If the science fiction I read is any guide, the solution to any problem is: violence! Whatever the context—first contact, zombie pandemic, meteor impact, or a stalled escalator—there’s nothing like clawing one’s way to survival over a heap of bodies.
Indeed, the violent solution is so expected that readers can be surprised by a plot that avoids it… Consider the venerable The Mote in God’s Eye. (So old that we don’t need to avoid spoilers, right?)
It was an unexpected plot twist that the Empire of Man, though capable of turning whole worlds into parking lots, didn’t incinerate the dangerous alien Moties. The Empire settled for a solution (well, perhaps “response” is more apt)… a response that kicked the can down the road in the hope that a non-genocidal solution might be found.
In Ruthanna Emrys’ Deep Roots, the second work in her Innsmouth Legacy series, it’s the aliens who save the day, or at least try to do so. Protagonist Aphra Marsh is almost the last of her kind thanks to U.S. government persecution (violence = solution), when benevolent aliens intervene. It may not work out as planned, but they meant well.
Yuki Urushibara’s manga Mushishi posits an Earth on which the familiar kingdoms of life (plants, animals, and fungi) share the world with the protean mushi. Most humans cannot see mushi, but mushi’s effects on the world can be all too apparent. Ginko is one of the lucky few who can perceive mushi, which has landed him with the task of dealing with them on behalf of his species. Since the mushi’s activities can be lethal to humans, it would have been easy for the author to turn Ginko into a supernatural exterminator. Instead, Ginko prefers comprehension and informed co-existence.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series—Children of Time and Children of Ruin—features not just one but two terraforming projects whose end results are worlds populated by entities seemingly designed to trigger human phobias. The planet of the intelligent spiders featured in Time is bad enough. Ruin offers not just a civilization of anarchistic octopuses, but true aliens straight out of Who Goes There? One might expect resolutions featuring an abundance of nuclear weapons or a well-aimed asteroid, perhaps. Tchaikovsky’s cast make entirely different decisions.
Ari Walkingnorth’s Aerial Magic is secondary world fantasy (whereas her earlier Always Human was near-future SF). Aerial Magic’s protagonist, Wisteria, is (like a lot of fantasy protagonists) a person with a respectable talent for magic, and one grand impediment that lies between them and success. The problem is not, as one might very reasonably expect, some noseless revenant or a would-be overlord determined to kill Wisteria, nor the prospect of a foreign army marching through the streets of Vecrum. Instead, word-blind Wisteria is wrestling with a prospect with which she has little personal experience and for which she has no relevant skills: the possibility of success.
Those of you familiar with Harry Connolly’s 20 Palaces books, a series entirely comfortable with violent solutions, may find his A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark an interesting change of pace. Protagonist Marley is an older woman who has specialized in solving vexing extra-legal problems (such as ghosts, vampires, werewolves). In the past she exorcised, staked, and shot her way to a solution. Of late she prefers to use persuasion, applied psychology, and money. These tools may be just what she needs to handle her latest problem: a real-estate developer.
I am always looking for more books in this sub-sub-sub-genre, so if you know of any examples not mentioned above, please mention them in comments.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He was a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
Here’s a biggie: The Foundation series!
The motto of one of the main characters in the first book is “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”
In the second book our intrepid heroes spend a lot of energy fighting an enemy general only to learn that (rather like Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark) he was taken down by social and historic forces and they could have just stayed in bed and netflixed.
In the second half of the second book the Big Bad doesn’t need to fight battles; he uses his mental powers to get people to surrender. In the third book our heroes’ victory comes from outsmarting the “enemy” rather than beating them.
My favourite kind of books!!
I would also recommend Nice Dragons Finish Last by Rachel Aaron, In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan and The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison!
LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea very much does not get resolved with violence…
Yes, The Goblin Emperor.
Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon. Od Magic by Patricia McKillip. A Door into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski (not to mention the slew of other fine SF books which are written by Quakers or are Quaker-influenced). Hellspark and Uhura’s Song by Janet Kagan. Any first-contact story where the participants develop mutual understanding and trust, such as David Weber’s “A Beautiful Friendship.”
Also, lots of SFF written for kids (children, so not the YA dystopian stuff): Eva Ibbotson, Diane Duane, Sophia McDougall (Mars Evacuees)….
Lots of Clarke’s stuff. No violence in most of his work, and very minor in the rest. I don’t recall any offhand that had Interstellar Wars or suchlike. A few murders here and there, and a couple of Death Rays.
