Good and Evil

see no evil, hear no evil, write no evil

While working on The Search for Kalid I've been thinking about this story as an example of space opera. In space opera there are often very clearly drawn "good" and "evil" characters. One of the first novels I ever read was The Skylark of Space which has Marc DuQuesne as a "bad guy", but also a character with a certain amount of honor.

I guess I have to admit that I am not very good at creating evil characters. My problem is, I do not find a stark dichotomy between good and evil interesting and in fiction, totally evil characters do not seem realistic.

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In The Search for Kalid the story starts with one character explicitly labeled as "The Evil One", but as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that this label is the subjective opinion of a long-time rival. The reader can decide if any of the characters in the story is really evil.

More about evil in fiction: 2010  2012 2013 2015 2016 2017 2018

Image credit: No evil by Nouvelles Fables (GFDL)