Originally posted by Garfield3d
... My take on the plot was that the Shivans were an ambiguous and mysterious force that could only be antagonized as a clensing force in which we were at the recieving end of. ...
And I can understand your perspective, but I likewise cannot quite agree. That the Shivans are a complex destructive force, in that there are side effects that might be classed as "good", I would wholeheartedly agree. But what did the Terrans or the Vasudans do to warrant destruction? Discovered subspace and had a little spat between themselves. The Ancients may have made themselves a scourge over other races, but all we had done was simply be there. The Shivans were not destroying us because we'd commited some crime that demanded punishment, but just because we were there.
New life may indeed spring up where death and destruction have passed before, which is the FS universe's ultimate moral. But that day breaks after the night doesn't make the night any less dark.
Originally posted by karajorma
I disagree with your view that the shivans are painted as an unknowable evil Sesquipedalian. Bosch understood them (or at least felt he did). Furthermore they didn't kill Bosch when he started to speak to him. Instead they took him away in their ships. That means that in FS2 [V] wanted to add some ambiguity to the shivans. Maybe they aren't evil. Maybe they were doing something else.
Bosch believed that humanity could make an alliance with the shivans. An alliance that somehow would never happen while we we allies with the Vasudans. Again that does sit well for me with the prospect of an unknowable evil. The shivans do have goals that a human can understand it's just that [V] reserved them for FS3.
But they did kill everyone on his ship indiscriminately when they took him. You've misunderstood my meaning ever so subtly, karajorma.
I did not say they are
of necessity unknowable: V could have written the story a bit differently, of course. I said that in V's story they are an unknown. To change that is to change the function of the Shivans in the story, and thus to change the nature of the whole story. It is not that the Shivans have no motivations (there usually are motivations associated with evil in most stories), but we are not told their motivations because they are supposed to remain incomprehensible to us (as real people).
Let me take a different tack for a minute. In 2000, I visited a preserved concentration camp in Dauchau. The single most disturbing thing about that day was not the photos, or the ovens, or the bunkers, or the medical experiment records. It was how effortlessly I could imagine being in the place, not of an inmate (which was hard), but of a guard. I spoke to others about this, and they had similar experiences. Any person could have become one, easily. The choice is simple, and perfectly understandable (hence the effortlessness of imagining it). And yet, understanding of the
motivation that would bring one to choose such a course eluded me, and still does. I can imagine myself into the place of a guard. I cannot imagine
why such evil was done.
Now, in this example, we can see that even being able to imagine oneself in the very place of the person with evil motivation does not allow one to understand the evil motivation. If we could truly understand it, we wouldn't call it evil anymore. We might call it insane or confused or misguided, and so find a place for it in the universe, as if it belonged here. But it is evil, and therefore we cannot truly understand it. So likewise the Shivans: whatever their general and particular motivations, V keeps them incomprehensible to us, because if they were known and understood by us, we could say of them "Oh, well, that's alright then."
As for Bosch, many people, real and fictitious, have foolishly felt they could ally with evil for some good end. Another of FS's major themes was that evil begets evil. As Bosch himself said, his quest had resulted in the deaths of millions. The irony of his final monologue's words followed by what the Shivans did when they arrived (killing everyone and dragging him aboard) clinched it for me on that count.
