thousands of years. Some took on farming then gave it up when it didn’t work out for them. Some never bothered with it. And we find examples of democratic institutions throughout the archaeological, anthropological and historical record. These are not thresholds that peoples pass through or fail to pass through. They are things we can choose to do or not to do.

Here’s a point that never would have occurred to me, but that I found compelling: Graeber & Wengrow see (at least some) early cities as cradles of democracy, and trace the origin of aristocracy to the ‘heroic societies’ of nomadic pastoralists. In the picture they paint, democracies are developing in cities, aristocracies in the hills nearby. They trade with each other, but develop in mutual opposition. Later the aristocratic nomads conquer the cities, but for long periods after that royal power is circumscribed by powerful urban councils.

The most interesting story unfortunately also struck me as the most tenuous in terms of evidence. The authors paint a picture of a powerful kingdom developing along the Ohio river in North America, imposing the will of its rulers through mass bloodshed; of this society collapsing as the population migrated to freer places; of a cultural memory of this experiment in hierarchy and empire digging itself deep into the traditions and instincts of the North American Indians, even vast distances away; of this memory informing the development of an anti-authoritarian political tradition. It’s a great story because it shows indigenous political institutions as something other than ancient traditions; they were informed by a particular experience in the not-too-distant past. It’s compelling and could well be true, but the evidence related here doesn’t prove it. It’s an example of how your mileage may vary with some of the material in this book. Speaking of material, they sometimes advance explanations for things that I can only see as second- or third-order explanations. We hear that large scale adoption of certain crops depended on that particular crop arbitrarily being used for (that most convenient of phrases) ritual purposes.

Excavated ruins of Mohenjo-daro, with the Great Bath in the foreground and the granary mound in the background.’ Photograph by Saqib Qayyum.

I still see a lot of value in categorising different societies using the rubric of production, in seeing economics as something that sets broad but hard limits on what can happen in politics and culture. While I don’t think the authors share these ideas, they didn’t go out of their way to attack them either, though I expected them to. The promised ‘plague on both your houses’ did not descend; Hobbes came out a lot worse than Rousseau.

I’ve had this book for at least three years, I shit you not. I wanted to read it very carefully and take loads of notes, so what I was doing with my little series here, 14 or 15 months ago (Jesus Christ), was reading, note-taking and writing a blog post on each chapter. This project, modest as it was, ground to a halt after just five chapters out of twelve, and so did my reading of The Dawn of Everything. My interest in the book had somehow become an obstacle to my actually getting it read. I made zero progress for a long time, then bit the bullet, bought the audiobook, and got the rest all listened to in a couple of weeks. No note-taking and no twelve-part blog series, just this capstone on the job I left unfinished.

News comment: Minneapolis; Iran (30 Jan 2026)

A few days ago I was pondering whether events in Minneapolis were (a) Trump and Co doing their usual kind of half-arsed, cruel, careless, brutish, incoherent spectacle and getting people killed as a predictable side effect, or (b), Trump and Co actually setting out to murder people as a terror campaign, with the ICE goons told in advance they would be backed up no matter what they did.

Given the way MAGA spokespeople defended the murderers wholeheartedly, I lean toward option (b) which means the situation is extremely dangerous. But the development of a mass, determined and tactically astute resistance movement on the streets of Minneapolis means that whichever it was, Trump and Co have failed at least for now.

While the Trump regime has only made tactical retreats so far, recalling Obersturmbahnführer Bovino, I feel a change in the wind. It looks different from the 2020 uprising, more disciplined and targeted, but it is an uprising, and the first big one the Trump gang has run into in its second term.

But it now looks like the Minneapolis battle could be overshadowed within a few days by a massive US attack on Iran.

If I read the patterns of Trumpism right, we are probably looking at the prospect something more limited, confused and cosmetic than all-out war. The much-hyped naval build-up is not sufficient to wage an actual war.

But maybe the pattern is that there is no pattern. It’s not a mad man strategy, just a mad man. The last month alone has seen a year or two’s worth of drama even by Trump standards – Iran, Venezuela, Greenland, the Gaza “Board of Peace”, Minnesota, Iran again. Maybe it’s the fear of the midterm elections, maybe it’s senility, maybe it’s “flooding the zone with shit…” or maybe it’s all just sound and fury, signifying nothing. But Trump has been getting Trumpier to the point where things could go critical.

The US military vessels conducting the attack would be sitting ducks for Iranian retaliation, even to a more limited strike. Heavy blows could fall on the human personnel, trillion-dollar war machines, and prestige of US imperialism.

What would the consequences in Iran be if, say, a lot of military facilities were bombed and a lot of political leaders assassinated? I don’t see how that  would bring about any kind of democratic revolution. People have already stopped protesting, and fear of US bombs and atrocities would smother any desire to return to the streets. I think the US state apparatus generally, not just Trump, are pretty comfortable with an outcome where Iran simply collapses into decades of senseless violence. The heads of zero powerful people in the US rolled after they spent untold lives and money procuring that outcome in Iraq. I can see that scenario for Iran if the US attacks. But the more likely scenario is that US attacks cut across what’s left of the mood of protest, and the regime survives.

