I want to write socially conscious science fiction. To quote television writer and producer Rod Serling, “The writer’s role is to be a menacer of the public’s conscience, he must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism, and he must focus on the issues of his time.” (Boyle, par. 7)
Am I menacing the public conscience? Or letting it lie content?
The choices we make as writers create a morality within our works; it is moral worldbuilding. I’m not talking about crafting a religion or philosophy for a fantasy society, though that sounds cool, but about what it says about our moral underpinning as writers, if, say, the good guys win through violence. The moral choices of the story, not the characters. What tactics end up working for the characters, what consequences they face… these are choices. Am I building a just world with my plot actions, word choices, and characterizations? Or one that is only just to the protagonists?
What is Moral Worldbuilding?
My awareness of this as a craft term began with an article by contemporary novelist Brandon Taylor, which I found via a friend on social media. It’s a lengthy piece. According to Taylor, moral world building “…means being more conscientious about the kinds of value systems we include in our work,” (par. 2) he clarifies worldbuilding itself later as, “the edifices of civilization and the exterior trappings of its manners and habits of mind—styles of dress, varieties of food, modes of transport, structures of government, methods of trade, and the laws that govern the heavenly spheres and the crude rock beneath our feet.” (par. 9)
When Elizabeth St. John builds cul-de-sacs and private family homes on the moon in Sea of Tranquility, she is creating a world where private property and capitalism are part of the moral landscape more important than conserving space in a pressurized dome.
Ursula K. Le Guin, in The Lathe of Heaven, takes a much more direct approach. The mechanics of the plot themselves create a moral dilemma: the main character changes the world itself every time he dreams, often resulting in deaths as he dreams up a plague or war. He has no control over his dreams, and his only choice at first seems to be to prevent himself from dreaming. This sets up a tension between action and inaction which defines the novel’s moral perspective.
Through the choices we make in building out the world of the text, we decide what moral questions to raise, or “the extent to which evil is permitted into contemporary fiction,” (Taylor par. 4).
Am I allowing evil into my fiction? And if so, is that a bad thing? Isn’t life full of evil, and shouldn’t we reflect life as it is? Taylor’s argument is, yes, we should. He finds modern literary fiction to be devoid of true evil, and that’s a problem. (par. 4)
Studies show that humans derive ethical models from fiction. We use fiction as shorthand in describing philosophy, technology, or point of view. We build our sense of the world as much from these fictional models as our day-to-day interactions. Viewing characters on television, for example, can change general attitudes toward real people who share their characteristics. (Żerebecki)
Therefore, yes, I do think we have a moral obligation not to perpetuate models that support evil. An example of such a model would be the anti-hero, usually a misanthrope who commits terrible acts of violence, but because these are shown to be in a just cause, and the character is given sympathetic treatment, the audience cheers them on.
In my lifetime I have seen anti-hero characters like Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle go from causing a sense of unease in the audience to being accepted as simply “heroes.” This is a failure of moral worldbuilding, the allowing of evil into fiction, and from there into the minds of the public.
I imagine Taylor’s opponents would say they are not watering down their morality but merely being realistic. Most of the villainy in the world is mundane. For every person who orders bombs dropped on civilians, there are a hundred thousand who go about their days while it is happening, complicit only in their silence. Surely, then, it is laudable to point out the mild evil of the ordinary? To paint well-rounded characters, see all sides, and eschew even the name “villain”?
Villains are a moral choice. Taylor’s article is mainly concerned with the problem of villains, particularly likable villains and the way modern literary fiction often softens villainy so as not to appear didactic. He feels that authors either explain away the evil through psychoanalyzing the villain or providing a sympathetic backstory, or by limiting the evil actions to “those petty everyday slights that make life such a humiliating ordeal.” (par. 4)
When I casually mentioned the topic of my paper to my friend Charlie, a fellow-author who reads largely in the contemporary literary fiction realm, his response was to chide me that, “That’s not a real problem! There’s too much didacticism in fiction already. You should leave the choice to the reader, not lead him by the nose to your conclusion” (Oberndorf).
I side with Taylor here, though I couldn’t articulate it at the time of my conversation. (Don’t you hate that?) To my friend’s demands that I name works of fiction that reflected Taylor’s concerns of moral vagueness, I could only think of the recent novel The Complicities by Stacey D’Erasmo. But this paper isn’t about proving if Taylor has a point or not. It’s about how to do this thing called moral worldbuilding intentionally.
