(Which if you think about the vectors makes a lot of sense...)
...and, well, if you look at the unicorn example, her decision is at least consistent. Unicorns killed people too. In that case, there's a clear connection between a small number of people being killed, and a much larger number being protected. In the ghoul case... warning off the ghoul once before killing it seems consistent with the general family plan, if it's kind of a Hayek-esque non-interventionist thing. Maybe ghouls are really important too, and killing humans by itself isn't the worst thing ever. Or so I read it.
I think the Price-Healy ethic is that genocide of a species is, in general, a dangerous thing (see: the unicorn example), and unicorns could be more troubling than ghouls because they might not be capable of being reasoned with. So you have the same problem of any dangerous animal: it serves an important purpose to the ecosystem but also will harm the unwary, which means you have to be clever and active about keeping an eye on things
( ... )
I definitely think there was a lot more going on in that scene than was actually written on the pages. (Seanan has a comment below about what she was going for there as well.)
Even with dangerous animals, if you get one that starts killing people, it's not uncommon to put that animal down.
I trust Seanan as an author to not do this sort of thing without thinking it through. But while it was a deliberate choice, I also get why it didn't work for some people.
I stopped at the ghoul warning. You don't tell me it killed sixteen young people, then act sassy when you let it go. It sounds like the author tried to get deeper into the mythos later, but I never got there.
The Prices are being deliberately portrayed as having a creepy, inhuman ethical stance, which I can still enjoy reading about in the same way I can enjoy reading about other alien species that have inhuman ethics.
This is, in fact, 100% the point I was aiming for, and you may have a cookie. :)
It's also one of those things that made a lot more sense once I'd read the whole book; and I try very hard not to ding books for not being what I expected based on what I heard secondhand from other readers. ("Very light and fluffy, not dark at all!") Because that's often quite different from what the author meant.
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(Which if you think about the vectors makes a lot of sense...)
...and, well, if you look at the unicorn example, her decision is at least consistent. Unicorns killed people too. In that case, there's a clear connection between a small number of people being killed, and a much larger number being protected. In the ghoul case... warning off the ghoul once before killing it seems consistent with the general family plan, if it's kind of a Hayek-esque non-interventionist thing. Maybe ghouls are really important too, and killing humans by itself isn't the worst thing ever. Or so I read it.
But yeah, kind of weird.
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Even with dangerous animals, if you get one that starts killing people, it's not uncommon to put that animal down.
I trust Seanan as an author to not do this sort of thing without thinking it through. But while it was a deliberate choice, I also get why it didn't work for some people.
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This is, in fact, 100% the point I was aiming for, and you may have a cookie. :)
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It's also one of those things that made a lot more sense once I'd read the whole book; and I try very hard not to ding books for not being what I expected based on what I heard secondhand from other readers. ("Very light and fluffy, not dark at all!") Because that's often quite different from what the author meant.
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I think there is a second one out now, right?
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