I highly recommend Edward Willett’s Lost in translation. A standalone, but there could have been sequels. If only. If only there were more books clever and original enough to have a non-violent solution.
Tepper’s The Awakeners. Violence is absolutely never the solution, although it’s the inevitable product of the setting.
I will definitely second Mars Evacuees, which gives us a protagonist whose mother is a heroic hotshot fighter pilot in Spaaaaaaaaaace, and who is thus expected to follow in her mom’s footsteps in fighting off the ongoing alien invasion. Which is…not at all how things end up turning out.
Trapped in the R.A.W.: A Journal of My Experiences during the Great Invasion, by Kate Boyes, fits this category. The main character struggles to find common ground with members of a deadly invading force, then risks her life to discover whether or not that common ground is enough to allow humans and invaders to coexist. Bonus feature: most of the action takes place in a special collections library.
Brian Stableford’s Hooded Swan series was deliberately made to be something of a less violent approach, almost pacifist with respect to his main character at least:
In it, the main character occasionally throws a few punches at a barfight level, and once or twice considers violent action as the only means to get out of a situation, but very rarely actually does it and even when he does keeps it to the minimum. There are also notable occasions where, though he threatens someone with a weapon he has absolutely no intention on using it, even if it’s the only way to get what he wants.
It’s especially interesting because on a personal level the character’s kind of a huge jerk (entertaining to read about though).
And, IIRC, at least one of the stories has the solution to the problem literally being “everybody stay peaceful while we sort this out.”
Go glad to see Mushishi here. A great example of a ‘slice of life’ sci-fi /Fantasy series that Manga has so many of. There’s a relaxed pace to them which is refreshing, a cross between the mundane and exceptional.
Tanya Huff’s No Quarter stands out to me as a book in which the heroes’ primary tools for dealing with the “villain” are love and psychoanalysis. There is violence, but it’s not presented as an easy answer.
@5 Clarke did have a war in the short story “Superiority”. Although its lesson would seem to be that the prospect of superior technology should not blind you to the importance of logistics and proper planning.
I don’t seem to recall any wars in the works of Hal Clement or Greg Egan, although they do have a certain amount of industrial espionage, policing etc
The old King’s Quest series of computer games holds an interesting twist on this topic. Especially in the first couple games. Typically, there would be multiple ways to solve each puzzle. Giant at the top of the beanstalk guarding the mcguffin you need to collect? You could do the David and Goliath option, or you could wear the magic ring so it couldn’t see you, and would eventually fall asleep. Either would allow you to complete the game, but you would invariably get more puzzle points for the latter option.
The Chiang short story “Story of Your Life” fits perfectly into this genre. The same is mostly true of the movie Arrival that is based on the story.
Same for most or all of Connie Willis works.
Second the above reference to Foundation.
Not a book, but the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender explicitly focuses on the dilemma faced by a protagonist who’s been told that violence is the only solution.
One of my recent favorites has been the Squirrel Girl comic book series, where she often out-thinks the villains, or convinces them of the error of their ways. A refreshing change of pace from the normal sturm und drang of superhero comics.
Saavik @@@@@#4 Great to see someone else recommending Elizbeth Moon’s Remnant Population. There is a little violence, but the solution is not achieved by violence.
Becky Chambers ‘ Wayfarer series has humans rejecting war altogether.
@18 jazzlet: Remnant Population got a *lot* of votes in the comments on the recent Tor post “Five Heroines over the Age of Forty”! Ofelia has my vote for “best old woman protagonist who doesn’t have magical powers”.
@17 AlanBrown: Ryan North’s Unbeatable Squirrel Girl has given me a tremendous amount of pleasure, and I am seriously bummed that it will end its run with issue #50. Yes, she usually manages to befriend the villain, or at least talk them out of their destructive plans. Very, very funny, and smart-funny, and deeply humane. Smart-funny: I’ve mentioned on some other Tor thread the joke about Fermat’s Last Theorem, a joke which was written in the margin.
@9 Monty Vee: Thanks for the recommendation; I have ordered a copy of Trapped in the R.A.W. to share with my friend the special collections librarian!
Yay foundation @1
ISTR that a lot of the drama in Alan Dean Foster’s Nor Crystal Tears, as well as some other stories of the Humanx Commonwealth, arises from the constant need for people to talk themselves and one another back from the brink of violence, because each species has an instinctive horror of the other.
Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing — a book about a near-future world after an ecological collapse. A culture that practices total non-violence has to deal with an invasion by an fascistic, extremely violent culture.
I’m not entirely convinced that non-violent resistance would work against (say) Nazis myself, but this book almost made me believe it.
The Martian by Andy Weir has literally no violence.
James Hogan’s early works are refreshingly violence free – “Inherit the Stars” has the only plot-relevant violence having occurred 50,000 in the past, and “Thrice Upon a Time” has no violence at all as I recall.
How about everyone’s favorite example of nominative determinism (not), Mary Gentle? Even in her military fiction, violence doesn’t _solve_ the problem.
Iain Bank’s Culture novels have lots of violence but it’s rarely the actual solution to the conflicts described which are dealt with by other means generally. The “piles of bodies” from, say, the Idirian-Culture war are reported off-hand in an epilogue to Consider Phlebas and regarded by the Culture’s anarchist society as evidence that they fucked up (as in Look to Windward). Excession has a war happen through manipulation and incitement but it’s peripheral to the core conceit of the story, the Excession itself which is non-violent to an extreme.
LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea very much does not get resolved with violence…
It does and it doesn’t. The problem of the main adversary, the shadow, is not resolved with violence. The problem of the Dragon of Pendor definitely is. As is, in The Farthest Shore, the problem of the necromancer Cob. Ged and Tenar’s escape from the Tombs of Atuan is also violent.
Saavik @@@@@ 4:
Od Magic by Patricia McKillip.
I think that most of McKillip’s works involve non-violent solutions; it’s almost a hallmark.
@14: Regarding King’s Quest: What, you never just hid behind the tree trunks until the giant fell asleep? Using the ring costs points.
@25: “I’m not entirely convinced that non-violent resistance would work against (say) Nazis myself, but this book almost made me believe it.”
If you’re willing to pay the prices associated with non-violent resistance, sure. Not many are. (For example, consider Gandhi’s proposed strategy for the Jews in response to their treatment at the hands of the Nazis pre-war.)
“First Contact,” by Murray Leinster, which gave the name to a whole sub-genre of SF, is a good example of two species doing their best to prevent conflict upon meeting.
Since I’m too lazy to read, I’ll put in a movie recommendation: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, where the only casualties are a trash can and a door knob. Also a punk rocker is neck-pinched, but he needed a nap anyway.
@29: I think that most of McKillip’s works involve non-violent solutions; it’s almost a hallmark. McKillip was my first thought — starting with her first work, in which the lead realizes that a violent revenge will cost her her heart’s desire. (From the same year as Mote, so waving our host’s principle instead of rot13’ing.)
And the stair strikes: now I remember Brust’s Hawk, in which a long elaborate buildup (the Wikipedia article mentions a euphonium) leads to a final scene in which IIRC nobody can kill anybody because they’ll wind up in their own mess. (When he was GoH at Boskone he said this book was modeled after the Flying Karamazov Brothers’ “Terror Trick”, in which increasingly strange objects were introduced, one by one, in between other numbers, and all juggled at the end.)
And let’s not forget John M. Ford’s How Much for Just the Planet, a brilliantly funny book in which a successful planetary defense plot consists of so badly embarassing both parties that they slink away hoping nobody else sees the recording of the climactic episode. This was the second original-Star-Trek book in which nobody dies; Hambly, who had the first with Ishmael, grumbled about no longer being the sole holder of that distinction.
@26. anon
But then there’s “Grunts” – “Pass me another elf, this one’s split.”
#35, grs1961
grin ; )
Songs of Chaos by S.N. Lewitt. It looks like it’s heading towards a violent conclusion and then something else happens. I asked her about it and she said the characters took over.
Vernor Vinge’s The Peace War and “The Ungoverned” are peaceful people with the setting’s One Weird Gadget trying to prevent armed people from imposing tyrannies or starting shooting wars.
Many Heinlein books are resolved by suing their enemies in lieu of just going out and shooting them.
And the case where it doesn’t always work: Richard Matheson wrote a couple of westerns. The Gun Fight has an elder gunfighter trying for the entire book to avoid duelling a dumb kid who took offense. Every step of the way, gossipping idiots make that harder.
There’s also the Elemental Logic series, where the problem with the invaders will go away, if the nominal ruler can keep her people from fighting them.
As I recall, most of Larry Niven stories feature main characters that have to *think* their way out of trouble—even if fireworks ensues.