Leaving the morality up to the reader is the same as accepting moral relativism; it is an example of moral worldbuilding of that particular value system. Personally, I don’t think the “both sides” arguments and cynicism have served our society well. It is a morality that supports the status quo and comforts inaction on the part of the principled.
We are building moral worlds whether we are conscious of it or not. In the typical action-adventure, there is no mourning for the dead foot soldier of the enemy, be they Imperial Storm Troopers or Borg. Their lives are literally worth less, each death taking less screen time or less description. The writer, no doubt, is merely thinking of building tension and creating opportunities for violent action.
In Ulysses, Joyce never shows female labor. Clearly, someone is keeping house for the Blooms, but we don’t see his wife’s work, only Leopold’s. The story has set up a stance on whose contribution is more important.
In The Lethe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin makes very intentional choices in how she builds her story to show her Taoist perspective. Her hero isn’t incidentally inactive, his morality comes from being inactive, and his intentional choice to be inactive ultimately pays off, resolving the central conflict. This is powerful, because the actions of the plot speak louder than any of the characters arguing against his passivity.
I think back to Rod Serling’s words, remembering that I, as a reader, was frustrated with that passivity, and kept waiting for the twist. Would he learn lucid dreaming? Would his love interest be the one to solve it for him? Only when the plot played out did I realize Le Guin’s purpose, and I had to face my preconceptions about agency and action.
Likewise, when Iris in Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night confesses that she never has had sex, “they played yumyum but never nooky[1], playing nooky’s bad,”(439) it is we, the audience, who are implicated for having misunderstood the term “yumyum” in all its many uses earlier in the book. The narrator never defined it; we did. We are complicit in the slander of a pre-teen orphan. Letting evil in, indeed!
If, like for my friend Charlie, the idea of consciously building morality into a story sounds schoolmarmish, it is also playing with devils, moving beyond mere “petty slights” to true horrors.
Honest assessment of my moral worldbuilding craft
I wrote a rather long blog post last year titled “The Danger of Cardboard Villains,” where I argued that failing to have fully-rounded villains perpetuated the falsehood that bad things happen because of bad people, not the well-intentioned actions of “patriots” or “protectors of children” who believe themselves to be heroes. I felt that this was perpetuating an evil, that evil that the solution to our problems is to find the “bad people” and punish or dispose of them. It is, essentially, fascist ideology.
Taylor’s article is arguing for the opposite. He wants us to have the freedom to show evil characters being evil. To not be afraid of “melodrama” (par. 25).
I look back askance at my blog post. Am I guilty of softening evil? Taylor and I both want the same thing: to do no evil ourselves and to point it out in the world. To him that means letting the bad guys be bad. To me, it means showing the way we all hold evil inside ourselves. I’m still letting evil into the story. If I am doing my job right, it should be both clear what is evil and not feel didactic.
The goal is not to lead the reader by the nose. I know that feeling of annoyance when I see the bare mechanics of the story. It is to let the reader think that they have come to their own conclusion, but the conclusion is one I have programmed in.
It sounds somewhat villainous now, doesn’t it?
It took about three minutes for someone to comment on my blog post, pointing out that the main antagonist in my novel Galactic Hellcats is irredeemably evil. She’s a fascist dictator who also abuses her son. We never see her being nice to anyone. She is, honestly, a cardboard villain. I had made her such because, like the action-adventure writers I mentioned, my mind was simply on pushing the protagonists forward to violent action.
On the other hand, my second novel, The Gods Awoke, has the sort of well-rounded villainy that Taylor might object to. I have characters in conflict, and thanks to the omniscient point of view, we get everyone’s literal point of view. Most of the harm in the story is caused by characters who believe they are doing what is right. I wanted the book to focus on morality and ethics, on religion and belief. I set up characters with opposing worldviews in opposition to each other, competing for the heart of the handsome young man or the votes of the senate. I wanted to show that blind faith is no virtue, that the power imbalance implied in the existence of a god or gods was dangerous, full stop. In short, if gods really did exist, we shouldn’t worship them.
As I look back on reviews and comments from readers, I know I was too subtle. They noticed the gods taking responsibility for their actions, but not the problem of their power itself. One friend thought “Their power comes from belief,” was the point? That’s not even in there? So maybe there is only so clear you can be? Still, I readily recognize in my choices writing The Gods Awoke the dominant humanist tradition that Taylor laments, and the moral ambiguity of cynical realism. Can I do better?
