Making Cruelty Look Ordinary

Making Cruelty Look Ordinary

When I moved from science fiction into dark fantasy, I thought I was leaving some things behind.

Technology, certainly.

Corporations.

Artificial intelligence.

Digital systems.

All the machinery that had occupied so much of my attention while writing Technomancers Rise.

Then I started building Titan, the occupied city at the centre of A Funeral for the Living, and realised I had not actually left one of my favourite subjects behind at all.

I had only changed the machinery.

In science fiction, I had been interested in systems built from technology, economics and corporate power: structures created by people that eventually become large enough to shape the people living inside them.

Titan does much the same thing.

It just uses paperwork.

Records.

Rations.

Assignments.

Quotas.

Offices.

People behind desks who know precisely which form you need.

That turned out to frighten me considerably more than another monster ever could.

Monsters are easy

There is something reassuring about an obvious villain.

A dragon lands in the town square and starts burning buildings, and everyone knows there is a problem.

A dark lord raises an army.

A monster comes through the door.

Whatever else happens afterward, there is very little ambiguity about which side of the situation everyone should be standing on.

Real systems are rarely that considerate.

Cruelty is much harder to confront when it has become part of the normal machinery of a society.

When there is a correct procedure for it.

When somebody has a job description.

When the paperwork is in order.

When the person carrying out one small part of the process does not feel personally responsible for the whole thing.

That became one of the central ideas behind Titan.

The city is occupied. The people living there know that. There are restrictions, shortages and rules that would immediately seem oppressive to somebody arriving from outside.

But the people of Titan do not arrive from outside every morning.

They grew up there.

They work there.

They raise children there.

They queue for food there.

They know what can be said, what cannot, which problems can be solved, which cannot, and which questions are better left unasked.

Life continues.

That is the important part.

The machine works.

Humans are very good at getting used to things

Adaptation is one of the extraordinary strengths of human beings.

Put us somewhere unfamiliar and, given enough time, we begin creating routines.

We learn.

We adjust.

We find ways to function.

It is one of the reasons humanity has managed to live almost everywhere on this planet.

But there is a darker side to that ability.

We can get used to things we should never have learned to tolerate.

I find myself thinking about that increasingly often.

There are photographs from history that once shocked entire populations.

Events that became defining moments.

Images that people remembered for decades because seeing them changed something.

Today we carry devices that can deliver suffering from almost anywhere on Earth directly into our hands within minutes.

War.

Bombings.

Famine.

Mass shootings.

Natural disasters.

People fleeing homes.

People dying.

Violence recorded from three different angles.

And then, immediately underneath it, an advertisement.

A joke.

A photograph of someone's dinner.

A film trailer.

Another atrocity.

Another argument.

Another notification.

I do not think that means people have stopped caring.

I think something more complicated has happened.

The extraordinary has become extremely frequent.

Our capacity for attention has not expanded with it.

We absorb.

We react.

We move on because another thing is already arriving.

And inevitably, the threshold moves.

Things that would once have occupied conversation for weeks can become one more item in a day containing ten other catastrophes.

That frightens me.

Not because I believe people today are uniquely callous.

Because I think this is an ordinary human response to extraordinary levels of information.

We adapt.

We always have.

Which leaves me with a question I find genuinely uncomfortable:

If this is what it takes to shock us now, what will it take fifty years from now?

What becomes normal?

Fifty years is not particularly long.

Some of the people alive today will still be alive in fifty years.

Some things that seemed almost unimaginable fifty years ago are now unremarkable parts of daily life.

Some changes have been enormously positive.

Others have been less so.

But the mechanism is similar.

Repeated exposure changes our sense of normality.

The first time something happens, everyone stops.

The tenth time, everyone talks about it.

The hundredth time, someone glances at the headline.

Eventually somebody grows up in a world where it has always happened.

They do not remember the transition.

There is only the world.

That idea became fundamental to Titan.

I did not want to write a society where every citizen secretly approved of everything happening around them.

That would be too easy.

Instead, I wanted people who had inherited normality.

People who might dislike something but know it has always worked that way.

People who know somebody who had trouble with the authorities once.

