Life Has Value

Dune, Terra Ignota, Nightwish and more

The Weight of a Life

This week I began listening to Christopher Ruocchio's Empire of Silence (2018), a science fiction epic clearly drawing heavy inspiration from Dune, A Song of Ice and Fire and The Book of the New Sun among other works. Depending on how the book progresses, it might be worth writing about how and when it's appropriate to copy worldbuilding and even character traits to such a degree.

But this book has also helped to crystallize for me a motif that runs through all the works listed above and much of science fiction & fantasy besides. Protagonist Hadrian reflects:

"A wise man once told me that flesh was the cheapest resource in the human universe and that life spends more easily than gold. I laughed when I heard that and denied him. I was a fool to do so. How little I knew." – Empire of Silence

Obviously this isn't a complete revelation – just last week I wrote about two books depicting brutal corporate slavery – but it got me thinking more about the relative value of life in these stories. Early in Empire of Silence, noble Hadrian wanders off alone and barely survives an encounter with a gang of ruffian adolescents. It's made abundantly clear that his life matters, because of both his aristocratic blood and his future plot relevance, mere pages after his above reflection on the value of plebeian flesh.

So does all life have value? Or only some lives?

Paul and the Fremen, by Steve Prescott

Proximity & Narrative Tradition

At this point I imagine we're all familiar with the idea that, illogical as it may be, our brains are wired to care a lot more about the death of someone close to us than the deaths of a million people we've never met – not only because of emotions and our societal divisions, but also because we simply cannot fathom such large numbers in any meaningful way. Many science fiction & fantasy stories explore this idea in the same way as Empire of Silence, and I think a vast majority of that trend can be linked back to Dune.

Hero Paul Atreides and his family are set apart from their rival Harkonnens mostly by the simple fact that they respect human life. They've fostered real relationships with the working class of their ancestral planet Caladan and bring that mindset to their stewardship of Arrakis and its populace. It's a sharp contrast to the Harkonnens' brutal approach, and part of why Paul ultimately wins the respect of the Fremen. (If you're more familiar with Game of Thrones, the Starks and Lannisters have a very similar dynamic.)

But still, Atreides blood is valued far higher than any other. Partly for emotional reasons (we see the story from Paul's & Jessica's perspectives, after all) and partly for narrative ones (harkening back to the likes of Achilles, Hector and Paris in The Iliad), these lives are treated as far more precious than the average.

I've sung a lot of praises for Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota books (and they deserve far more), but they also harshly annoyed me at times for how feverishly obsessive the narration could be about their noble cast. I'll contain myself to one example for today: The fourth book opens with a rapid worldwide descent from utopia into the chaos of war, with unnamed millions if not billions in need of immediate guidance, yet our point-of-view character – a supposed beacon for humanity, with unlimited access and connections – spends an absurd amount of time ensuring the emotional wellbeing of one peripheral named character before taking a break to eat chocolate cake with another.

Granted that Palmer is actively imitating The Iliad even more than Frank Herbert was in Dune, but it's still a strange contrast to how in the same series J.E.D.D. Mason holds each and every life as being infinitely valuable. After all, we are all 'small authors', writing our stories on the world.

Altruism, by Rob Rey

Life has Value

Of course life has intrinsic value. The science fiction & fantasy stories I brought up today each try to grapple with and communicate that answer in their own ways, though few reach as idealistic a conclusion as J.E.D.D. Mason. (Dune also sees Paul & Leto II pivot hard on the value of life – I touched on it a bit here but might well be worth a follow-up post.)

Many of these stories also contrast the privileged lives of their aristocratic characters with extreme hardships for the lives of everyone else, again similar to my post from last week. The Expanse has a pretty great storyline about this, which should probably also get its own post sometime. (I should probably mention the popular Red Rising series too, though for the life of me I still don't understand why the author chose to make the first book a Hunger Games ripoff and I have yet to explore the sequels.)

Just because our limited perspective & our narrative traditions both seem to tell us some lives are more important than others doesn't make it at all true. Everyone deserves a chance to live their life to the fullest! May J.E.D.D. Mason and whatever other powers bless the people continuing to fight for a free Palestine and other causes – it's hard not to be inspired by the activists on board the Madleen and across America this week.

(I feel like I was a bit scattered today, partly because a Google Cloud disruption has been messing with my ability to find and add images, but I hope the message still came across.)

Below is a quote from the song at the top, in case you didn't make it through the whole twenty minute masterpiece. Thanks for reading and until next time <3

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?" – Professor Richard Dawkins & Nightwish, 'The Greatest Show on Earth'