And how would things go in the US if some hundreds or thousands of naval and air personnel died in a couple of days? A vengeful response, rallying around the government to take revenge, a 9/11 or Beirut truck bomb response, is not what I think would happen in this case. It’s widely perceived that Trump pursues gratuitous conflict, that he pushes things to the brink of carnage just for his own ego. The stated goal of helping the Iranian protesters is the kind of neocon hypocrisy that just stopped convincing most people a long time ago. There would be massive cynicism toward any attack on Iran, even a successful one.

I’m skeptical about the prospect of a massive US attack disarming and decapitating the Iranian state apparatus without losing a ton of ships and planes in the process and in the retaliation.

It might not come to that. This is Trump. He could be photo-opping and grinning with the Ayatollah within weeks. More likely, he will cut some unimpressive deal with the surviving portion of the Iranian state apparatus and once again declare himself the greatest peacemaker in history.

Fatima Masumeh shrine, Qom, Iran. Amir Pashaei, Wikipedia Commons

What I’m Reading: Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Second Foundation is the third volume of the original Foundation trilogy so before I get into it I’ll sum up what I wrote here on this blog about volumes 1 and 2, Foundation and Foundation and Empire.

I liked the deterministic mid-century materialism of Foundation. On the other hand, it could be smug and cynical and it was extremely of its time (imagine, someone probably died in combat on Iwo Jima knowing what the Seldon Plan was). It was quite dry, to-the-point, talky and minimalist.though it got more flashy and dramatic as it went on. Then at the midpoint of Foundation and Empire Asimov threw the old formula out the window. So long, mid-century determinist fable – don’t let the vast socio-economic forces hit you in the arse on the way out – it’s time for a fun swashbuckling adventure about a villain who can do mind control. This new formula boasted better characterisation and pacing, but overall I missed the tweedy old Foundation.

Second Foundation, like Foundation and Empire, contains two stories separated by a few decades. The first story concludes the story of the Mule, the psychic warlord introduced in the previous volume. He searches for and struggles with the Second Foundation. At last towards the end we get a glimpse of this mysterious institution.

Skirting around spoilers, we don’t see any more of the Mule in the next story. ‘Good,’ I said to myself. ‘We’re back on track. No more Space Yuri. We’re back to the Seldon Plan. Amoral characters as unwitting agents of vast historical forces. Empires hobbled by their own overextension. Kingdoms brought low by atomic hairdryers.’ But I ended up disappointed; this too was a story about psychic powers and mind control. We are focused on the Second Foundation in this story, and they just so happen to be a bunch of psychics like the Mule. Asimov labours to tie it in with the whole idea of psychohistory.

Dust jacket of 1953 edition

The Magneto in the High Castle

To get a sense of how I feel about this, imagine if half-way through The Man in the High Castle Philip K Dick had suddenly introduced Magneto from the X-Men. For the uninitiated, Magneto is, like the Mule, a mutant with special powers; he can control metal with his mind. So imagine if a good chunk of The Man in the High Castle is about Magneto picking up panzers and flinging them around squishing prominent Nazi leaders. Dick’s counterfactual 1960s Nazis are developing plastics, so I suppose they  finally build a plastic tank and squish Magneto in turn. After Magneto is vanquished, there is one final episode in the story, concerning the Japanese Emperor, who it is revealed also has magnetic powers. Dick goes out of his way to explain this, somehow, with reference to the I Ching, in order to tie this absolute nonsense back into the original ideas of the story.

However fun this scenario would be, it would kind of distract from the fascinating questions that Dick uses his alternate history to ponder. To take another example, just for fun, imagine if half-way through The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu, when we are invested in wondering how humanity is going to hold off an alien invasion, the clouds part and Jesus descends, turns a lot of water into wine, and dies on a cross somewhere half-way through Death’s End.

This is kind of what happens with the original Foundation trilogy. Its second half is fun and not by any means devoid of the interesting ideas we find in the first half. The mysteries – where is the Second Foundation? Who are its secret agents? Who is its mysterious leader, the First Speaker? – are solid with good development and payoffs. But they are mechanical. They have more to do with the craft of storytelling than with the science of psychohistory.

And, I mean… no doubt Dick would have written Magneto pretty well too, and would have found some time to ponder the nature of reality itself in between the scene where Bormann gets squashed by a panzer and the scene where Goebbels gets boa constricted by a lamp-post. But it would still have been a wild and irrelevant departure from a promising story.

The spiral galaxy Messier 83. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Acknowledgement: William Blair (Johns Hopkins University)

Motivations

The second half of this volume presented some problems for me, even aside from all that. In this story a group of private citizens from the Foundation are hunting for the Second Foundation, because some people’s brainwaves have started to show up a little strange on the mind-reading machines, and it is suspected that the Second Foundation is interfering.

