What is a crime?

 Last week I was at a meeting of the writers' circle I chair.  We were having an in-house workshop evening on crime fiction, run by my friend Carol Westron.

I see myself as a science fiction and fantasy writer, but most of my stories include crimes.  In many stories my main characters are sworn to right the wrongs that crime has caused.

Carol ran through the different types of crimes which people write stories about, and it got me thinking about the series of novellas I'm currently writing.  Some crimes are constant throughout time.  Murder is the big example.  But there are many others which are crimes by virtue of the culture and the time period which people live in.

At one time in the UK worshipping according to the wrong religious rites would've got you killed.  These days, we allow people to choose their own faith - or no faith at all - provided it doesn't harm others.  

In my own work I always have a strong streak of morality running through the narrative.  In fantasy fiction there's a long line of books about a thief from the poor side of town being the hero and getting caught up in things bigger than them.  There are also many series with an assassin as the main character.

I've never fallen in love with any of those characters.  Yes, in the real world people without enough money do turn to crime to survive.   But I don't have to replicate that in the secondary worlds I invent.  I can invent whatever I want.  So let's show characters using their intelligence and grit and creativity to pull themselves up out of the bad circumstances.

One of the things Carol reminded us of was that villains don't see themselves as villains.  As Stephen King says: "They are the heroes of their own lives." 

This is what I've done with the novella I'm writing now.  My characters are challenging the legality of some policies which the elected government enacted, and working against them to unmask secret, unethical research.

Technically, my sapient machine intelligence Strike could often be accused of treason.  He could be labelled a conscientious objector, because he tries not to get involved in fights where people get killed.  Given that he's a Starnavy warship, this is somewhat problematical.  And sometimes he can't avoid killing a ship or a crew when they attack him, but he mourns each death.

I wanted to present a more nuanced view of what AI could become in these novellas.  We're currently panicking about its exponential growth, and imagining all sorts of bad things.  But what if we didn't have that future?

Strike is programmed with a robust ethics and morals database, and that allows him to make difficult decisions on issues.  Sometimes he works against the government if what it's doing is morally wrong.  Sometimes he works with the Starnavy to support the rule of law.

I didn't set out to examine the issue of what is a crime when I created Strike, but that's effectively become the central question of the stories.