Writing the other

 This week I'm well into writing a second novella about my talking lion character.  She's the only viewpoint in the novella, and that gives me both advantages and disadvantages.

I've had to do a bit of hand-waving to get her to be able to talk and to understand human culture.  Cue the evil Predatorbot Programme, which bioengineered her, allowing her to speak.  The Programme also taught her language and human culture.

So now I have a character who sort of understands human culture, but who is a complete outsider to it.  She is the other who allows me to comment on human values sideways.

I'm finding this very useful to examine issues like human greed.  Being a lion, my character doesn't understand that at all.  I can use her to make comments on the ways humans trash the world just to make money, which they can't take with them when they die.

My main character's best friend is a sapient machine intelligence, another other.  He's installed into a human warship.  This character gives me scope to comment on the way humans push difficult tasks onto others and don't take responsibility for them.

I'm reading Rutger Bregman's  book Human Kind at present.  Its strapline is "A hopeful history", but many of the incidents he relates there are nowhere near hopeful.  That's why it's taking me a long time to get though the book.  But one of the sections which did stay with me is titled "Colonel Marshall and the Soldiers who Wouldn't Shoot."

It references a study Marshall did around the time of the Second World War.  He found that only 15 - 25% of soldiers ever fired their guns.  He said that "the average and mentally healthy individual... has such an inner usually unrealised resistance toward killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life."  And that hasn't changed with modern weapons.  Drone pilots remote-killing targets suffer from PTSD as a result.

So what would happen if you put a sapient machine intelligence into your warship?  Would those warships refuse to pull the trigger too?

I took a slightly sideways approach to this in my story.  My warship character doesn't refuse to shoot.  Instead he removes himself from the risk of being ordered to shoot.  In effect, he's a conscientious objector deserter.  He creates an unofficial Special Investigations Unit, dedicated to uncovering corruption, slavery, and environmental destruction across the vast area of space occupied by the Human Collective.

I added a paragraph to the first novella in the series, claiming that the Unit's members were "the keepers of the Collective's conscience".  I also hinted that some warships had refused to fight in engagements which they considered illegal.  They'd put themselves into port, claiming they had damage which needed repairing.  Some ships had deliberately taken hits and damage from an enemy in order to be retired from combat.

Writing these "other" characters has allowed me to examine and challenge human values in a way which a human making those points couldn't.  Writing the other puts that other outside the culture I'm examining, a very useful tool for challenging norms.