The motivations of this group of private citizens don’t make much sense. The Second Foundation saved them and it is part of the Seldon Plan, which is their secular religion. And then during the story, agents of the Second Foundation save their arses again and again.  The two Foundations have no basis for conflict at all. In spite of all this, our Foundation characters remain determined to root out the Second Foundation and its agents with extreme prejudice. Not only does it seem perverse, it doesn’t seem urgent at all. There is no existential threat to the Foundation here. The story lacks urgency, unless it is our desire to see how the Second Foundation will stop these gobshites, but the author doesn’t really commit to that either.

It gets worse (and spoilers follow). When the Foundationers identify one Second Foundation agent in their own circle, they immediately torture and restrain him (p. 229, 1994 HarperCollins Voyager edition). When the Foundation crowd believe they have found fifty agents of the Second Foundation, they do not take long to decide on their narrow range of options:

‘What will we do with all of them… these Second Foundation fellas?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Darell, sadly. ‘We could exile them, I suppose. There’s Zoranel, for instance. They can be placed there and the planet saturated with Mind Static. The sexes can be separated or, better still, they can be sterilized – and in fifty years, the Second Foundation will be a thing of the past. Or perhaps a quiet death for al of them would be kinder.’ (p 232)

A subsequent scene confirms that one of these fates has indeed befallen the fifty agents. Though we are not told which one, it hardly makes a difference!

The early-1950s viewpoint of the author offers some sources of interest and amusement, and, occasionally for me, mild disgust. But I was struck in a nice way by this description of an automatic ticket machine as a futuristic wonder:

‘You put a high denomination bill into the clipper which sank out of sight. You pressed a button below your destination and a ticket came out with your ticket and the correct change as determined by an electronic scanning machine that never made a mistake. It is a very ordinary thing[…]’ (p 169-170)

We have that now, and the only abnormal thing there is using cash instead of card. My knee-jerk reaction is to think, ‘how quaint.’ But on reflection, what prescience.

Conclusion

So that’s how I felt about Second Foundation: enjoyed it, recommend it, but expected more and felt it could have been more.

My verdict on the whole Foundation trilogy (I haven’t read the prequels and sequels written forty years later, so for me it is still a trilogy): “The General” in Foundation and Empire and the first few dozen pages of “The Mule” in the same volume represent a kind of peak Foundation for me. It’s lost some of the excessive dryness of the first volume without yet taking on all the extraneous psychic stuff. After this point, it never stops being entertaining or having good ideas; to its credit, it never retcons; and in some ways the writing improves… But it loses touch with its basic theme. The author seems to have lost interest in the question of predicting and planning the future through mathematics and psychology.

No wonder it ends unfinished, only half-way through Seldon’s thousand-year interregnum. Maybe that’s for the best. The rise of the Foundation into a new Galaxy-wide empire would not have been half as interesting as its early struggles for survival. Let’s remember the assumptions the series is built on: that empires are good and interregna are bad. Later stories would have had to go back and deconstruct a lot of that, if they wanted to remain thoughtful and interesting.

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What I’m reading: Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov

Last year I wrote about Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation (1951), in which a small community struggles to preserve culture and technology on the fringe of a collapsing galaxy-wide empire. Hari Seldon, the man whose command of the science of psychohistory allowed him to predict the collapse, has laid out a plan for this community, the Foundation, to unite the Galaxy in ‘only’ a thousand years or so. Foundation is episodic, as every 50-100 years the Foundation is presented with a new existential threat and the question is ‘How will the immortal science of Marxism-Seldonism get them out of this one?’

The sequel Foundation and Empire consists of just two longer episodes, ‘The General’ and ‘The Mule.’ They’re both good and they’re both set in the same world, one after the other. But in tone, theme and style they are two completely different novels. With ‘The Mule,’ we can see Asimov completely throwing out the old formula and introducing a new one. His story about interstellar socio-economics becomes a boisterous space opera about psychics and mind control.

Featured image: ‘Laser Towards Milky Way’s Centre’ by Yuri Beletsky. From Wikimedia Commons. https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100906.html

The General

The first part of the book is peak ‘old-formula’ Foundation. I unambiguously love it. General Bel Riose, the most capable military leader in the decaying rump of the Empire, sets out to conquer the Foundation. His will, his ability and the forces at his disposal are all more than sufficient to the task. How can he possibly fail? 

The main characters are two captives of Bel Riose: the old Imperial aristocrat Ducem Barr and a Foundation trader named Lathan Devers, who are trying to spoil the General’s design. Their mission centres on an apparent contradiction: they must pursue this task with urgency and initiative even as they maintain their faith in the inevitability of a Foundation victory through the Seldon Plan.

A part of my pleasure in this story came from the way our two main characters speak with very distinct voices. Here’s Lathan Devers on page 37 (2016 HarperCollins edition), faking indifference but with some measure of genuine conviction:

Listen […] what’s defeat? I’ve seen wars and I’ve seen defeats. What if the winner takes over? Who’s bothered? Me? Guys like me? […] Get this […] there are five or six fat slobs who usually run an average planet. They get the rabbit punch, but I’m not losing peace of mind over them. See. The people? The ordinary run of guys? Sure, some get killed, and the rest pay extra taxes for a while. But it settles itself out; it runs itself down. And then it’s the old situation again with a different five or six.

