The problem of evil.

Evil needs better public relations. For something present in each and every human being it certainly gets a lot of bad press. Most of us manage to convince ourselves, not only that we are good people by and large -- with which I would mostly agree -- but also that I am not capable of real evil. Oh, to be sure, I can be mean, and petty, and vindictive, but mostly what I do is done for the best of reasons, with the best of intentions. But evil? Not me. Evil is the definitive other and, as such, has no defense to humankind's constant demonization.

Nowhere has this absolutist dichotomy more evident than in epic fantasy fiction. From Melkor and Sauron, to Lord Foul, to Torak and Shai'tan, the bad guys of epic fantasy are bad, really bad, yes ultimately bad. Evil is external, insatiable, and irredeemable. Evil is incarnate. The good guys sometimes display slightly more complexity, usually in the form of confronting and overcoming the temptation to join the evil fun. The great evil of the ring, after all, is seduction. Nevertheless, in the end, the good guys remain ultimately good and ultimately conquer the evil despite overwhelming odds. This opposition of good-vs-evil so dominates the genre that it is now often the target of reaction and even parody.

This archetypical opposition poses a number of serious problems for the aspiring writer in the genre. First, the slightly-flawed-but-essentially-good hero overcoming the deliciously-despicable incarnation of evil has been done to death. What can a new spin on the old formulation add to the canon? Second, there is still, apparently, a great thirst among readers for more of the same old story. Someone is going to write the old cliches over again because the large numbers will buy it, and who can resist large numbers -- especially when there are dollar signs in front of them? Can the hungry, unknown writer resist this temptation, irony be damned? Should she? Third, having rejected seduction and having rejected the soul-numbing labor of spewing more of the same, the aspiring writer must battle the powers that be. Absolutist good-vs-evil epics dominate sales in the fantasy genre, and therefore dominate the time, effort and money of agents, editors, publishers, booksellers and all the other cogs in the machine. How does a little guy say anything above all the noise? Would it not be much easier to sell yet another three or four book epic series wherein an orphan farm boy discovers that he is truly a (pick one) prince/heir of an ancient hero/dragon rider/powerful wizard destined by prophecy to defeat Evil Incarnate? The blurbs practically write themselves, not to mention the invocations of Tolkien. Fourth, turning the tables and writing the epic fantasy of the anti-hero, the brooding bad-guy-out-for-himself, is no solution. It has been done to death; the cliches will suck the marrow from your bones along with your soul; the machine, the machine will eat this as well.

But, so you break away from the same old thing, you still face the biggest problem yet. What now? If you do not write about good-vs-evil, then what do you write? Human beings are complex creatures. We are all good, and we are all evil. There is no incarnation of evil in our world, even in the great religions. Evil works through us. There is no Sauron; there is only the ring and it cannot be destroyed. That may be the solution of the aspiring writer: to write about the seduction of humanity by Evil Inchoate. Promise abounds in this, and it has not yet been killed by the machine.

There is, however, at least another solution. Us. Write about us, plain and simple. Write about humanity, our flaws, our failures, our own evil. There can still be swords, and magic, and goblins, trolls, and dragons. There can still be evil deeds and people given over to evil, but without the capital E. That sounds interesting to me.