I’ve been thinking lately about how to make Disintegration stand out from the glut of other science fiction on Inkshares, of which there’s a lot. The publisher is replete with sci-fi and fantasy titles.

Sci-fi has been a love of mine all my life, from the moment I discovered Star Trek: TOS via the cartoon (!!!) and worked my way back to the live action version. I was a child, but I knew it was cheesy ... but it was also endearing, idealistic and it piqued my imagination. What has always bugged me about sci-fi (in general) is that it is often sophomoric, childish, and sloppy, riddled with Deus ex Machinae, cardboard characters, cliches, and simplistic (even moronic) storylines. I could go on, but I’ve always been told that I should exercise some restraint. ;P

I understand that mainstream science fiction has little reason to present anything but the tried-and-true because it sells (I must say that I’m so glad Joss Whedon at least got to make one season of Firefly, but just think about how superlative and wonderful that show is and how it got ONE SEASON. Yes, we got the movie, too. But gems like Firefly and Serenity are outweighed a trillion-fold by dreck). People watch the dreck. I’ve watched it. Hell, sometimes, I even enjoy it ... but I’m avoiding Stark Trek Beyond because it looks insultingly simple (albeit visually beautiful). I like the flash and glitz, the bells and whistles ... my inner Philistine can be quite pleased with pap.

But it’s not enough.

I am tired of Good vs. Evil. I am tired of the monolithic Bad Guy. And the Good Guys taking him (very rarely her, though I did love Alice Kreig’s Borg Queen) down. I want moral ambiguity. I want Good People who do Bad Things and vice versa. I want stories that take place in the gray area. I am not a child anymore. The world is a fucked up place and people do fucked up things. I like seeing the faults, foibles and weaknesses of the "hero." I like it when Heroes Die and Villains Live ... because, at least in these fictions, who is really a hero? Who is really a villain? It’s a matter of perspective. We’re directed whom to like. For whom to root. We excuse the questionable things done by the protagonists because we’re invested in these characters and their goals as consumers, first, and because, second, they are often analogues or avatars of the reader (I, a white man, am so fucking tired of white male heroes). I don’t need heroes who look like me. Many men with my complexion have done some pretty vile things, write very large. Most people who committed atrocities in human history believed they were right and good and morally justified. They think they are heroic. They are not my heroes.

Yet, consider that every villain is the hero of his own story.

That is what I think of every time I write my character Arak Matar, in Disintegration. He is a Bad Guy, sure, by most moral measurements, but he is paving the ole Road to Hell with aplomb because his intentions are quite good. He wants to save the Earth. The planet itself. His solution: get rid of those pesky, short-sighted, vile, capricious human idiots who have been raping Her for centuries.

Darek Marseh is a grandfatherly, kind, calm figure who could probably be considered a sociopath because he has zero concern for anything but the bigger picture. People are not special. They may be useful, but they are just grist for the mill ... yet there is zero malice in what he does. His only passion is realizing his vision of what should be. Everything else is banal, including human and corren life. Except, unlike Matar, he doesn’t want to eliminate all the humans. He just wants to route them, utterly, subjugate them, weed them of the undesirables ... and begin restoring the planet to its former, beautiful natural glory.

The ostensible Good Guys in Disintegration, the Allied Nations are, in fact, a conglomerate of military dictatorships wherein civilians have very few, if any real freedoms, and only those who live in a military-run city live anyhow close to "well" ... most everyone else fights for survival in savage badlands where animal law is the only law. Those in power don’t care about those who are not. These powerful leaders piss and moan and cry and complain when the Confederation attacks their sovereign lands and, perhaps, kills their citizens ... but these casualties are Allied citizens to whom the Allied leaders wouldn’t give the steam from their piss. (Thank you, Frank McCourt, for that one.)

The Confederation, run by Marseh and Matar, are the prototypical Bad Guys, yet their citizens live better and richer, safer, freer lives than those in the Allied Nations.

My point is that nothing is tidy. I abhor tidiness.

I don’t want stories to be rambling, incoherent messes, but neither do I want them to be neat little things that feel forced and shoehorned to go a certain way. While I appreciate some "pure" entertainments (I watched some Winnie the Pooh the other day and it was great: "I’m just a little, black raincloud / hovering under the honey tree ..."), I also like entertainments that show the grit and shit and filth of a horrible reality. When someone wades through the sewer, I want to (not literally, mind) smell the stink upon them in the narrative.

I want the stakes to seem real. I want "noble" and "vaunted" "heroes" to be laid low, to have to do questionable things and to either be really messed up by those choices or be made to account for them, somehow. I want "evil" baddies to have depth and dimension and to seem like real people, not flat tropes, not mere foils for the "champion" to vanquish so to seem valiant. What did Grendel ever do to Beowulf, really? Isn’t Perseus a villain? When you break into someone’s home and they attack you, whether they have hair of snakes and can turn men to stone or not, who is truly in the wrong? If you broke into some lady’s house and cut off her head, you’d probably get in trouble.

Disintegration has many of the trappings of tradition sci-fi, but it also has significant character development and a stark realism to it that I don’t often find in genre fiction. (I am a big fan of The Expanse and I look forward to reading the books upon which the show is based ... however, even admitting that:) I don’t think I’m blustering to say that you’ve never read anything quite like Disintegration.