I’ve gone into Foundation’s influences on Star Wars before, but it’s so clear in this book, right down to the characters’ voices and attitudes. There are whole pages where we might as well be in the company of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Han Solo; Ducem Barr does a good line in traumatised reminiscences and holding forth about psychohistory the way old Ben does about the Force, and Lathan Devers would have you believe that he’s in it for the money, doesn’t give a damn about your struggle for freedom, and doesn’t have any time for far-fetched ancient belief systems.

Devers, however, is in it for the revolution. He tells the leaders of the Foundation that he wants to ‘spread the wealth a bit, and keep it from concentrating too much out of the hands that work for it.’ (78) And in the next episode we learn that ‘Devers died in the slave-mines […] because he lacked wisdom but didn’t lack heart.’ (89) This is part of a satisfying pattern where each episode by the way refers back to the characters in the previous one.

Compared with the earlier Foundation stories, this one has more detail, more drama, more interstellar travel, and more character. It even has some action. We get a few scenes with the Galactic Emperor himself. It’s still a very talky piece, as if Asimov wrote it with an eye to royalties from a radio play adaptation. But it’s a development.

The contradiction between individual initiative and historical inevitability is resolved very well. Without getting into spoilers, maybe the actions of our main characters were just part of a more general movement which could be predicted mathematically, or maybe they are there only to illustrate the broader trend. They didn’t solve the problem by their own actions – Ducem Barr remarks after the event that ‘through all this wild threshing up of tiny ripples, the Seldon tidal wave continued onward, quietly – but quite irresistibly.’ (76) But that doesn’t mean their actions didn’t matter.

First edition cover. From Wikipedia.org

The Mule

I grumbled about Foundation being very dry, talky and un-visual, and having almost zero women in it. The second half of Foundation and Empire blows all these complaints out of the water. The lead character, Bayta Darrell, is a strong and smart woman; there is more humour, travelogue, spectacle, more set-pieces. The narrator becomes sassy and sardonic.

At the same time it might be a case of “be careful what you wish for.”

There are things that would have been impossible in previous Foundation stories, not all of it good. Asimov moves from the version of sexism where you pretend there are no women in the entire Galaxy to the version of sexism where you describe women’s appearances more than you really need to, or have supposedly sympathetic men say patronizing shit to them. There is hack stuff, whimsical stuff, clichés: a silly clown who talks Shakespearian; a scene which is just making fun of the way women in a typing pool talk to each other; a psychedelic bit where a special musical instrument triggers hallucinations; an episode in which a villainous nobleman captures all the main characters because he wants to have sex with Bayta.

All in all, this story is written more like a traditional novel of its time. So on the one hand it’s better-crafted and easier to get into. On the other hand, it’s less distinctive. It becomes less about the things Foundation is about.

It starts very good, with all the strengths of the new formula on display. Asimov does a neat job of showing us how the Foundation has grown authoritarian and how its outside colonies of traders chafe under its rule and long for independence (as predicted by Hober Mallow and Lathan Devers). ‘Every vice of the Empire has been repeated in the Foundation. Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law; no change. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what is theirs.’ (89) Instead of giving us a page from the Encyclopedia Galactica explaining it all, the author conveys it through a sequence where a newlywed couple, one from the Foundation and one a trader, go on a family visit and end up being recruited by the Traders’ resistance movement.

So far, so good: we have a Foundation story but told in a more balanced and engaging way. It is setting us up for a story of class warfare and social revolution. Then all of a sudden it ceases to be a story about sociology or economics or politics and becomes a story about mind control. The Seldon plan is thrown into disarray by the appearance of a man who can hypnotize people. Haha! You didn’t consider that possibility, did you Hari Seldon? You dumbass.

Before I get into criticism of the Yuri’s Revenge turn, let’s just clarify that the story is good and fun and intelligent. The mysteries and twists are one step ahead of the reader. But it’s not a spoiler to say that for the rest of the trilogy the mind control never really takes a back seat. And I just didn’t get as much out of this series from here on out.

Suddenly it all gets a bit ‘Your command is my wish.’ Cover art for Command and Conquer Red Alert 2 Yuri’s Revenge (2001) featuring Udo Kier, a great German actor who passed away this year. Was the Mule a model for Yuri?

What’s my problem with the mind control? Science fiction stories are generally based on “what ifs.” In this case: what if we could predict (and subtly shape) the future development of society through psychology and mathematics? But half-way through the trilogy Asimov suddenly asks, ‘And what if, also, there was a magical guy who could permanently control the emotions of everyone he met?’ It complicates and obscures the original ‘what if’ question.

