Influences, Part 4

Technology never solved any of our real problems. The moment we squash one, another pops up. We praise ourselves for defeating polio only to see the disease morph and avoid our vaccines. We congratulate ourselves on decreasing the amount of backbreaking work present in our daily lives only to fear heart disease and obesity. We thwart terrorist attacks only to infringe on personal liberties. Beyond that, we just use our new sciences to fuel our old fires of hatred.

The advent of modernism, I think, demonstrated this extremely clearly. Remember the eugenics movement? This "science" was used to perpetuate racism and to shirk off social responsibility. Its most disastrous use was its role in the Holocaust, when it was used to "prove" the inferiority of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals, among others. Those who assumed these people were inferior determined the genetic traits they didn't want society to have, rounded up those who represented them, and quarantined or killed them. Were they simply weeding out undesirable elements as the cold logic of science dictated? Or were they using flawed logic that supported their hatred? Germany had already begun to hate Jews and gypsies before eugenics made its appearance on the scientific state, so it seems the use of eugenics to prove the inferiority of the Jews was quite convenient.

Peace, it seems, never comes to man. We've fought countless wars and yet can never quench our thirst for violence. World War I was called by some "the war to end all wars". It didn't of course. Today we find ourselves mired in combat with those in the Middle East who simply want to rule themselves instead of being at the mercy of every other nation in a tumultuous region, or being sliced up and handed over to oil companies. We generate doctrines of hate against those who want the same thing as America wanted when it declared its independence from England: freedom from oppressive lands across the sea. We cry for (nuclear!) war against Iran simply because they hate us, yet we think we are justified in our hatred towards them. Despite all this, rather than settle our differences with words and thoughtful understanding, tools we have had since the dawn of man, we rush to kill others with our new weapons of war.

If I say I want Shadows & Silver to be realistic, it's because the real world offers the epic, tragic conflict of which fantasy novelists can only dream. Reality, then, is the primary influence on my fiction.