Around about 2016, I vowed to get more political in my science fiction, to write about the things that truly mattered to me: income inequality, worker’s rights, anti-bigotry. I immediately felt that aforementioned fear of the didactic, of the melodramatic. How to convey the dangers of school choice programs without ranting at my readers?
In science fiction, we have two modes of conveying our moral purpose. We can write the cautionary tale, or the hopeful tale. It’s harder to write the hopeful. Le Guin shows this in her “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” as she speaks to a presumably disbelieving reader. “We can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas?”(275) and “Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No?” (277)
I’m drawn to the difficult, and so I have struggled to write primarily hopeful tales. My short story, “This Is an Optimistic Science Fiction Story About the Future” was written in a fit of pique in 2017 as I failed again and again to write something that showed a hopeful future. “Because this is an optimistic story about the future,” I wrote, “you are probably expecting some inner darkness, some hint that all is not well in the narrator’s present”. But no, there are jet packs and children wearing colorful ribbons in the sky, concrete roads are replaced with good, sustainable green swathes, using flowers to mark the shoulder or a yield. It’s more wish list than story, still, there’s a morality to it. I picked the parts of our world I wanted to fix. Someone else wouldn’t be so irritated at the existence of freeways.
Writing that was cathartic, but it left me no closer to real moral worlds, to building up the realism to convince a reader, quietly and without drawing attention, of my moral stand. I bring it up because I think giving up on hiding the moral stand was a step. I had to walk before I could run. I let myself be as didactic as all get out in my short stories “Free Wifi” and “Subscription Life.”
I’ve been able to hit the reader over the head with a moral. How to do it in a more Machiavellian way? I want the moral to slide like an assassin’s blade into the reader’s heart and leave them wondering if they pushed it in there themselves.
For years, my big moral project was “We Built This City,” which started as a flash piece, became a short story, and then my only (to date) novelette. It went through eleven separate drafts, trying to balance everything I wanted to say about labor organizing, worker’s rights, and how the precarity of life outside of Earth’s atmosphere might heighten the drama and the dangers. I did not put a villain on screen. The “administration” is represented by a harried office worker, Angel, who has to enact policies he may not agree with. I focused on the things that were frustrating me as I was trying to organize my own workplace, such as people refusing to join the movement for fear of reprisal, always saying, “I need this job,” as though any of us didn’t!
Judging by the reader response, I succeeded in showing the importance of worker’s rights. It was, however, not a conscious success. I only got there through eleven rounds of trial and error, until I hit on the working plot.
One of the last things I added, I now realize, was a consequence for the administration’s cutbacks. Fewer workers washing the dome resulted in acid-rain induced cracks, and the city began to sink. Physically, not metaphorically, the public and the union were in the same boat.
How can I better implement the craft of moral worldbuilding?
Taylor offers some solutions. “The first is to begin to ask better, deeper questions about the moral logic of the world you create and its value systems.” (par. 40)
Better questions. That’s a hard task. What are the questions I ask about the moral logic of my stories? Does capitalism exist in this story? To what extent? Who benefits from the labor of the protagonist? Why do people live where they do?
I suppose, for me, the answer is to keep asking, and to examine the questions I am asking. My worldview is shaped by my socioeconomic class and the circumstances around me. That, too, is an opinion and moral stance. I need to be honest with myself about my goals in a story and ask myself how to show my moral intention in the actions of the story itself.
The first step is that honesty, articulating the morals to myself. Taylor writes, “…ask yourself what are the values of this world? To whom are these people accountable? To what? And what is the cost? Who must pay it? And what if they can’t?” (par. 44)
Consequences. Bad things happening to good people and good things happening to bad people can both show a moral failing in the society of the story, or in the characters enacting it.
Plot actions speak louder than character words.
Thinking back, what I left out of The Gods Awoke was showing the morality in action, in consequences. Characters suffering, say, as a result of choosing to worship. I put most of the “atheist morality” in the words of one character, Illoe. As I mentioned in referring to Lathe of Heaven, plot actions speak louder than character words. I had to be brave enough to show the negative consequences of accepting these gods. I wasn’t, and so my planned “atheist screed” turned into merely a story where evil is muted, decoupled from character choice.
Avoiding didactic voice doesn’t mean avoiding moral truth. So how do I get away with didactic writing without seeming didactic? Taylor would say go ahead and seem didactic, but I don’t have a Penguin/Random House contract, so I must be more careful in going against public tastes.
