by Jon James
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Science fiction isn’t the place you might expect to encounter consistent life ethics — when it isn’t escapist, it can tend towards relativism or even nihilism. But it’s a genre as diverse as its authors, and even from the beginning, Frankenstein (often considered the first sci-fi novel) tackles a number of pro-life themes, including the “abortion” of the would-be bride of Frankenstein’s Creature, the injustice of mistreatment due to disability, and the responsibility of parents to provide a dignified existence for their progeny.
The Dark Legacies trilogy by Yuval Kordov — with the final installment, The World to Come, just released September 3 — continues in this vein, rejecting the materialist view that pervades much of modern science fiction in favor of a more holistic humanity. While characters themselves are often the perpetrators of violence against one another, they learn throughout the series the futility of dehumanization.
Dark Legacies takes place in a double post-apocalyptic setting. First, the world was destroyed by humankind with nuclear weapons and machines of war. Then, when humanity’s hubris failed to diminish, the skies darkened and demons spewed forth onto the Earth. Most of the series takes place a few hundred years after this desolation, with human settlements banding together into several main factions.
One such faction, Cathedral, is a theocracy run by a woman known as Messiah, seemingly immortal and imbued with physics-bending powers that, along with her Revenant Sisters and God-Engines, allow her to protect the city from demonic and human foes alike. But the God-Engines contain a dark secret: their hard-wired pilots are actually the deformed children of the Revenant Sisters. In a eugenics system that leaves many dead in its wake, the most powerful — and faithful — of Messiah’s inner circle are bred repeatedly, until a child viable enough to survive connection into a nuclear-powered war machine is created.
These details aren’t included to shock, as they might in a “grimdark” setting like Warhammer 40,000 where one-upping evildoing is the norm. In Dark Legacies, one of the perspective characters, Rebekah, is the mother of one such daughter, exiled for caring too much about her own offspring — and another is the child herself, dubbed merely ‘R-6’, as if to convince her of her own inhumanity.
From the beginning, R-6 is a model of disability advocacy. Due to the circumstances of her birth, R-6’s body is misshapen — she is unable to walk, and without intervention, she won’t live much longer as her body collapses under its own weight. R-6 is brainwashed to reject her flesh, told that she will not be complete until she is wired into her new battle walker body. And when her mother protests, knowing that becoming a tool to suit others’ purposes will not bring her daughter the freedom she so craves, Rebekah is exiled, condemned to wander alone in the wasteland.
Despite the arsenal and machinery that make up R-6’s cyborg carapace, she is still very much human. She is shaken upon seeing the ravages of war. She mourns the loss of one of her sisters. In fact, R-6 may be one of the most human characters in the entire series, as after a life of abuse and isolation, she finally is free to learn what being human is, and in so doing, learns to value the life of the humans around her even more than her own.
Perhaps the most significant theme in Dark Legacies is that of dehumanization through division. The main plot of the series kicks off when cultures on opposite sides of the wasteland finally rediscover each other. But rather than allies against the literal demonic hordes that besiege each respective settlement, other humans are viewed with distrust due to their differences. Isolated from each other for so long, the cultures have redefined what they consider human to be, and are unwilling to challenge that definition when they encounter others like them. Meanwhile, characters like R-6, who has in many ways been literally dehumanized, and Aleph, an AI-powered mech who has discovered religion, are on the opposite trajectory, learning to overcome their brainwashed prejudice and see the humanity in others.
Baptiste, a high-ranking nepotism hire in the regimented city of Bastion’s military, is sent to meet up with the Mad Max-esque Scavrats in an arrangement intended to tip the balance of power against Cathedral. This is ordered without anyone from Bastion having so much as spoken to or seen anyone from Cathedral. Their paranoia has made their fellow survivors into something to be feared and hated, rather than partners against a common enemy.
Throughout the series, it is increasingly implied that the world has been forsaken by God as punishment for the nuclear war that devastated the planet. Earth is taken from its proper spot in the universe and moved to another unknown place, a limbo of sorts, where there are no stars to light the evening sky. Demons are released, not as judgment against fallen children, but as a motivation to set aside the divisions that led to the destruction in the first place. And repeatedly, the Scavrats, Bastionites, and people of Cathedral fail to do so, and repeatedly, things get worse for them.
Finally, as tensions between the cultures escalate to the brink of all-out war again, the throng of demons parallel their sins, swelling to numbers never seen since the opening of the Hellmouth. And ultimately, it is only through one character’s self sacrifice in atonement for her sins against the others that the remainder of humanity is saved.
But everything is not tied up in a neat little bow. Just as some characters are redeemed by learning to see the humanity in their enemies, others fall — often those most open minded about their foes in the first place, a reminder that it is our wounds that cause us to dehumanize others. Trauma causes some characters to view other cultures, not as enemies, but as tools for their own use, and this proves even more detrimental. In the end, they have completely isolated themselves, not just from other cultures, but even within their own societies.
Only those characters which seek healing within the self, and between the self and others, are able to experience peace in Dark Legacies, and, perhaps, to restore the unity with their Creator that was lost when the world ended.