A defence of Asimov here would be to say that psychohistory deals only with masses of humans, so the mind control stuff is relevant because it’s something happening on the individual level that psychohistory can’t predict. This is stated explicitly a few times. But I just don’t buy it. There’s got to be a more subtle way of interrogating the role of the individual in history and the potential weaknesses of the Seldon Plan. Say, introduce a guy who’s really charismatic, or a small organisation that’s really disciplined. There’s a lot that can happen on a level lower than the actions of billions. Introducing magical mind control, no matter how much Asimov labours to explain it and tie it into psychohistory, doesn’t further explore the concept. It just takes the story somewhere else entirely.

The mysteries are no longer like “how will the Foundation exploit atomic gadgets to control their stronger neighbours?” and more like “Which of these characters is the big baddie in disguise?” and “Which of these planets is the secret base of the Second Foundation?”

I want to re-emphasize that this story is better on a craft level than what came before. My friends who read Foundation at the same time as me didn’t like it, because of the very shortcomings that are addressed in Foundation and Empire. But from my point of view Asimov threw out the baby with the bathwater here. My enjoyment of ‘The Mule’ was tinged with disappointment.

I’ve also read the third novel in the series, Second Foundation, and I will be sharing my thoughts some day soon. Stay tuned.

Necropolis (Gaunt’s Ghosts) by Dan Abnett

Dan Abnett, Necropolis, Black Library, 2000

In a vast hive-city on a distant world, an alarm sounds. It blares all throughout the city, and we see in rapid succession the reactions of a miner beneath the alien soil, a housewife at a market, a soldier on the walls, a factory foreman, a ruthless trader and a young noblewoman. In this way, the first few pages of Necropolis by Dan Abnett give us a sweeping but economical cross-section of the city of Vervunhive in the moment when its tens of millions of inhabitants receive the first sign of the unimaginable destruction that is coming.

A vast Chaos-corrupted army descends on Vervunhive, and over the following days and weeks the poor souls we’ve just been introduced to are put through hell. One is killed in the first savage bombardment; another develops from his pre-war existence to heroic status as a resistance fighter; another endangers the defense of the city in the interests of war profiteering. Meanwhile all around them, the city collapses by degrees into a ruin and, as the novel’s title suggests, there is a whole lot of mortality.

The cover of the ebook edition. I found this image on lexicanum (https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/File:Necropolis-cover.jpg#filehistory) where the artist is uncredited.

Gaunt’s Ghosts

Friendly forces arrive from offworld to help defend the city, including the Tanith First Regiment led by the heroic Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt. This is the third novel starring Gaunt and his Ghosts, a regiment of scrappy light infantry fighters from a world lost to Chaos. First and Only and Ghostmaker flesh out the regiment’s characters in a way that Necropolis is too busy to do. But Necropolis is still bigger and better, and it can be read on its own. And, like most Black Library novels, it can be enjoyed as a military sci-fi epic, without any knowledge of the tabletop wargame hobby on which it is based.

Still, it has some of the familiar features of those other stories: Gaunt’s most difficult battles are against cynical, cruel and complacent people on his own side; the Tanith Ghosts are underestimated by snobbish other regiments recruited from wealthier and, well, not-dead planets; in spite of all this, Gaunt and the Ghosts save the day and win their internal and external battles. If more high-ranking servants of the Imperium of Man were like Comissar Gaunt, maybe it wouldn’t be such a dystopian nightmare of a society – which makes it kind of tragic that he serves it.

Unlike the previous novels, Necropolis has a fairly reasonable gender balance, because of the focus on various women from Vervunhive and the role they play in the resistance, often in the face of condescension from some of the less sympathetic Tanith Ghosts. Another departure from its predecessors is that it focuses on a single momentous battle, the Stalingrad of the Sabbat Worlds crusade, and tells the story from start to finish. For the first time, we see Gaunt commanding at a strategic level. Himself and Dan Abnett both are working with a bigger canvas, after finding their feet with two simpler novels, and that’s awesome.

We see refugees overrunning the police cordons that stand between them and safety, occupying factories and warehouses without permission, and organizing themselves into work teams. We see miners and women from textile mills, many of them permanently deafened from shellfire, forming guerrilla units behind enemy lines on their own initiative. These sub-plots are compassionate stories about the most downtrodden imperial subjects claiming some agency in terrible conditions. These stories also give an impression of Vervunhive as a place with lots of people and moving parts. It is a living, breathing place – for now.

Toby Longworth is great

I listened to this novel as an audiobook. I rarely re-read a book and it is rarer still with audiobooks; there are only two I’ve ever taken the time to give a re-listen, and Necropolis is one of them. Toby Longworth reads all the Gaunt’s Ghosts audiobooks, and he is just fantastic to listen to. He gets the tone of the ‘grim, dark future’ just right. I usually hate it when readers put on lots of elaborate accents, but Longworth gets away with it. Like the dwarves in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies, the Tanith Ghosts have an array of regional British and Irish accents, suggesting that their world of agriculture and forestry was home to a range of cultures, but not a particularly wide or exotic one. In Ghostmaker and Honour Guard, Longworth does a perfect impression of Alec Guinness for a couple of senior characters in Gaunt’s flashbacks. The officer class, you see. The regiment’s chief medical officer Dorden has a dreadful Irish accent, but somehow Longworth’s performance is still good, and I still believe him as a character. The very likeable Colonel Corbec has an Irish accent too, and his one is much better.

