Exciting, violent, full of swearing - dystopian storytelling

One of the judges of a prestigious literary award was recently quoted as saying that one of the reasons the awards committee had chosen the winner was because it was "exciting, violent, and full of swearing."

It's at times like this that I despair of our society.  That is dystopian storytelling at its worst, bringing out the worst that humans can be.  We may not always think about it, but what we write about, and the way that we write it, involves making moral choices.  We choose whether to tell a light or dark story, we choose the amount of violence we put into it.  We can choose to write about murder, blood and gore, about wholesale slaughter with spectacular special effects.  Or we can choose to write on a less bloodstained slate, and focus on the devastation those deaths produce in the lives of those around them.  

I suspect that how we choose to write depends on how we see our writing.  If we see it as purely entertainment, we might feel the need to compete with Hollywood's blood and gore, to have the same level of sensationalism in the text.  But if instead we want to focus on the fallout from those deaths, we need to be more subtle.  To focus on the grief and loss, to examine what changes as a result of the death.  And that takes us to somewhere other than the world of shallow entertainment.

We might still have a whole planet full of people dying, but their deaths aren't gratuitous.  They're there to illustrate the evil in the story.   Having less violence and swearing in the narrative can be far more effective in getting a message across.  But that presumes that the text has a message.  Sometimes I worry that all there is in these bloodthirsty books is blood.

I need to believe that humans can be a civilised species, that we can make moral choices in extreme  situations.  Anne McCaffrey's Sassinak is a military officer.  She's forced to sit back and watch a whole colony of people die in order to follow the slavers instead.  She has to allow the smaller evil in order to stop the much larger one.  It's a choice that haunts the character ever after, but it was necessary.

Literature like this teaches us something in its stories.  It shows us that being military doesn't automatically mean being violent.  And it shows us that violence has a price.  We should remember that next time we praise a book for its violence and swearing.