EVIL IS A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE: An Anthology of Antagonists
Copyright © 2017 by Grimdark Magazine. All rights reserved.
All stories, worlds, characters, and non-fiction pieces within are copyright © of their respective authors.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or fictitious recreations of actual historical persons. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and unintended by the authors unless otherwise specified.
Editor: Adrian Collins
Copy Editor (all stories): Mike Myers
Cover Artist: Tommy Arnold
Interior Artist: Jason Deem
Cover Design and Interior Layout: Shawn T. King
Concept Collaboration Acknowledgement: Tom Smith
Trade paperback ISBN: 978-0-6480105-2-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-6480105-6-2
Worldwide Rights.
Created in Australia.
Second Edition, May 2017
Published by Grimdark Magazine
Unit 1 / 184-186 Military Road
Neutral Bay, NSW 2089
www.grimdarkmagazine.com
For Tom Smith, for the late night chat from the other side of the world that led to the concept for this anthology.
For Tim Marquitz, Joe Martin, Shawn Speakman and Geoff Brown, for your advice and support.
For Mike Myers, for the countless hours spent editing Grimdark Magazine and the pieces in this anthology.
For the Grimdark Magazine team, whose volunteer efforts over the last three years got us into a position where this anthology could acquire the talent and attention we needed to succeed: Cheresse Burke, Layla Cummins, Kyle Massa, Rob Matheny, Tom Smith, Jeff Suwak, Joe Price, Sean Grigsby, Joey To, Jewel Eliese, Kristy Mika, Matthew Cropley, Shawn Mansouri, and Durand Welsh.
For the authors, who leapt at this project and got so involved in the Kickstarter.
For the grimdark and dark fantasy community who trusted us to create it.
For Kennet Gencks, who we wish was still here to hold this anthology in his hands.
Grimdark Magazine has chosen to maintain the authors’ original languages and publishing standards (eg. Australian English, American English, Canadian English, UK English) for each story.
Contents
Foreword
R. Scott Bakker
Introduction
Adrian Collins
The Broken Dead
Michael R. Fletcher
Every Hair Casts a Shadow
Teresa Frochock
The Divine Death of Jirella Martigore
Alex Marshall
A Royal Gift
Mark Alder
Old Blood
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Black Bargain
Janny Wurts
The Syldoon Sun
Jeff Salyards
The Darkness Within the Light
Shawn Speakman
The Greater of Two Evils
Marc Turner
Exceeding Bitter
Kaaron Warren
A Game of Mages
Courtney Schafer
The Tattered Prince and the Demon Veiled
Bradley P. Beaulieu
A Storm Unbound
E.V. Morrigan
The Game
Matthew Ward
Blood Penny
Deborah A. Wolf
Better than Breath
Brian Staveley
Foundation of Bones
Mazarkis Williams
The Aging of a Kill
Peter Orullian
The Carathayan
R. Scott Bakker
On the Goodness of Evil
A foreword by
R. Scott Bakker
The world is a circle that possesses as many centres as it does men.
—Ajencis
Evil is a matter of perspective.
“There is nothing either good or bad,” Hamlet says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “but thinking makes it so.” For many scholars, claims like this identify Hamlet as the forebear of the modern individual. We dwell in what might be called the age of ‘more or less relativism,’ a time when the assertion of universal moral truths can just as easily identify fantasy as it can scripture.
This wasn’t the case just a few centuries ago. As recently as the Renaissance, assertions of universal good and evil were more apt to sort friend from foe. Their universality was given, which meant the imperative to ‘destroy evil’ included the murder and degradation of fellow human beings.
When people grow up immersed in cultures, the values belonging to those cultures become their unconscious yardstick, their own idiosyncratic angle on the actions of their fellows. Geography turns out to be a good predictor of moral consensus. This is no accident. ‘Us good’ and ‘Them evil’ line up so neatly simply because ‘Us against Them’ is pretty clearly the primary evolutionary function of ‘good and evil.’ Infants display bias for and against at the tender age of three months! The more we study the psychology and neuroscience of good and evil, the more clear their biological bases and evolutionary origins become, to the point where it now takes a genuine leap of faith to say evil is more than a matter of mere perspective.
‘Evil,’ you could say, is the name our ancestors used to label victims.
Which is to say, to do evil.
Hamlet’s world, the modern world of moral complication, is the one you happen to be sitting in this moment now. ‘Evil’ is often evil, we think, because it licences irrevocable acts on the basis of a hallucinatory universalism. Someone reads some scripture, takes what are, in many cases, absurdly parochial claims, and thinks they apply to the whole of humanity. They think evil is more than a matter of perspective, and people are all too often oppressed, terrorized.
Thus the dark moral to the story of human morality: we are hardwired to hallucinate universal good and evil. And we are often most evil when we think ourselves certain of evil. Absent modern civilization, we will generally assume the evil of our enemies to be absolute, not a matter of mere perspective.