Why did I like this book, and who would not like it?

I was a Warhammer hobbyist for a few years around age 11-16, and Imperial Guard were my second choice after Orks. Hence the appeal of this book to me, even twenty years removed from the life of drybrushing, gluing and rolling meteor showers of dice. I’ve also always had a fascination with all things military, and with alien worlds and future civilisations, and with various episodes of human history that resonate in the visuals and language of Warhammer. But it’s not just the future or the past. For me, horror is catharsis. Appalling death and destruction, at a safely fantastical or science-fictional remove, and contained within the frame of a story, eases the mental pain one feels at the real horrors of the world.

There are parallels, there is applicability – but there is also the safe distance of several hundred lightyears and thirty-eight millennia. Without getting too dramatic (here I wisely deleted 500 words where I got too dramatic), fiction, including genre fiction based on an elaborate game involving toy soldiers, gives us a space to feel things safely. There is, however, the overhead cost that we risk fetishizing death and destruction. In our culture and in individual people, it becomes hard to tell where this search for catharsis ends and the simple glorification of war begins.

Abnett is prolific, and he might not even remember writing this quarter-century-old novel. But I hope he knows he did a skillful and spirited job here of depicting war: gore-splattered, dynamic, technical, kinetic, but at the same time sensitive to human suffering.

But to people who do not like to read about gore, cathartic destruction, war stuff, intense human suffering on an epic scale, or fantastical future settings, I’ll level with you: Necropolis is probably not your cup of tea.

The section on Commissars from the Warhammer 40,000 3rd Edition Imperial Guard codex (1999), contemporary with Necropolis. Images and text belong to Games Workshop ltd

Necropolis should be on TV

I wrote in my most recent post that I was going to suggest a Black Library novel that ‘they’ should base the planned Warhammer 40K TV series on. ‘They’ being, I suppose, Henry Cavill and Amazon. Since these personages are not to my knowledge regular readers of The 1919 Review, it should be clear to the reader that the thoughts I am sharing are just a fun exercise. The corporate entertainment industry are gonna do what they’re gonna do. That’s bleak, but the alternative, that they would try to triangulate between posters, vloggers and maybe even bloggers and make a pathetic effort to please the most hyper-engaged people on the internet, would be pretty bad as well. So let us write and read this free of any illusion that we have any control over the outcome. This is not intense fandom. This is just fun and chill.

These caveats made, here’s why ‘they’ should make a Warhammer TV series based on Necropolis. Even though, to be clear, they will probably make eight dismal hours of 300 with boltguns.

Gaunt is the archetypal TV male lead character: stern, compassionate, imperfect but always fundamentally right, beset by challenges from people of lesser stature. He is Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights, but instead of American Football it’s purging the heretic. He’s Edward James Olmos in Battlestar Galactica, only younger and more athletic: from time to time he revs up his chainsword and wades into a melée, chopping off limbs right and left. Walter White, Tony Soprano, forget about your petty rackets: the dubious cause which Gaunt serves makes him a classic TV antihero.

I noted above that Necropolis has a fair balance of men and women as characters, which would be a big advantage over a lot of other Black Library novels.

(Honourable mention here for Sandy Mitchell’s Ciaphas Cain novels, which have some ingredients of a good TV show – except that Commissar Cain’s narrative voice is so crucial to the irony at the heart of these stories.)

I also remarked that Necropolis is focused on a single location, which allows not just for savings on sets, props, costumes and effects, but for the kind of rich and dense environmental storytelling and set design that this kind of project absolutely needs. Necropolis gives us a cross-section of Imperial society, as opposed to a glimpse of the frontlines in various warzones. What better introduction to the grim darkness of the far future?

In Necropolis the Tanith are backed up by a heavy tank regiment, the Narmenians, who storm in to save the day at a crucial moment. For TV, I say, replace these guys with a hundred Space Marines. First, because the audience wants to see Space Marines. There can, and must, be Adeptus Astartes. Second, because they would serve the same purpose – as the heavy forces which wade in and make a right mess of the enemy. They would make a heavier visual impact than tanks, while probably being cheaper to put on the screen.

All in all, Necropolis is just a cracking good story, a simple situation and idea brilliantly executed. For a TV audience it would be a fantastic introduction to the 41st millennium.

300 with Boltguns – no thanks; Or, How Warhammer could be a good TV show

Warhammer 40,000 has surged in popularity in the 2020s. It has broken into the United States, and there has been a new proliferation of videogame adaptations. A couple of years ago Amazon bought the rights to make a TV show set in the grim, dark future in which this tabletop wargame is set, which has led to speculation and discussion about what such a show would look like. I decided to share my thoughts, and they ended up being a meditation on the unique appeal of this hobby and setting.

Don’t make it about the Space Marines…

We do not know if the Warhammer 40,000 TV series will actually be made. But I have a dreadful premonition that if it is made it will turn out to be mostly lads in power armour doing stilted dialogue in front of  fuzzy CGI landscapes.