Perhaps my favorite writer of all SF at this point, Julian May, had a nonviolent approach to a potentially massive interstellar war in her Milieu Trilogy.
In the movie The Book of Life, the penultimate battle is resolved in a novel and non-violent way.
It’s a long time since I read Mote – doesn’t the solution involve posting warships around the Eye to zap any Moties trying to emigrate?
I haven’t seen anyone mention his work in a long time, but James White’s Hospital Station and other books are good candidates for this genre.
Eric Frank Russell’s classic 1962 golden-age-sf novel The Great Explosion (expanded from his 1951 short story “And Then There were None,.” and F. Paul Wilson’s La Nague Federation novels, especially An Enemy of the State and Wheels within Wheels (1978), both ingeniously explore the issue of how to defend liberty against aggressive invaders, or an existing tyranny, without resorting to violence and war.
Although the use of force in self-defense is morally justified, both authors focus on passive resistance or the use of indirect incentives (such as economic marketplace pressures) to fight or undermine or rechannel aggression by authoritarian governments, or in the case of Wilson’s Wheels within Wheels, to counter bigotry and racism.
All of these Prometheus Award-winning novels, thus, reflect the libertarian core principles of non-aggression, voluntary social cooperation (through society, culture and the marketplace, etc.) and respect for other people’s moral autonomy, human dignity (with Wilson, also applied to alien’s rights).
P.S. These are just a few of many award-winning novels, in some cases inspired by Gandhi, Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr.’s commitment to nonviolence as a moral and practical strategy, on the Prometheus Award-winning list of past winners available at http://www.lfs.org
Your reference to “the libertarian core principles of non-aggression . . .” makes me wonder if I’ve fallen victim to my sub-group’s prejudices. I’d always assumed “libertarian” meant “stand your ground–hard–even if no one is threatening you.” Amazing to realize there’s always at least two sides, with decent people all around.
Great article! But I must admit I have trouble coming up with many novels that do not involve violence! Of course, a great one that falls in your category is Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke. In fact, now that I think about it, almost all of Clarke’s works don’t involve violence as the method that the novel’s challenges are resolved. On a side note, that is why Star Trek (before Discovery at least) was so popular because our heroes almost always found a way to talk themselves out of a sticky situation and even make peace (of sorts) with their foes!
Fred the Vampire Accountant by Drew Hayes would fall into this category. Someone has already mentioned Elizabeth Moon’s Remnant Population, and The Speed of Dark is also non-violent if I remember correctly. I’m sure there’s many more out there.
The ending of KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS features the most amazing thing I have ever seen done with a defeated enemy who has lost his memory. Go see it!
A Canticle for Leibowitz. Not only is violence not the solution, it is the very problem they are trying to solve! It’s not the typical SF/F book, but it’s stayed with me longer than most any other book from any other genre.
You might like to look back over the career of Batton Lash, who died late last year. His major work, Supernatural Law (formerly Wolff and Byrd), was a comic about the deeds of two attorneys who represented various sorts of monsters in court, working to find legal solutions to classic horror movie plots.
@45 also, Eric Frank Russell’s Next of Kin, where a lone Earthman manages to end a space war using an invisible friend…
Mordecai Roshwald, Level Seven. Another novel where violence is the problem.
Actually, it’s the root of the problem in just about every post-apocalyptic story.
@1,
I’ve always wondered about that quote. It would seem much more pointed if it read “Violence is the first resort of the incompetent.”
@46,
There are probably multiple flavors of libertarianism. The one that seems to get the most press is Rand’s objectivism, which reeks strongly of “might makes right.” Libertariaism, like anarchism, can also be communitarian, not some sort of prelude to feudalism or philosophy of slavery by contract.
What about Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s ‘Good Omens’?
And almost everything Ursula Le Guin wrote. If violence is there, it’s never there just for the heck of it.
@43: IIRC, the Moties never developed the shielding technology humanity stumbled onto, but the way to defeat it is to pump so much weapons fire into it that shed energy builds up internally. The humans just tried to force generated power into the shield so the external energy does outward. The Moties found a way to redirect some of the energy the shield absorbs into its own workings, making it expand and radiate away more energy, harmlessly. But they didn’t realize that the only jump point their system has leads into the atmosphere of a star – the more potent the shield, the faster it absorbs all that ambient heat. The human warships are there in case a Motie ship tries some other method, but since they reasonably assume their ‘improved’ shield is superior, every attempt defeats itself.