I'm a Member of an Evil Horde, Ask Me How!
So, last month, I issued a plea for topics, and Sora Kess answered with an excellent question regarding Evil Hordes. There was a panel at World Fantasy, which I did not attend, in which apparently the consensus was that all secondary world fantasies have Evil Hordes in them. (If this is a misrepresentation, I apologize.)
Now, I reject pretty emphatically the idea that all secondary world fantasies have–or should have–Evil Hordes. That’s the same as saying all secondary world fantasies have quests. Or Dark Lords. Or magical MacGuffins. Certainly, many secondary world fantasies do have these things–hence Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide to Fantasyland–but by the same token, surely the Tough Guide is a suggestion that maybe we could do something else instead? The fact that many secondary world fantasies have quests and Dark Lords and and magical MacGuffins and Evil Hordes, doesn’t mean that any of these things is a requirement. Or even a desideraturm.
In the Doctrine of Labyrinths (Melusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, Corambis), I was working deliberately to write secondary world fantasy that didn’t have all those things. I didn’t entirely succeed–the Virtu is, yes, a great big magical MacGuffin, and my poor protagonists do spend an awful lot of time tramping back and forth across the continent. But no one sends them or makes prophecies about them, and they’re not saving the world. Malkar Gennadion is evil and powerful (and kind of two dimensional, honestly), but he’s not a Dark Lord. And the wizards of the Bastion, with their military hierarchy and their ideology, still aren’t an Evil Horde.
(The relationship between the Mirador and the Bastion was based on my memories of growing up during the last decade of the Cold War. So the characters may think of the Bastion as an Evil Horde, but they aren’t, any more than the Russians were.)
In A Companion to Wolves, the trolls are, really, the epitome of an Evil Horde: implacable, inhuman, they don’t even have individual identities. But it turns out that to them, the humans (and wolves) are just as incomprehensibly alien and terrifying, and for me (as I do not pretend to speak for my co-author Elizabeth Bear), the end of the book–when Isolfr chooses to spare the troll kitten–is a rejection of Evil Horde-ism and its inevitable companion, genocide.
What Evil Hordes do is reduce human conflict to Us vs. Them. Moreover, since we’re talking about fantasy, “They” don’t have to be human at all, which makes the whole ethical dimension of the conflict ever so much simpler. No one agonizes, for instance, about the ethics of chopping zombies into mincemeat. It is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a no-brainer.
Zombies are kind of the quintessence of Evil Horde-ism. They are an inarguable, external threat that can only be dealt with by wholesale extermination. Negotiating with zombies is not an option. Generally, there’s neither room, time, nor need for debate, and we may be comfortably certain that any character who tries to espouse a more liberal position will be the first person eaten: not just mistaken, but totally, irrefutably, cosmologically, capital-W Wrong.
Zombies, of course, do other cultural work, which the Evil Hordes of secondary world fantasy may, or may not, participate in; the crucial point for my argument is that zombies make it very easy to see the dehumanizing impulse at work. George Lucas’ Stormtroopers are another readily accessible example. Their quite literal facelessnsess (and that handy Nazi reference, just in case) makes their deaths unproblematic and meaningless. Like zombies, they’re there to provide an external threat, and they’re there to be killed.
Fundamentally, these two things are the purposes of an Evil Horde: an external threat and an excuse for bloodshed (metaphorical in the case of Stormtroopers, who don’t even bleed). An enemy that it’s uncomplicatedly good (ethically, morally, narratively) to kill. And, by extension, good to exterminate, 100%, to the last zombie, Stormtrooper, or orc.
It should be clear by now that I have ethical and philosophical objections to Evil Hordes and the policy of genocide they lead to. I don’t think Evil Hordes necessarily represent any specific human cultural group (although they certainly can), but considering all the real world examples of genocide the last two centuries have seen, I think any pattern of thought that makes it easier to get to genocide as an answer–even, or perhaps especially, when divorced from reality–needs to be interrogated very carefully and approached with caution. If you’re going to use it, you should use it in full mindfulness of its baggage and its underlying darkness.
I am not, however, calling for an end to zombie stories. (I may be calling for an end to stories that treat nonhuman species like zombies; I’ll have to get back to you on that.) I understand entirely that sometimes we all need things to be just that simple and just that violent, and I think zombies are a fantastic way to deal with that in fiction, whether text, movie, or game. But I also think that that’s a catharsis, not either (a.) a plot or (b.) a useful solution to the ineradicable problem of conflict between humans. Which is to say, once you finish killing the zombies, you still have to settle who among the survivors gets the last spoonful of peanut butter. And that peanut butter is going to be the interesting conflict in your story, besides.*
Pepole who are not like us (whoever “we” are) may be frightening, but the reactionary answer of “Kill them all!” is, frankly, a bad answer. Fantasy, as a genre, needs to start coming up with better ones.
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*For the record, I would like to point out that zombie novels like Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker already know this.
