All’s Well That Ends Well is the story of a maid – Helena – who heals the King of France and, for her reward, asks for the hand of Lord Bertram in marriage. Bertram consents, then runs off to fight a war in Italy with his habitually deceitful follower Parolles, hoping that death will get him out of it. Hurt, Helena sets out on a pilgrimage and ends in Italy, where she meets Lord Bertram’s new lover, Diana. Diana and Helena swap places unknown to Bertram, who sleeps with his betrothed. He later agrees to love Helena and their unborn child. Almost half of the invective below is directed at Parolles.

All's Well That Ends Well by Photobunny

• Little Helen, farewell; if I can remember thee, I will think of thee at court.
• The complaints I have heard of you I do not all believe; ’tis my slowness that I do not, for I know you lack not folly to commit them and have ability enough to make such knaveries yours.
• You would answer very well to a whipping.
• Scurvy, old, filthy, scurvy lord!
• Methink’st thou art a general offence, and every man should beat thee. I think thou wast created for men to breathe themselves upon thee.
• You are not worth another word, else I’d call you knave.
• France is a dog-hole, and it no more merits the tread of a man’s foot.
• She is too mean to have her name repeated.
• He’s a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner of no one good quality.
• I spoke with her but once, and found her wondrous cold.
• For I knew the young Count to be a dangerous and  lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity, and devours up all  the fry it finds.
• Drunkenness is his best virtue, for he will be swine-drunk; and in his sleep he does little harm, save to his bedclothes about him.
• He hath out-villain’d villainy so far that the rarity redeems him.
• He excels his brother for a coward; yet his brother is reputed one of the best that is. In a retreat he outruns any lackey: marry, in coming on he has the cramp.
• Use the carp as you may; for he looks like a poor, decayed, ingenious, foolish, rascally knave.
• I saw the man today, if man he be.
• This woman’s an easy glove, my lord; she goes off and on at pleasure.

One notable difference between romantic fantasy and most of the other sub-genres is that magic is seen as a consequence of the natural order of the world. It’s not some demonic force from outside, as is often the case in Sword & Sorcery, or a highly arcane science that isolates its practitioners, as frequently depicted in high fantasy. In romantic fantasy, magic is a simple talent, an inborn channel of mystical self-expression. The key difference is that magic here is a wholesome force, in tune with the world. For the heroes, anyway.

The heroes of romantic fantasy are typically either young, recently bereaved, or otherwise just now finding themselves pushed into the wider world. In fairly short order, they discover dread plots against the world they live in, their own burgeoning talents, a group of talented companions who become close friends, and a life-partner-in-waiting. Companions are frequently titled nobles or other persons of responsibility and influence; the hero may be too. By the end of the story, the hero will have gained victory, magical power, true love and a place to call home. This is a shamelessly feel-good sub-genre, not a challenging one. The most influential romantic fantasy series remains David Eddings’ charming “Belgariad”.

Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings

I’m sorry! I suck!

Unfortunately, I’ve been overloaded with work on a critical, Top Secret project for most of February. I know that’s dull of me, so as a little bit of a consolation, I thought I’d tell you the things that I’m (more or less) allowed to reveal about it. Hopefully, my publishers won’t put a price on my head.

Put simply, it’s a treasure hunt.

The book (which will be available globally) takes the form of a series of images, accompanied by passages of text. Each image/text combination contains a series of clues, which taken together will point to a specific solution. As a theoretical f’rinstance, a large bear on its hind legs in a picture could suggest a Russian link.

Each of the solutions, taken together, will then point to the final answer.

The first person to solve the answer, and submit it after a specific date, will win money. A _lot_ of money.

The answer exists in only two places: my head, and a highly-encrypted DVD locked in a secure bank vault. Obviously if anything dodgy happens to me — I vanish, get kidnapped, die suspiciously, etc etc — then the whole deal is off. Finding the answer won’t require any specific skill or cultural background; literally anyone could do it, if they try. Fortunately there’ll be no question of going out into the countryside with a shovel and metal detector :)

Pot of Gold by Tao Zhyn

So it’s a really exciting project. I’m not allowed to reveal the title yet, but I can tell you that I’ve been thinking of it as The Labyrinth.

The one piece of advice I’d give to anyone hoping to win is to get to know the way I think. It’s good advice for any puzzle; the better you understand the mind that created it, the easier it is to solve it. There may — just may — be clues hidden here in the blog, and other places where I can be found online. Later on, I’ll probably have a specific Twitter feed and blog too, but I’ll still drop little nuggets here for just you :)

Oh, and no, I’m afraid I’m not open to bribes!

There are as many subdivisions as there are mythologies of course, but not all of them generate the same amount of mythic fantasy. Although the Norse and Greek myths have probably been the most influential in contributing to the flavour of modern fantasy, they are not particularly common settings for modern works. Perhaps they’re the victims of their own success, too familiar in terms of general fantasy to be appealing as a mythic story venue.

Other mythic cycles seem to be more attractive to fantasy writers. The Arthurian legend cycle of western Europe remains one of the most popular mythic fantasy settings. The historical origins of the ‘real’ King Arthur remain obscure. There are some mentions of a 5th-century British war-leader in some of the ancient chronicles, but they are tantalisingly slight, and generate a lot of debate. Anyhow, whatever the truth is, it certainly bears precious little relation to the mythic figure.

