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blatherskiteThe people who come up with ideas for panel discussions at WorldCon sometimes get a bit punch-drunk as the planning deadline for the convention approaches, and at first glance, this panel topic seems to have been one result. It's hard to imagine any logical response to this question other than "never—okay, now that the debate is over, let's hit the bar for another beer". But you can always count on Connie Willis to subvert even the most straightforward topic and get you laughing. Her response (paraphrased): "At least genocide clears the landscape and leaves you room to tell your story." But in an allusion to her own brilliant Doomsday Book, she followed that with one of her trademark wisdoms: "Do not wait upon the day of judgment: it happens every day." I take that to mean that terrible things happen in the real world, and authors don't have to invent these things—indeed, that as authors, we cannot always avoid addressing these things.
There's a long, long history of various forms of genocide in science fiction and fantasy, ranging from deliberate to accidental. Examples include the venerable 1949 Earth Abides by George Stewart, all of the many "we must kill the invading alien insects" books (including the much debated Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein), to Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, and most recently, the elimination of the Daleks in Dr. Who and the elimination of humanity by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and in Saturn's Children by Charles Stross. And, most egregiously, in the brain-dead but very pretty 2009 installment of the Star Trek movie franchise, in which everyone's favorite aliens (the Vulcans) are nearly exterminated as a race.
Clearly the dramatic power of eliminating a whole species, including our own, is enormous: if you can't feel it in your gut as you read, then either the author is awesomely clumsy or you're not paying attention. But we can't neglect the emotional toll that's taken on the characters either, since only zombies would remain unaffected and largely able to function normally by such an event as genocide—and that's true as much of the killers as of any survivors. Speaking of zombies, it's interesting to speculate about the ethical implications of killing off the undead: after all, zombies clearly can't help being what they are, and neither can vampires and most other popular denizens of the shadowy parts of modern fiction. It's not as if this is a lifestyle choice. Sure, we may need to kill 'em all for the sake of our own survival, but at what cost to ourselves? Without turning this into too much of a stretch, you can extend the whole notion of genocide to smaller groups: security guards (or anyone wearing a red shirt) in the original Star Trek series, North American Indians in most Westerns, and even women in the TV show Supernatural. In short, genocide can involve the elimination, whether ruthless or unheeding, of any group you consider to be valueless. Richard Foss, one of the panelists, noted that genocide requires the ability to deny the humanity of those being killed, and whenever we can make that literal (as in the kinds of genocide of nonhumans that we see in science fiction and fantasy), it becomes so much easier.
Genocide can also be cultural rather than physical, as has been argued about attempts to extinguish the culture of Tibet, or it can be social, as in the subjugation of Blacks in Western white-dominated culture. It doesn't even have to involve sentient beings—witness what we're doing to global biodiversity right now. (This is what has sometimes been referred to as the "banality of evil"—in itself a very scary notion.) What's a bit odd is that we can even commit genocide against non-living things. The suppression of ideas or the right to free thought by certain fundamentalist groups is one obvious example of extinguishing a group by extinguishing the thoughts that make them who they are. Then there's the semi-living world to consider: I doubt anyone will miss the smallpox virus (for instance) until the day it turns out we weren't as clever as we thought, that there really was one last reservoir of the virus we'd somehow missed, and that we suddenly need to create a new vaccine. And what about artificial computer intelligences? We don't have them right now, but we will within the lifetime of most readers of this blog. When we delete them from our hard disk or just shut down the computer for the day, are we committing murder?
Conversely, what are the ethical implications of bringing a race or species or other group back from extinction? There are efforts right now to sequence the genome of the Neandertals, apparently just because it can be done. Is it ethical to bring back a race that, from all evidence, was our closest cousin, given that they won't possess any Neandertal cultural knowledge and will be, at best, exploited and demonized and may become a new subclass of economic slaves or house pets? (Which raises the the notion of economic genocide when we attempt to crush someone else's economy to accomplish our own ends without relying on a military solution.) Not to mention the inconvenient question of why we'd be wasting our efforts on the Neandertal project when millions of people are dying right now from hunger or preventable diseases, problems that could be solved by investing the same resources in useful research.
One of the things that the best science fiction and fantasy do well is to make us see the other side of things, as William Tenn used to do when he made us see the world from the monster's or alien's perspective. Connie Willis elaborated on this point by noting how the science fiction and fantasy genres let us establish sufficient critical distance by relocating the story into another time or place. That distance lets us examine really uncomfortable things—such as genocide—in a way that might be impossible to do when the subject strikes too close to home. Joseph Stalin might have captured this most chillingly when he observed that if you kill a single human, it's a tragedy, but if you kill a milllion, it's only statistics. Connie Willis noted that our inability to grasp a concept as large as genocide seems to be an essential flaw in our nature, but Richard Foss notes that this may have originally been a kind of survival mechanism. It also raises a popular point of discussion among authors, namely about whether we should feel bad about harming the characters of our stories. (I always do, but I'm a wuss.)
The discussion reminded me of one of the lesser-known events in Canadian history, which began not long after the British defeated the French at the battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759. A Quebec historian whose name I've long forgotten proposed to me that the main reason the British allowed French citizens of Quebec to retain their language, religion, and legal system was that the conquerors were confident the French could be exterminated—diluted in a growing sea of British citizens arriving as immigrants. The Catholic Church, so the story goes, recognized what the British were doing—after all, they were veterans of centuries of political warfare with the secular powers over who would rule the hearts and minds of the people—and set about trying to save their people by making it the moral duty of all French Canadians to produce as many children as possible. This led to a period of more than a century in which Quebec had perhaps the highest birth rate in world history, neatly turning the tables on the British. I haven't seen this theory debated in any credible forum, but the historian seemed to have his facts on straight. It's certainly true that many of the French kids I grew up with came from families where their grandparents each had 14 to 20 siblings.