Like it or not, the objectivity of evil is part and parcel of our basic moral toolbox, and you find clear evidence of this throughout our culture, on the evening news, in popular political rhetoric, in comedy, but also, believe it or not, on the shelves of your local bookstore—and nowhere more so than the fantasy section.
Consider Tolkien. Part of the difficulty of modern life, the ‘malaise,’ lies precisely in its moral complication, how it continuously bombards us with unprecedented moral problems, environments unknown to our ancestors and quite beyond the toolkit they have bequeathed us. Middle-earth is possessed of a profound moral certainty, one far outstripping anything our ancestors enjoyed (and they enjoyed a great deal). Heroes question their resolve, their wisdom or even their courage, but they never question the evil they are charged with destroying. Sauron is evil in an absolute sense.
To dwell in Middle-earth as a reader, then, is to dwell in an essentially morally idyllic place. The apocalyptic structure (or ‘eschatology’) assures that good will prevail, but even if Sauron had regained the One Ring and Middle-earth had fallen into irrevocable shadow, it would be no less morally simple. The reader is guaranteed their instinct to universalism will not be betrayed, that those who destroy evil will not themselves be charged with evil. Evil triumphant does not simply amount to an inverted good. Orcs can be killed by the thousands, but no orc can be murdered, simply because murder is intri
nsically immoral, and to destroy evil is to do good in Middle-earth.
The goodness of ‘evil’ is what makes The Lord of the Rings morally (as opposed to merely magically and spiritually) fantastic, and so genuinely scriptural. It indulges our ancestral predilection for moral certainty, vividly concretizes our instinct to demonize our enemies, blurring, the way our ancestors blurred, the natural and the social dimensions of our environments. It explores a world where our hallucination is as real as real, where fundamental moral structure of the world gratifies our instinct to destroy evil.
The Lord of the Rings exemplifies what might be called morally fantastic heroic fantasy fiction. It allows us to escape the moral complexities of modern life, to follow the human drama against a backdrop of absolute moral certainty. And there is comfort in this—at least there is for me! Doing good is difficult enough knowing the Good, and quickly seems hopeless when you have scant clue as to what ‘good’ means. This is the genius in Tolkien’s world-building, his instinctive understanding of the way worlds and ideologies rise and fall together in the ancestral mind. The more convincing the world, the more convincing the objectivity of evil.
And this is just to say that The Lord of the Rings indulges what has to be, without any doubt, the most dangerous of the many illusions we have inherited from our tribal ancestors. This is why so many critics both within and without fantasy were so quick to condemn the work for its apparent, political atavism. The Lord of the Rings resembles scripture, and so, they think, promulgates a universalistic mindset, rather than, as was the case in my childhood, revealing such mindsets as fantastic. The interchangeability of Sauron and Satan, for me anyway, made Satan seem more fictional, not less. And the jaw-dropping believability of Middle-earth taught me that reality could be easily faked.
Whatever the political consequence of The Lord of the Rings, the larger genre has never wanted for counter-examples, works that are more or less morally realistic, while remaining magical and spiritual. Nowadays the inclination is to identify morally realistic heroic fantasy as grimdark, but it’s important to realize that we are talking about a story-telling tendency, here, rather than fixed set of types. ‘Grimdark’ simply helps us articulate this tendency in the context of other concerns.
In grimdark, then, the storyteller seeks to complicate, even undermine, our instinctively universalistic understanding of good and evil. One of the goals of grimdark, in other words, is to explore the perspectival structure of evil, either by jamming the moral intuitions of readers, and/or by depicting morally ambivalent heroes (‘rogues’) and morally ambiguous worlds. Where morally fantastic heroic fantasy tends to be scriptural, providing a mythologized portrait of the past, morally realistic heroic fantasy tends to be historical, providing a demythologized portrait of the past.
The canonical work of morally realistic heroic fantasy has to be George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice. Where Middle-earth levels moral complexities, Westeros exposes them, all the heroisms and the madnesses belonging to our premodern ancestors. In Westeros, moral status is always held in suspense; characters are far more likely to pursue ingroup interests at the violent expense of their ‘evil’ outgroup competitors. The reader is systematically denied the moral clarity required to do anything more than what they are forced to do in their daily lives: interpret as best they can.
Given the kind of criticism levelled at Tolkien’s mythologization of morality, one might think someone, like Martin, who so relentlessly pursues its demythologization would be applauded. The problem is that demythologizing premodern moral contexts entails depicting actions and attitudes that we presently think abhorrent. In circles devoted to the moral and political evaluation of cultural production, description amounts to tacit endorsement, and has the aggregate effect of desensitizing audiences to such occurrences in the real world. So where Tolkien was accused of constructing too sanitary a world, one finds Martin—and grimdark more generally—accused of constructing one that is too unsanitary. Where Tolkien is charged with mythologizing too much, Martin is charged with mythologizing too little.