The Space Marines are good for miniature wargaming: chunky, iconic and with cool abilities. But I can’t imagine them making up a good cast of characters on TV. If the camera has to linger on them for longer than a few minutes they will get really boring, really fast.

By definition they are all ultra-zealous supersoldiers, and I don’t see much dramatic potential there without really stretching the bounds of the setting.  I fear the screenwriters will stretch it and break it, resorting to the war movie clichés, and there will be a streetwise city Space Marine and a naive farm-boy Space Marine, a Space Marine who is a petty thief and pedlar, a fat clumsy Space Marine, a nerd Space Marine, a Space Marine who shows people a picture of his girlfriend back home, etc. There might be room, maybe, for one religious Space Marine. Stock characters are not necessarily a bad thing in general, but they won’t work as Space Marines.

Three Space Marine scouts. These are metal miniatures from the 2000s painted by yours truly back in those days.

The other problem with the Adeptus Astartes is that they would cost an absolute bomb to put on the screen. How are they going to lumber around on set with any comfort or dignity in all that massive armour? If it’s light enough for them to wear, the weight of it won’t sit right, won’t look good; if it’s heavy enough to look convincing the actors just won’t be able to do it. CGI will have a lot of sins to cover up, and there goes your budget.

So who should the TV show be about? Easy: the Astra Militarum, aka Imperial Guard, because they are relatable and human but exist on a sliding scale of weirdness. They can be stock war movie characters, or they can be the Death Korps of Krieg, or anything in between. The writers have more freedom. Costumes and kit would be much cheaper: extras could be army reservists from whatever country they film in, maybe even, if we are really short of funds, wearing their actual uniforms, decorated of course with plenty of skulls and aquilas. They are canonically multi-racial and multi-gendered, so you could cast these characters pretty much any way.

The Tau would be another faction that could be interesting to show.  Avatar shows that it can work when you base a story around blue and heavily made-up and CGI’d aliens who are still humanoid and relatively sympathetic. Some similar points apply to the Aeldari. But the Astra Militarum would be so much more straightforward.

…but have Space Marines in it

But the Adeptus Astartes are iconic. They have to be in the show, or people will feel cheated. Here’s an easy solution: include them. Have a squad or a company of them, and make them secondary characters. We see them for 5-10 minutes in each episode, and in the finale they stomp in and help turn the tide. The less we see of them, the cooler they will be. Also, if they are not the main characters, you can make them as weird and fanatical as they should be. You can also spend plenty of money to get them right, because you would make savings based on their limited screen time.

Tell a (relatively) small story

Warhammer 40,000 is a famously baroque and extravagant setting. Aside from half a dozen human factions, we have Chaos, Aeldari, Drukhari, Orks, Tau, Necrons, Tyranids and Leagues of Votann. At that, I’ve probably missed a few. Each faction has its strengths and weaknesses and its aesthetic. Then within each faction, we have numerous sub-factions (Goffs, Bad Moons, etc for the Orks; Aeldari Craftworlds, cults of Chaos). And each sub-faction has its strengths and weaknesses, aesthetic, etc too. Even after all that, there are more than enough lacunas in the lore for players to make up their own craftworld, Space Marines chapter, Astra Militarum regiment, etc. Each faction has dozens of troop and vehicle types, each with its own set of stats and rules and its own intricate resin miniature; the hobbyist glues each miniature together from parts and then paints it according to their own creative vision.

Another of my old miniatures that I was able to find. An Imperial soldier has just hijacked a bike from an Ork. This hobby is all too expensive and time-consuming for me now, so I haven’t painted an Ork for nearly 20 years. I still buy the odd copy of White Dwarf magazine and read Black Library novels. And I still appreciate the continuum from the smallest resin hip-flask to the galaxy-spanning civilisation.

I think it’s the medium of the tabletop wargame that gives it the freedom to get so weird and wide-ranging. Novels have to be focused on character and plot, TV shows more so, movies most of all. You might see elaborate worldbuilding in, say, a very long series consisting of very long books (George RR Martin), an open-world videogame (Fallout: New Vegas) or in a sprawling comic that runs for decades (Marvel, DC). But a tabletop wargame is even more freed from the constraints of character, plot and narrative focus.

A novelist has to think about how to work in some backstory or try to make the exposition more interesting. Warhammer hobbyists are happy to buy army books in which (alongside rules, tips, artwork, etc) platefuls of backstory and exposition are served up without any attempt at “working them in subtly.” It’s open-ended; it’s better if it doesn’t go anywhere. No hero is going to come along and fix this horrifying future. The point is that the setting is suitable to have a battle in.

What does all this mean for a TV show? Pitfalls. The writers will have to convey a sense of that breadth and depth while also telling a cohesive story. A lot of Black Library material is sprawling and epic in a way that would not translate to the small screen. There are over fifty books in the Horus Heresy series! So I hope they don’t try to tell *the* story of Warhammer 40k, with the Emperor and the primarchs as characters. The fall of Cadia would be another dangerous one to try. These kinds of stories would cost too much, and be too solemn and gargantuan to give new audiences a point of entry. 