People who tell their children which streets to avoid.

People who understand that certain conversations should happen quietly.

People who complain about ration allocations, work assignments or bureaucracy while accepting the larger structure those things belong to.

Not because they are evil.

Because tomorrow morning still exists.

There is work to do.

There is food to find.

Someone needs collecting.

Something needs repairing.

Life has an extraordinary ability to continue around horror.

The language changes first

One of the things I found myself thinking about while building Titan was how much work language can do for a system.

Words create distance.

They can take something physical and make it administrative.

A person becomes a case.

A family becomes a household.

Suffering becomes an outcome.

Someone losing access to something becomes an adjustment.

A decision becomes policy.

Nobody necessarily has to lie.

Sometimes all that is required is describing reality from sufficiently far away.

Titan has Processing.

I chose that word very deliberately.

It is almost aggressively meaningless.

Everything gets processed.

Applications.

Food.

Waste.

Payments.

Data.

Orders.

A word like that does not tell you what happens.

It tells you that a system has handled something correctly.

That distinction matters.

In The Box of Dead Heroes, Processing exists in the background of Titan before it becomes important to Elias and Jack. It belongs to the same civic landscape as records, assignments and official procedures. Book I deliberately reveals its significance through people encountering bureaucracy and eventually following the arithmetic of the system rather than through a villain explaining everything in a speech.

That is because the horror I wanted was not:

Look what this terrible person is doing.

It was:

Look what everyone has learned to call normal.

Responsibility gets smaller as the system gets larger

Large systems have another useful feature.

They divide responsibility.

One person enters the information.

Someone else approves it.

Someone else schedules it.

Another person transports something.

Someone works at the destination.

Each person can truthfully say that they only handled their part.

This is not unique to evil institutions.

Modern life could not function without division of labour.

Hospitals work this way.

Governments work this way.

Companies work this way.

Supply chains work this way.

Thousands of people perform specialised pieces of processes they could never manage alone.

That is incredibly useful.

It also creates moral distance.

The larger the machine becomes, the easier it can be for any individual inside it to believe that the machine itself is responsible for whatever the machine produces.

That interested me enormously while writing Jack.

Jack is a worker.

He is not standing above Titan making grand decisions.

He has a job.

There are things that need doing.

There are quotas and routes and supervisors and consequences.

And there are human beings at the end of those processes.

Book I places him precisely at that uncomfortable point where necessary civic work, compassion and dehumanising procedure meet.

He does not begin by thinking of himself as someone resisting anything.

He is trying to get through the day.

That felt important.

Most people do not wake up believing they are participants in history.

They wake up late and need coffee.

History often has the discourtesy to happen around them anyway.

The most dangerous sentence may be “that's just how it works”

Systems do not survive only because powerful people enforce them.

They survive because eventually everybody else learns their shape.

You learn which office handles something.

You learn which form is pointless to challenge.

You learn that arguing will only make the queue longer.

You learn that someone who made trouble last month has not been seen recently.

You learn not to ask why.

Eventually those lessons can become etiquette.

Do not make a scene.

Do not embarrass anyone.

Do not spoil dinner.

Do not bring politics into it.

Do not ask that question here.

There is enormous social power in avoiding discomfort.

Sometimes that is good.

Civilisation requires us not to turn every disagreement into a confrontation.

But politeness can also become camouflage.

A room full of people can know something is wrong and remain silent because nobody wants to be the first person to make the room uncomfortable.

That mechanism fascinates and frightens me far more than a room full of obvious villains.

Because I recognise it.

I think most of us do.

Maybe not around anything enormous.

Maybe somebody makes a cruel joke.

Someone is treated badly at work.

A friend behaves terribly toward another person.

A conversation moves in an ugly direction.

You notice.

Everyone notices.

And for a few seconds there is a choice.

Say something and change the atmosphere.

Or let the moment pass.

Most of us have done both.

That is why I distrust stories that divide humanity too cleanly into courageous people and cowards.

Most of us are capable of either depending on the room.

This is not a prediction

Titan is not my prediction of where Britain, America or the modern world is heading.

I am not secretly writing a political manifesto with dragons attached.

It is fantasy.

