A moral death

One of the things I always look for in a story is a sense of moral responsibility.  And nowhere is that more important to me than how a writer handles death and killing in their work.

One of the things that has disturbed me about many young adult books is the explicit description of violence and death that some of those books contain.  In some cases, books marketed as suitable for twelve year olds have more explicit violence in them than most of the adult SF I've read.

One of the surprises I've found is how moral military SF can be.  Take Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series.  Kylara Vatta is an ex-military spacer, who uses her training to set up a Space Defence Force to protect innocent civilians against a large force of dangerous pirates.  Yes, the books do contain descriptions of space battles and the destruction of ships, but the narrative also makes it clear that the destruction is necessary to save billions of civilian lives.  That is death in a moral context.

One of the most shocking descriptions of death I've read is in a wildly successful young adult SF series.  Right at the end of the first book the heroine witnesses her parents being gunned to death.  What I objected to was the excessive detail with which each death is described, the drawn-out way in which the action is described in every gory second of dying.

To me, this is the writer almost glorying in death.  There's a sneaking suspicion that she's almost having fun writing that scene.  And that twitches my moral fibre hard.  I despise that.

Contrast that with a scene in Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet where a civilian ship is boarded by pirate raiders.  The pirates do nothing more than threaten everyone with guns pushed into their faces, steal some stuff, and lightly beat the captain up.  But Becky gives one of those civilians nightmares about the boarding for weeks after.  To me, this is a moral exploration of death.  True, no-one gets killed in the scene, but the possibility of a swift end to life at the press of a trigger comes across strongly.  And people worry about that.

To me, that is a moral exploration of death.  It gives a visceral, personal sense of life's fragility in such situations.  It urges us to think about how we relate to other people.  And that's the kind of moral framework I like to see in books I read, one that acknowledges that, in most cases, killing people is just plain wrong.