The featured image is an equally solemn and gargantuan statue of a Space Marine at Warhammer World. By Julie Gibbons, via Wikipedia Commons

Think smaller. Stick to one planet, or even one city or one battlefield. ‘Thinking small’ in the context of 40k could still encompass a gigantic city with lots of ecclesiastical mega-architecture, or an arsenal-moon with a gun cannon bigger than Australia. A hive city would allow for a good mix of studio interiors and miniature or CGI exteriors.

I was not a great painter, and as a commander I had a terrible habit of getting all my soldiers killed. But what I really loved was converting, ie, gluing miniatures together in interesting ways that, while lore-friendly, were not anticipated by the designers.

Here are ideas of the kind I think could work:

Inquisitors investigate a Genestealer cult. A full-scale Genestealer rebellion breaks out later in the season. After the Imperium forces win in the final episode, we strike a fatalistic note with the discovery of an approaching Tyranid hive fleet, of which our Genestealer cult was just a forward outpost.

A group of civilians and assorted imperial soldiers are trapped behind enemy lines by a sudden enemy advance and fight a partisan war.

Imperium and Eldar/ Tau/ Votann forces are forced to bury the hatchet and ally against a Chaos onslaught that threatens them all. The grim, dark, fatalistic note could sound when it ends with the trial and execution of our main character on charges of working too closely with xenos.

Use what you’ve got

A simple story set in a limited location allows for the more full building of a world. In a film like Children of Men, the most important things accumulate in the background or in brief glimpses. The visual and auditory richness of that movie shows what could be possible in a 40k series.

It is already such a visually rich world. A TV show would have an absolute wealth of material to draw on. No need to reinvent the wheel in terms of costumes, decor, set design, etc. Give us half-robotic flying cherubs and guys with pipes sticking out of their faces. Give us flying buttresses and computer terminals set into ornate pulpits, and skulls everywhere.

Get it right

I talked earlier about how 40K is open-ended, that there’s no real need for narrative focus as far as the tabletop wargame is concerned. But it would be a big mistake to think this means it’s shapeless or meaningless. What 40K does have is a distinct aesthetic and tone (maximalist, gothic, totalitarian, grotesque, with a hint of satire), plus rules that are (of necessity) pedantically exact. This provides a backbone to the sprawling lore. Its not that there’s ‘no point’ to the lore or backstory or that it ‘goes nowhere.’ If I’m building an army of Chaos Marines who worship the plague god Nurgle, I’m going to assemble them so as they look diseased and paint them in sickly greens. If I have an army of Orks I know they are very poor shots with ranged weapons but strong in hand-to-hand; my tactical challenge is to get them to close in on the enemy fast. Good thing I have some Stormboyz, ie, Orks with rockets on their backs.

So the lore is not arbitrary or pointless. It gives purpose to the hobbyist and clear rules to the gamer.

My Imperial Guard officer holds a holy book which I think I borrowed from an Inquisitor kit. Back then they were Imperial Guard, now they are called Astra Militarum. Most of my knowledge is from that earlier iteration of the game.

A TV show would have to get such details right. There is room for great variation in the 40k Galaxy, but if we see Orks who are crap at close quarters combat, or Nurgle Marines with a general air of good health, that will be a problem.

Imperial Guard sniper, adapted from plastic Cadian kit and metal Catachan heavy weapon loader, if memory serves

Another pitfall would be if the story and setting are played straight. The Imperium of man is a monstrous society, combining the 17th Century wars of religion with the height of Stalinism. Please understand before you begin that a Space Marine is not a US Marine in space. He is what it would look like if Buzz Lightyear joined ISIS.

We identify with the Imperium because we see in it something of ourselves, even though that something is a savage caricature of human history’s most repressive and fanatical tendencies.

And in turn, isn’t Chaos just a caricature of the Imperium? Maybe if imperial citizens weren’t primed and traumatized their whole lives by the grotesque imperial cults, they wouldn’t find the Chaos gods so appealing. If life wasn’t so miserable in the Imperium, maybe its people wouldn’t regularly see guys who look like Mad Max villains crossed with actual maggots and say, “Where do I sign up?”

A vein of fatalistic humour should run through this grim, dark story. For tone, think along the lines of Paul Verhoeven, Mortal Engines, Judge Dredd and Fallout (well, West Coast Fallout, not East Coast Fallout, which is an instructive example of inappropriately playing it straight). It’s not Star Wars. And on the other extreme, we don’t want ten hours of 300 with boltguns.

Another small conversion. An Imperial Guard soldier covers his airways while purging heretics with flamer.

A related idea: what if the series was a straight adaptation of an existing Black Library novel? I actually have a specific one in mind. But I’ll leave that for another post. Stay tuned. Meanwhile share your own thoughts in the comments. What faction should a TV show focus on? Is there any book you’d like to see adapted? Can you see a way small-screen Space Marines could work?