Its history is its own.

Its occupation is its own.

Its institutions belong to Olyndar.

But fiction rarely comes from nowhere.

We take things we recognise and change the scale.

We separate mechanisms from their familiar context so we can look at them differently.

Titan exaggerates things I already find unsettling:

how easily human beings adapt;

how bureaucracy can distance people from consequences;

how language can make something ugly sound neutral;

how responsibility can disappear between departments;

how quickly yesterday's outrage can become today's background noise;

and how difficult it can be to object once everybody around you has learned not to.

None of those ideas requires a fantasy empire.

We live around them already.

Mostly in smaller, more ordinary forms.

That is precisely why they make useful horror.

I thought this was supposed to be the fantasy series

There is something amusing to me about all of this.

I moved away from Technomancers Rise partly because I needed to write something emotionally different.

I wanted fantasy.

Old cities.

Swords.

Magic.

History.

Legends.

And somehow I still ended up writing about systems.

Apparently I have a problem.

But the machinery genuinely changed.

In Technomancers Rise, I could explore what happens when technology and institutions grow faster than humanity's ability to understand the consequences.

In A Funeral for the Living, I could strip away much of that modern machinery and discover that the underlying question remained.

What happens when the system becomes more important than the person it was supposedly built to serve?

What happens when efficiency becomes a moral argument?

What happens when everyone is following the rules and the result is still monstrous?

And perhaps most importantly:

At what point does somebody decide that “this is how things work” is no longer an acceptable answer?

Elias starts by looking

This is where Elias matters.

At the beginning of The Box of Dead Heroes, he is barely participating in Titan at all.

Then something changes in the way he sees people.

That movement is deliberately small.

He does not immediately decide to overthrow a regime.

He does not understand the whole machine.

He starts noticing.

Workers.

Queues.

Children.

People carrying burdens nobody else seems interested in.

Small kindnesses that would be completely insignificant in a conventional history of the city.

The structure of Book I is deliberately built around that shift: Elias moves from looking backward toward old heroes to seeing the ordinary people around him, while Titan remains alive and largely indifferent.

That is where resistance has to begin in this story.

Before action comes recognition.

Before you can object to someone being treated as a number, you first have to see the person the number replaced.

Normal can move in both directions

There is a hopeful side to human adaptability.

If terrible things can become normal, so can better things.

We learn habits.

We copy one another.

We create expectations.

One person asks the uncomfortable question.

The next person finds it slightly easier.

One person refuses to laugh.

Someone else realises they did not find the joke funny either.

Someone uses a name instead of a category.

Somebody stops.

Somebody notices.

Somebody helps.

Eventually behaviour that once seemed strange can become ordinary too.

This is part of why the hope in A Funeral for the Living is so practical.

I am less interested in a hero declaring that everyone deserves dignity than I am in what happens when people start behaving as though that statement is true.

Does someone get fed?

Does someone get a place to sleep?

Does somebody notice when they are missing?

Do they have a name?

Are they expected tomorrow?

That is where values stop being speeches and start becoming infrastructure.

And systems are ultimately made from repeated behaviour.

So are alternatives to them.

What are we learning to tolerate?

I do not know what the world will look like fifty years from now.

Nobody does.

There will almost certainly be things that are better than they are today.

There will probably be things people in 2076 look back at us for and wonder how we ever accepted them.

I hope so.

That would mean somebody noticed.

What worries me are the things moving in the other direction.

The things that still disturb us now but slightly less than they did the first time.

The language becoming cleaner.

The numbers getting larger.

The individual faces becoming harder to remember.

The moment where something shifts from unthinkable to terrible to unfortunate to normal.

That progression is where Titan came from.

Not from imagining a world full of monsters.

From imagining a world full of people who have become very good at living beside something monstrous.

And perhaps that is the question underneath much of The Box of Dead Heroes.

Not simply:

What would you do if something terrible happened?

Most of us hope we know the answer to that.

The harder question is:

What would you do if it happened slowly enough that, by the time you understood what it had become, everyone around you was already used to it?

And maybe the question worth asking outside fiction is even simpler.

What are we getting used to now that we should still find unbearable?