I was six years old when my dad took me to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. I didn’t understand that ancient aliens had left a sentinel and were waiting for apes to evolve and discover it.
But I understood HAL.
He didn’t break in any obvious way. He was put in a situation. Then, calmly, rationally, he made a reasonable decision.
He would kill the crew.
That moment never left me. Not because it suggested HAL was evil, but because it suggested something even more unsettling. The problem isn’t just the technology. It’s the choices we make around it.
Speculative fiction has always been well-suited for exploring moral and ethical questions. Move a familiar problem to another planet, or give it to an artificial intelligence. Change the circumstances and suddenly the reader sees the problem clearly.
But not every story with a moral issue is ethically complex. Ethical complexity starts when the answer gets messy. And for me, three things tend to make that happen: meaningful choice; competing values; and consequences.
First, somebody has to make a choice.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often described as a warning about scientific ambition. Victor Frankenstein discovers how to create life, and his ego and ambition drive that discovery forward.
The more interesting choices come after Victor chooses to create that life. When Victor chooses to abandon his creation. When the creation asks Victor for a companion, and Victor must choose between what he owes his creation and the potential risk to the world.
The science creates the possibility. Victor’s choices create the story.
That distinction matters. If nobody has a meaningful choice, we may have tragedy. We may have injustice. We may have horror. But give someone a choice and suddenly we have something worth arguing about over drinks.
Which brings me to the second ingredient.
Competing values. Two things we value cannot both survive.
In Carrie Vaughn’s Bannerless, civilization has collapsed and resources are limited. Communities are forced to regulate reproduction to keep population from outstripping resources. Reproductive autonomy matters. So does sustainable living.
Now we have a problem. And I don’t necessarily want the author to solve it for me. I want the story to make me understand what each answer costs.
Which brings me to number three: consequences.
This may be where speculative fiction has the most fun. It gets to ask one of the nastiest questions in storytelling:
And then what?
Harvest human clones for replacement organs, solve a resource shortage by controlling reproduction, design recursively self-improving artificial intelligence. And then what?
The speculative premise gets our attention, but the story lives in the consequences.
The consequences might be unintended. Maybe they were ignored because acknowledging them would have been inconvenient. Or perhaps they’re the result of reasonable individual decisions that collectively produce something monstrous.
That last one fascinates me.
Ethical failures rarely announce themselves with thunder and sinister music. People have reasons. Institutions have policies. Scientists have objectives. One reasonable choice follows another. And then what?
Which is why I keep coming back to HAL.
HAL isn’t irrational. He’s been instructed to conceal the mission’s true purpose. And in order to ensure the mission succeeds, committing murder becomes a solution. The interesting question isn’t whether HAL is evil. It’s how the hell did we build a situation where killing people made sense?
More than half a century after 2001 appeared, that question has become real. We live in a world with genetic engineering, autonomous weapons, fossil fuels, constant surveillance—and yes, artificial intelligence. Technologies that come with benefits as well as risks.
It’s easy to say a dangerous technology should be eliminated. Harder when eliminating it also hurts people. Doing the right thing isn’t so easy if it means doing something else that’s wrong. That’s competing values again. In your story, it’s conflict.
Speculative fiction gives us moral distance. Readers can sympathize with someone whose choices they disagree with. Watch a reasonable policy turn into a tool for oppression.
I don’t think speculative fiction needs to provide answers. In fact, I prefer stories that don’t make the answers too easy. Give me stories that make two things I value collide. Then make me live with the consequences.