TGIAD 2.0: 40 – Muddying the waters of good and evil

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It’s TGIAD, or Thank God It’s Amnar Day (so named by the great Toaster Ferret). I release the next chapter in the book Amnar: The Awakening, and take a moment here to write about what happens in the episode here on the blog.

Amnar: The Awakening will soon be available in MP3 format via Podiobooks.com. Watch this space for more…

We’re now into Amnar: The Inheritance, the second book in The Awakening series.

Who’s good, and who’s bad…

As the story opens, we return to Amin Duum, where the Tiomke, the Duum State, is recovering from the impact of Io’s escape. It was dramatic, and a victory for the Amnari.

Newly appointed Commander Vasha is in charge of managing the eastern lines, which will soon become battle lines if they have another attack by the Amnari. He’s a rather reluctant commander; he wants the promotion for its High City residence and the advantages it will give his daughter in marriage. But fighting Amnari? That’s another matter.

This is the chapter where Vasha and Arandes first meet face to face. It originally appeared as Chapter 20 in the old book one, and was a fascinating moment for me. I couldn’t work out how to get Arandes back onto the Plains without using his viewpoint. I have a rule that I never use his POV, so I had a problem.

I went out for a walk, as I’m wont to do, and as I came back I suddenly had the clear voice of Vasha in my head. In the Awakening series, he appears as a captain much earlier in the story (Daar and Io go see him when Te’Gara is arrested). Here he is again, opening The Inheritance, and demonstrating something that lies at the heart of the Amnar story: good and evil are very unclear and I keep the waters as muddy as possible.

There are lots of questions around Vasha and his role in Amnar, and as a model of a good-bad guy. The traditional fantasy approach of evil looking and acting evil doesn’t apply here. In the real world, the boundaries are never so clear-cut. Societies blitzed by economic and social breakdown vote in leaders that make most liberals’ stomachs turn (look at the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, for example, or the voting in of the BNP in the UK).

And dictators aren’t Hollywood or comic book bad guys with big plans to blow up the world. They tend to come with massive ideologies, grand visions to change the world. The thing we find hardest to stomach is that our bad guys, the ones who kill hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, do it because they believe they’re doing the right thing, that they’re somehow benefiting their society. On a smaller scale, the same thinking justifies extreme pro-lifers killing doctors or militant animal-rights activists killing scientists. If you have an ideology and a vision that drives you that hard, taking human lives becomes a cost of the grand plan.

But for those who carry out the orders of leaders with a grand vision of a better world (according to their own personal philosophy), life is frequently terrifying and overwhelming. Just as many SS officers committed suicide as a result of taking part in the genocide of the Holocaust, Vasha is struggling already with his role as a senior official in Duum. He is now responsible for the torture and execution of prisoners taken in all along the East City Wall, which by this point could number hundreds in a month.

These are uncomfortable issues to deal with, especially as its very tempting to want to imagine that the people we call evil know themselves to be evil. The problem is they don’t. They believe wholeheartedly, doggedly to the point of death, that what they’re doing is right. And that’s why they’re so incredibly dangerous.

For people like Vasha, life is even more difficult, as we will see in the course of this and future books.