Bringing in the big guns

"I write shoot-em-up space operas" a female author said recently on an SF panel of writers. She seemed to take delight in blowing things up, the bigger the explosion the better.

I baulk at this idea. I'm aware that, at base, everything in the universe is energy.  The energy of the universe is affected by everything that I think, say, and do. And the words that I write are also energy that I'm sending out into the universe.

In recent years dystopian stories, and ever more violent crime books, have filled up the booksellers' shelves.  I've read quite a lot of  young adult dystopian stories, and a few adult SF ones too.  But I refuse to buy, read, or endorse, books that have graphic violence front and centre in their plots and stories.  Yes, there is violence in the books I read, but it's never centre stage.  For the most part, the deaths are off the page.

An exception to this was a young adult book I read a couple of weeks ago.  I'd followed the spiky, not-quite-romance of the two central characters throughout the book.  It was the classic clash of opposites, the rich, privileged girl falling In love with the boy from the wrong side of the tracks.  So what did the author do?  She had the boy shot, on the page, in the last chapter of the book.  And he was shot in the back, unable to defend himself.  She then added an epilogue which said, in effect, that the relationship was never going to work.  The rich girl had a duty to marry the prince she didn't love, and she did.

At this point I wanted to throw the book across the room.  A more clumsy use of violence to twist a plot I've never seen, or a more unfair ending,  I felt cheated.  It was an unjust ending to the book to kill the boy.  And it was a convenient cop-out.  I could have looked forward to a sequel which addressed the challenges of this on-off relationship as the characters went on new adventures.  Instead I've marked the author down as one won't read again.

In YA books it's amazing how many sets of parents are killed while being watched by their children.  But it's just a story, isn't it?  But in two cases these books have been turned into films.  The big guns on the page have been turned into big guns on the silver screen.  People have been trying to convince us for years that violence in "make-believe" worlds doesn't affect people in real life.  I've never believed that.  Everything is energy, remember, and I think the violence in books and movies does affect us long-term.  The energy is being absorbed by us, incorporated somewhere into our consciousness.

That's a scary thought, and it's one reason why I don't have big guns in the centre of my writing,  it's a moral decision not to put that violent energy into the world.  Violence doesn't settle anything permanently,  it's only when the big guns fall silent that the talking starts.