I took a hard look at what I consider to be “pedantic” writing. I scanned various online screeds, thought back to stories I had rejected in the slush pile, and my own very amateur writing, looking for the nuts and bolts of sounding preachy.
What stood out to me first was repetition, particularly baldly stating the moral in the mouths of the characters. Well, that’s easy to avoid, as are clichés, talking heads spouting points without action or setting, and jargon or buzz words presented without depth.
I remember asking a student of mine who was writing an historical fiction story about gender identity, “How would you describe being nonbinary without using those words, since the characters don’t have them?” I think, even if the characters do have the words, it adds weight to describe things plainly. Simple truths should be stated simply. The audience may have pre-conceived notions about a particular word, but they can’t deny simple truth.
I suppose it depends on if your audience agrees with you or not. I try to reach those who disagree, so that shades my preferences.
The one marker of “didactic” I find myself tripping over is over-the-top consequences or action. This is because over-the-top can be uncomfortably close to reality. Nearly every time I have been accused of being over-the-top, it was because I included an autobiographical detail. Truth is stranger than fiction, indeed.
I don’t think the solution is to avoid the more dramatic, but to sell the dramatic moment to the reader through careful inclusion of details that create verisimilitude. Writing from inside the body, viscerally, with taste and smell.
If I am honest, and starting from reality, well, there must be details in reality that set up that over-the-top moment. Things I was not privy to as a participant in the moment. Perhaps there it behooves me to show the villain in action.
Is it just that we forgive didactic writing if it is well done? Verisimilitude, deep characterization, witty dialog?
Another thing I played with in “We Built This City” was having a character we sympathize with change her mind. It was in hope that readers would change their minds with her, and the change of heart had to come organically, prompted by story action.
It all comes back to action. I’ve seen a number of TV shows recently – Legend of Korra and Falcon and the Winter Soldier come immediately to mind – where well-rounded, thoughtful villains suddenly turn pure evil, murdering innocents so we remember whose side we are on. It’s false. I’m not saying don’t make the villain well-rounded to start with, but maybe ask yourself what is the moral underpinning of the conflict? Why is this person the villain? I think we are seeing these writers wrestle unsuccessfully with wanting to have it both ways – to have the well-realized, sympathetic villain as well as the clear black-and-white morality of a traditional superhero show. And they can’t.
There is a middle path. In the movie The Black Panther, the hero at the end acknowledges the points made by the villain and takes actions he had demanded. If Killmonger was right, let Killmonger be right. It’s uncomfortable, but maybe we need to be a little less comfortable as writers.
I am going to look for places that I feel uncomfortable in my writing, and lean into that discomfort, pick it apart, ask why, and use that to chart my middle path, from action to action.
Works Cited
Boyle, Michael, “Censorship Was The Spark That Sent Rod Serling To The Twilight Zone,” Slashfilm, 1 Oct. 2022, https://www.slashfilm.com/1030859/censorship- was-the-spark-that-sent-rod-serling-to-the-twilight- zone/ accessed on November 29, 2024.
Donoso, Jose, The Obscene Bird of Night, translated by Megan McDowell, New Directions, 2024.
Le Guin, Ursula K., “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas,” The Wind’s Twelve Quarters: Stories, Harper & Row, 1976, pp. 275-277.
Oberndorf, Charles. Conversation with the author. 1 Dec. 2024.
Taylor, Brandon, “living shadows: aesthetics of moral worldbuilding,” Substack, Feb. 2024, https://blgtylr.substack.com/p/living-shadows-aesthetics-of-moral accessed on November 29, 2024.
Vibbert, Marie, “The Danger of Cardboard Villians,” Marie Vibbert’s Website, 11 Jan. 2024, https://www.marievibbert.com/the-danger-of-cardboard-villains/
Vibbert, Marie, “This Is an Optimistic Science Fiction Story About the Future,” Little Blue Marble, 18 May 2018, https://littlebluemarble.ca/2018/05/25/this-is-an-optimistic-science-fiction-story-about-the-future/
Żerebecki, Bartosz G. “Can TV shows promote acceptance of sexual and ethnic minorities? A literature review of television effects on diversity attitudes,” Sociology Compass, 3 June 2021, https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/soc4.12906
[1] This is, of course, trusting the translator’s nuance with colloquialisms. The actual words are “hacer nanay” and “hacer tuto” in the Spanish copy I have
https://blgtylr.substack.com/p/living-shadows-aesthetics-of-moral