In each case, of course, the critic is making some kind of universal claim regarding the evils of certain forms of representation. The transgression they identify will strike them as objective, so they will insist that contrary interpretations are wrong, despite the absence of any fact of the matter. The moral nature of their claim suggests they will be incapable of considering their position rationally, that they, like every other moralist on the planet, will endlessly confabulate reasons. But this isn’t to say their charges should be dismissed: far from it. Precisely because we are hardwired to be chauvinistic, we need to take all charges of chauvinism seriously.
What it means is that there will be no decisive way to settle the issue one way or another. Precisely because the issue is moral, perspectival, we lack the objectivity required to reach any decisive settlement one way or another. What imperative compels a writer to import modern moral perspectives? A universal one? What good is served by editing, say, sexual violence out of our reimaginings of our premodern past? Does sexual violence become less prevalent when we ignore it, or does our cultural environment simply become less troubling, less tolerant of difficult topics? King Richard III, forensic historians have discovered, was not simply killed by being stabbed in the head, his body was also subsequently desecrated: someone, perhaps in a bid to humiliate his memory, thrust a sword into his rectum hard enough to notch his pelvis. The suspicion is that he was displayed thus draped over the saddle of a horse. Certainly it would be absurd to suggest that this latter fact does not say something incredibly important about Richard’s life and times—even humanity itself.
Precisely because brutality characterizes so much of our past, we need to view all demands for mythologization critically. No matter how plain the offending text seems to be, the would-be moral censor has a pretty challenging case to make. First, they need to convince people of their interpretation in the absence of interpretative facts of the matter. Second, they need to convince people that the alleged meaning is indeed evil, either intrinsically or in terms of consequences. Given our tendency to hallucinate universality, they will assume their claims and evaluations obvious, something that only morally or intellectually defective individuals could fail to see. That self-same programming will lead them to devalue their targets, to think tactics like shaming and threatening and harassment are more than justified. They will believe their good more than rationalizes the systematic devaluation of perceived offenders. They will do evil, in other words, to combat what they think ‘evil.’
The chances of rationally debating and settling the matter are zero. Neither the grimdark critic nor the apologist have any hope of resolving the controversies between them precisely because their moral debate is a modern one—complicated. In premodern times, when the objectivity of morality was enforced (if not given), the matter would have been decided by some kind of moral authority. The evil party would have been identified and chastised if not destroyed. Nowadays, we have no arbiter, no way, as Nietzsche might have put it, to evaluate competing valuations. The goodness of ‘evil,’ the ability to impose clarity where none can be found, is no longer an option belonging to us. Interminable debate is the inevitable outcome, particularly in those societies possessing guarantees on free speech.
In this sense, grimdark as much exemplifies as explores moral complication, daring to represent what many think immoral, worthy only of contempt and scorn. By committing to the perspectival nature of evil, grimdark writers themselves risk what others call evil. Grimdark, you could say, contains a commitment to the potential goodness of evil, the need to ignore the moralist and to make readers itch.
Evil is a matter of perspective. To appreciate this fact is to surmount the tribalism that is our inheritance, to join those who refuse, as far as they are able, to play groupish games. To write grimdark, to pursue complicated moralities in fantastic settings, is to risk the universal instincts of one’s fellows
in a manner no other genre can.
R. Scott Bakker
January, 2017
A Lifetime of Inspiration
An Introduction by
Adrian Collins
I’m a villain. And so are you.
From a very early age I found myself drawn to the villains in fiction. As I started to watch and read science fiction and fantasy, I wanted to know why they were the way they were. Why did Darth Vader want to kill the rebels? Why did so many storm troopers follow the Emperor? What made Sauron want to destroy Middle Earth? Why was I so interested in Boromir after he betrayed the Fellowship of the Ring?
In my teens I became immersed in modern history—the Nazis in particular. How could an entire nation turn on the world like that? How could they see their cause as righteous when history tells us it was evil? How could they be the cause of so much death and destruction when the War to End all Wars had already been fought?
As I grew older, I became more cynical and intuitive. I had debates where my mouth went dry as I realised my fervently argued black and white viewpoint was wrong; felt like smashing my face to a pulp on a brick wall when I couldn’t even find a middle ground with somebody who refused to budge. I made mistakes I’ll likely look back on with shame until the day I go into the furnace. But I learned, and I realised life was all about perspective. There was no black and white viewpoint, just seven billion shades of grey in between.
For every evil act that I read about, hear about, or witness—from a coward punch in the street after a night out to the bombing of a military checkpoint or civilian hospital in the Middle East—irrespective of how reprehensible I see it as, there is somebody out there who sees a history of oppression and hardship and horror and abuse leading to that act and understands it or even views it as heroic. The coward puncher may have suffered a lifetime of physical and mental abuse to make them snap at an innocent that night. The conquering empire—whether I see it as an empire of good or evil—likely has millions of followers firmly believing that I am doing my best to tear it down and they need to defend it with blood and bullets.
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