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Thinking About SF 24: Good and Evil

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It was way back in Post 2 (fav.me/d55azyc) that I said the following:


"Finally, as I create races, I want to keep their overall morality ambiguous for the time being. That's not to say I won't be slotting them into good and evil as the situation demand- I WILL be making value judgments later on, because if I don't then the fans will and I doubt I'll like their decisions. But I don't want said morality to color my own development of plot, history, or other elements."


I've held to that promise as I wrote the story of Galactic Age, trying to get species to behave in ways defined by realpolitik and their own cultural specializations as opposed to ideas of "good" or "evil," and I think that my historical background is a lot more realistic because of it. But now the history is more or less set up, and I have a major problem, because when I try to assign moralities to the races I've created... it doesn't work.

First off, for balancing reasons, we'd need two Good, two Evil, and one Neutral side. Otherwise, the balance of power would be off and someone would be the odd morality out in a galaxy tilted unambiguously to the other side. Let's start with the Taloc and Agrathi- I'd want them to both be "Good" civilizations (albeit with very different cultural outlooks), because I wanted the Trilateral War to be both tragic and lacking in a clear moral "sidedness." Therefore, it was going to be a "Good versus Good" conflict (tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php…). So now we've got our two "Good" civilizations, the Taloc Hegemony and the Agrathi Union. So far, so... umm... good. Then we have the Humans, whose mercantile antics and blatant selfishness seem to be the embodiment of Neutral. That leaves our Evil races as... the Lhin and the Indaneer.

Wait... what?

That can't be right! The Lhin's whole shtick is that they are, as a race, a bunch of Lawful Stupid idealists who want to protect the whole galaxy from itself. They don't just say they're the good guys and then go out and massacre babies- for their collective character to have real depth, they actually have to be doing the right thing 90% of the time. And the Indaneer have never done anything demonstrably bad. Their omni-capable nature, in fact, would push them into Neutral.

Now, I have no doubt that I could make the races fit into their categories if I looked at it hard enough. But... do I really want to? I've put a lot of effort into making them complex, multi-dimensional groups with complicated histories... and at the end of the day I think I've grown to understand their motivations enough that I can't really apply a blanket generalization of "Good" or "Evil" to them. Their histories are all filled with miracles, atrocities, and a whole lot of things that could be either, and now that they are galactic powers, their behavior has grown even more checkered. The Agrathi have a code of strict, religious laws that ban medical treatments the rest of the galaxy considers lifesaving. Does that make them Evil? But at the same time, the Orders Militant are required to show mercy and compassion to a defeated enemy, as part of the commandments of that same religion. Does that make them Good? Were the Taloc Scholars justified in "reeducating" Agrathi colonists? In blowing up Mersteth? In dethroning Empress Xhotan the Mad and her sacrificial cult? And what about the Lhin? Is injecting birth-control drugs into the water supply any worse than following the path of the Indaneer, and allowing billions of random people to starve?

In the end, I've come to the conclusion that the races are just too complex to make a value judgment on. Sometimes their governments do good things, and sometimes they do evil things, because the races are made up of both good and bad people learning from a lot of both good and bad history. So no. If I did try to assign them moralities, it would just be arbitrary, and readers can pick up on that sort of thing. So they will remain as they started- morally ambiguous.

Howver, it seems that just by coincidence they do fit awfully well onto a continuum of Law and Chaos morality (or, as the proponents of each would like to call it, Order versus Freedom). I didn't deliberately try to set them up that way... but they really do fit:


  1. FREEDOM

  2. Humans: Somewhere, Ayn Rand is smiling.

  3. Indaneer: On Pahklaval, diversity is the key to evolution, and evolution is the key to survival.

  4. Taloc: Science runs on rules, but also on creativity.

  5. Agrathi: Pornography is banned. 'nuff said.

  6. Lhin: Cerigal Ent-Zha made the trains run on time.

  7. ORDER


Oh yes, and while it's only tangentially related to some of my ideas about deterministic evolution and planetary ecology, this www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&fea… is a rather interesting pseudodocumentary that I'd highly recommend watching for anyone interested in science. I don't really have terribly much else to say about it, other than that Darwin IV would likely be considered a medium to high Class 3 planet- capable of supporting life, but not a good candidate for colonization unless it had significant mineral assets (which it probably would- rare materials seem to gravitate towards these sort of planets more than others).

This article continues my Galactic Age scifi world-building project, which began with this [link] and the Thinking About Fantasy articles. Today we will discuss the value system of the world, and why it isn't more black and white.
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