Timewaster's Guide Archive

Um, I think it's harder for a woman to force herself to miscarry than you think, especially without harming herself. Yes, there are ways to determine if a woman will have a difficult pregnancy, but the medical field has progressed enough that the baby can usually be saved. Are you saying that if a woman is going to lose the baby regardless then she should be able to abort the fetus early on so she doesn't have to continue with the pregnancy? I'm having trouble understanding what you're saying.

I'm against abortion personally except in extreme cases such as when the mother's life is in great danger if she continues the pregnancy or some other specific cases. I don't think abortion is moral because I think it is very close to murder. I've been pregnant and I've felt my baby move. He had a personality even before he was born and I always thought of him as a baby. Aborting him would have been murder to me.

I've been thinking about this a lot, and I'm still not sure. Let's face it, Fantasy and Science Fiction tend to have a lot of action which usually ends up in killing. Most of the time as a reader, I want to see the bad guy killed off. However, I hate books that make me want to enter the book and kill the bad guy myself. I admit, I don't like feeling homicidal. I also have a terribly hard time killing off characters in my writing, even when I guess it would be "justified."

Lois McMaster Bujold dealt very well with it in "Curse of Chalion." The main character, in order to protect a number of innocent people, wants to kill off the bad guy. To do so, he has to perform death magic which will kill him (the main character) in the process.  He decides it is worth it, performs the magic, but is saved by a miracle. There is no law against successfully completing death magic (only attempting it), since no one has ever lived through it before. The character seems justified in his murder since he was willing to give his own life up for it and there was no other way to stop the bad guy (at least, no available way as the world was set up by the author).

There is a difference between the real world and fiction, but fiction should reflect the real world, in my opinion, or it is pointless. It's interesting how Disney gets around this problem: the good guy rarely kills the bad guy outright.  Instead, some force of nature or the bad guy's own mistake kills him. This avoids the dilemma but often seems unrealistic.  Wow, I need to stop talking now.

Back to the origins of this topic: Stacer, did you finish the series?  I think that Cart and Cwidder and Drowned Ammet are both very weak books and Crown of Dalemark is a pretty weak book, but I love Spellcoats.  It may help that Spellcoats takes place in a different time period, has no guns, and avoids the major inconsistencies that the other three are rife with.  A lot of Diana Wynne Jones' early works are pretty weak.

I want to know what people think about murder and killing in fiction.  When do you think it is okay for a good guy character to kill someone else?  I'm wondering because my brother-in-law just had to read a book where the main character hunts down other characters who are "bad" and kills them. Apparently, the justification for killing these other characters was because the author designated them as bad.  Do you think that's justification?  I'm curious.

Thanks, I tried that too but I couldn't find anything.  I am gaining new hatred of Disney and I didn't think that was possible.

All of the answers were good, but I just had to go for the sweaters.  Didn't any of you watch the old Bob Newhart show?  Where he owned an inn in Vermont?  That poll answer made me laugh so hard.

I don't think I ever realized that girls were less likely to be (or at least publicly) into fantasy.  After all, growing up my favorite fantasy authors were women.  And I have to agree with stacer.  When I grew up I never thought anything was verboten simply because I was female.  I had five older sisters who were certainly doing whatever they wanted.