The moral compass

I'm not a fan of blood and gore stories.  Excessive violence will turn me off a writer faster than I can blink.  I don't buy the argument that "it's only make-believe, it isn't doing any harm."

Anyone who knows anything about metaphysics or quantum physics knows that the universe is made up of energy at its basic level. And quantum physics shows us how we can affect that energy.  Our thoughts, our writings have power.  Of course, we've always known this, but it turns out that our power goes deeper than the influence of the printed page, what we write affects the very structure of the universe itself.

We need to discover our moral compass as writers.  What are willing to take responsibility for sending out into the universe?  And I think sometimes SF writers have a problem with moral limits.  They're sometimes pushed aside in the search for a radical, glossy new idea.  But ultimately all SF needs some reference point to the human condition. And talking of the human condition necessarily involves a discussion of moral limits.

Yes, people are sometimes murdered or killed in my stories, but I never lose sight of the value of that life, even when the antagonist was thoroughly bad.  I don't subscribe to the thinking that readers love a  violent murder, and I won't give them one in detail, on the page.  

I can't identify with space operas where, at the push of one button, a whole planet and its billions of inhabitants are vaporised.  Each of those alien races had its hopes and dreams, its personal struggles, its loves and hates.  But above all, it had the right to live.  Such wholesale slaughter would be labelled genocide if it happened on Earth.  We need to retain that awareness when we're writing about it happening to others.  

For me, the whizz, bang, crash of the latest super weapon has never had any appeal.  And I don't want to read about mass destruction or murder in a filmic, wide-screen way where I'm supposed to detach from the horror of what's just happened and admire the special effects.

That's not to say I don't read stories about wholesale destruction.  Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's war books are some of my favourites.  But they have more civilian characters than military, and the books explore the consequences of the trail of destruction left by the pirate.  And even the cool military leader Ky Vatta thinks about blown ships, the death tolls on destroyed ansible platforms and space stations, as she takes stock of the damage the pirate has done.

I want to read fiction that upholds humanity, that supports our prohibitions on taking another person's life and on preventing violence.  I want a writer's moral compass to be fully functioning when I read their story.