All this from one wacky panel title. Maybe the program organizers were more clever than we thought? Whether or not that's the case, one of the things I love about these conventions is how deeply they can make you think.
There's a long, long history of various forms of genocide in science fiction and fantasy, ranging from deliberate to accidental. Examples include the venerable 1949 Earth Abides by George Stewart, all of the many "we must kill the invading alien insects" books (including the much debated Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein), to Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, and most recently, the elimination of the Daleks in Dr. Who and the elimination of humanity by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and in Saturn's Children by Charles Stross. And, most egregiously, in the brain-dead but very pretty 2009 installment of the Star Trek movie franchise, in which everyone's favorite aliens (the Vulcans) are nearly exterminated as a race.
Clearly the dramatic power of eliminating a whole species, including our own, is enormous: if you can't feel it in your gut as you read, then either the author is awesomely clumsy or you're not paying attention. But we can't neglect the emotional toll that's taken on the characters either, since only zombies would remain unaffected and largely able to function normally by such an event as genocide—and that's true as much of the killers as of any survivors. Speaking of zombies, it's interesting to speculate about the ethical implications of killing off the undead: after all, zombies clearly can't help being what they are, and neither can vampires and most other popular denizens of the shadowy parts of modern fiction. It's not as if this is a lifestyle choice. Sure, we may need to kill 'em all for the sake of our own survival, but at what cost to ourselves? Without turning this into too much of a stretch, you can extend the whole notion of genocide to smaller groups: security guards (or anyone wearing a red shirt) in the original Star Trek series, North American Indians in most Westerns, and even women in the TV show Supernatural. In short, genocide can involve the elimination, whether ruthless or unheeding, of any group you consider to be valueless. Richard Foss, one of the panelists, noted that genocide requires the ability to deny the humanity of those being killed, and whenever we can make that literal (as in the kinds of genocide of nonhumans that we see in science fiction and fantasy), it becomes so much easier.
Genocide can also be cultural rather than physical, as has been argued about attempts to extinguish the culture of Tibet, or it can be social, as in the subjugation of Blacks in Western white-dominated culture. It doesn't even have to involve sentient beings—witness what we're doing to global biodiversity right now. (This is what has sometimes been referred to as the "banality of evil"—in itself a very scary notion.) What's a bit odd is that we can even commit genocide against non-living things. The suppression of ideas or the right to free thought by certain fundamentalist groups is one obvious example of extinguishing a group by extinguishing the thoughts that make them who they are. Then there's the semi-living world to consider: I doubt anyone will miss the smallpox virus (for instance) until the day it turns out we weren't as clever as we thought, that there really was one last reservoir of the virus we'd somehow missed, and that we suddenly need to create a new vaccine. And what about artificial computer intelligences? We don't have them right now, but we will within the lifetime of most readers of this blog. When we delete them from our hard disk or just shut down the computer for the day, are we committing murder?
Conversely, what are the ethical implications of bringing a race or species or other group back from extinction? There are efforts right now to sequence the genome of the Neandertals, apparently just because it can be done. Is it ethical to bring back a race that, from all evidence, was our closest cousin, given that they won't possess any Neandertal cultural knowledge and will be, at best, exploited and demonized and may become a new subclass of economic slaves or house pets? (Which raises the the notion of economic genocide when we attempt to crush someone else's economy to accomplish our own ends without relying on a military solution.) Not to mention the inconvenient question of why we'd be wasting our efforts on the Neandertal project when millions of people are dying right now from hunger or preventable diseases, problems that could be solved by investing the same resources in useful research.
One of the things that the best science fiction and fantasy do well is to make us see the other side of things, as William Tenn used to do when he made us see the world from the monster's or alien's perspective. Connie Willis elaborated on this point by noting how the science fiction and fantasy genres let us establish sufficient critical distance by relocating the story into another time or place. That distance lets us examine really uncomfortable things—such as genocide—in a way that might be impossible to do when the subject strikes too close to home. Joseph Stalin might have captured this most chillingly when he observed that if you kill a single human, it's a tragedy, but if you kill a milllion, it's only statistics. Connie Willis noted that our inability to grasp a concept as large as genocide seems to be an essential flaw in our nature, but Richard Foss notes that this may have originally been a kind of survival mechanism. It also raises a popular point of discussion among authors, namely about whether we should feel bad about harming the characters of our stories. (I always do, but I'm a wuss.)
The discussion reminded me of one of the lesser-known events in Canadian history, which began not long after the British defeated the French at the battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759. A Quebec historian whose name I've long forgotten proposed to me that the main reason the British allowed French citizens of Quebec to retain their language, religion, and legal system was that the conquerors were confident the French could be exterminated—diluted in a growing sea of British citizens arriving as immigrants. The Catholic Church, so the story goes, recognized what the British were doing—after all, they were veterans of centuries of political warfare with the secular powers over who would rule the hearts and minds of the people—and set about trying to save their people by making it the moral duty of all French Canadians to produce as many children as possible. This led to a period of more than a century in which Quebec had perhaps the highest birth rate in world history, neatly turning the tables on the British. I haven't seen this theory debated in any credible forum, but the historian seemed to have his facts on straight. It's certainly true that many of the French kids I grew up with came from families where their grandparents each had 14 to 20 siblings.
All this from one wacky panel title. Maybe the program organizers were more clever than we thought? Whether or not that's the case, one of the things I love about these conventions is how deeply they can make you think.