Raise your hand if you've committed novelized genocide

[jeriendhal]

So, in this post the ever erudite james_nicoll ponders the nature of the Singularity as portrayed in recent books, and how it compares to the earlier "eugenics" novel where Humanity is taken out by its techno-hubris and replaced with Homo Superior.

It just got me to thinking, how many of us here who have written sci-fi stories have ever destroyed more than a billion people, either as part of the plot or as the story's background? I'll admit I'm guilty of it myself, stating in my fanfic The Lucky Country that the Varn invasion killed about 3 and half billion people (Peta OTOH has managed to avoid mentioning what the actual canon casualty figures are).

Just wondering.

Comments

[scarfman]

The first step in the evolution between my fanfiction crossover multiverse and Arthur, King of Time and Space was an alternate multiverse with the cast of Arthur's and some other legends inserted in my fanfiction stories in place of the native franchises' characters. The second season of the imaginary tv series Excalibur closed with a superweapon from Hindi space killing like 6 million people on the crew's home planet. I didn't kill them directly myself, any more than you killed that three and a half million, though my figure did come from my source.

[wolfstormdancer.livejournal.com]

I have not written that much fiction. However having seen first hand the grizzly cost of any conflict I am generally reluctant to "kill off" large numbers of people. Genocide is a gruesome idea and while it may move the story line forward I would like to think that I would avoid it.