King Arthur's Domain, Tintagel by IDS

King Arthur’s creation in the sense we know him now dates from 1136, in the “Historia Regum Britanniae” (The History of the Kings of Britain) by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Although it claimed to be a historical account, Geoffrey’s manuscript was highly coloured, and devoted a large part of its text to the story of Arthur, Guinevere, Merlin the magician and the traitor Mordred – quite probably drawing its inspiration from older cycles of Welsh mythology. Despite its factual implausibility, the Historia was a big success amongst the nobility of England and France, and Arthur quickly became a favourite subject of medieval romances all over Western Europe.

Robert Wace added the Round Table in 1155, with the Holy Grail and Sir Lancelot arriving some twenty-five years later through Chretien de Troyes. Many others contributed, until the whole cycle was broadly cemented in its current form by Thomas Malory in Le Morte D’Arthur, around 1470. The definitive modern Arthurian fantasy – so far, anyhow – remains TH White’s “The Once and Future King” (1958). Although the text makes use of anachronistic comparisons and similes, and the story itself is considerably more overtly magical than most, this is still the most influential piece of Arthuriana.

Ancient China is another common setting for mythic fantasies. China has a unique depth of continuous cultural history to draw on, and its own self-image of its mythological past is enthusiastically magical. There are many domestic Chinese fantasies of course – in the West, the best known are “Outlaws of the Marsh”, by Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong (c. 1380), and “Journey to the West” by Wu Ch’eng-en (1592), better known as “Monkey”. Both of these epics are boisterous, highly magical and, like Homer’s “Odyssey” and “Iliad”, highly repetitive, at least in their original forms.

Yangtzi Gorge by Britrob

A much more contemporary example of the same sort of mythic tale is “Blades from the Willows” by Li Shanji (1946), which was serialised in Chinese newspapers in the same way as the Sword & Sorcery stories originally were. Although it only made it into print in English n 1991, “Blades from the Willows” was hugely influential in establishing the Wu Xia story style – the oriental analogue of Sword & Sorcery that most of the Hong Kong magical martial arts movies fit into. These movies – and the comics and books that they have inspired – remain the true inheritors of Chinese mythic fantasy, and they have become hugely popular all around the world.

It should be no surprise to hear that plenty of western authors have turned to Chinese myth for inspiration. Many have met with reasonable commercial success, in the west anyway. The most important was Ernest Bramah, who created a series of wryly humorous books about the mannered wandering story-teller Kai Lung and the tall tales he span. The first of these, “The Wallet of Kai Lung”, was published in 1900. A more recent master of the same charmingly humorous ‘Chinoiserie’ is Barry Hughart, who produced a delightful trilogy of novels about the mystery-solving sage Li Kao and his assistant Number Ten Ox, starting with “Bridge of Birds” in 1984.

A third important source of mythic fantasy is the “Alf Layla-wa-Layla” (literally ‘A Thousand Nights and a Night’), commonly known in English as the Arabian Nights. It is one of the world’s greatest compendiums of stories. It contains an immense cycle of tales that Scheherazade supposedly told to her cruel husband, the King, on a nightly basis, in order to keep him from having her killed. The contents are very varied in origin. Tales seem to have come from Arabia, Persia, India and even Egypt, and there is much dispute as to exactly when they took their ‘final’ form. The rough consensus seems to be that they took shape between about 900 AD and the year 1400. Many probably started as professionally written stories, rather than as folk tales; Arabic Middle Age culture was highly civilized and literate.

Not all of the stories of the Arabian Nights are fantasies, but the role-call of tales found within its pages is impressive: “Aladdin and His Magic Lamp”, “The Ebony Horse”, “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad”, “The City of Brass”, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”, “Julnar the Sea-Born” and many others. The first printed edition of the book was produced in France at the start of the 18th century, translated and edited by Antoine Galland. None of the earlier, hand-written manuscripts survive, and there is considerable controversy as to how much of the content Galland actually created himself.

In the end it doesn’t really matter, though. The origins of myth are lost in history, like the seeds of truth that may have given rise to them. That doesn’t change the vital role that that the world’s mythologies have played in shaping modern fantasy.

High fantasy is also referred to as epic fantasy or heroic fantasy, and these names give a clue as to its real nature. Tales of high fantasy are epic in scope, heroic in the breadth of their vision. There may be a main hero, but he or she will encounter a whole cast of other characters, and their actions and interactions form a web spanning both story and land. The world itself has a specific culture, history, geography and bestiary, and the story would fall apart without it.

High fantasy usually comes in big packages. Novels of 500 pages and more are common, and frequently form part of a trilogy  – or more; some core sequences have run to a dozen books. At some point though, the nature of the epic story requires a resolution. Even the longest high fantasy series must eventually come to a recognisable end. For a while, anyway. It’s not uncommon for an author to follow a core trilogy with a sequel trilogy, a prequel trilogy, or even a parallel ‘sidebar’ trilogy.

The Well at the World’s End

Although JRR Tolkien is the author who made modern fantasy what it is, the father of high fantasy is generally agreed to be William Morris. “The Well at the World’s End”, written in 1896 and running over 500 pages in the 1975 reprint, is a fantastical quest-romance written in archaic style. It was not particularly popular when released, but it inspired great devotion in a number of younger writers. These authors – people like Lord Dunsany, ER Eddison, and CS Lewis – went on to give fantasy its form.

These early works provided vital service preparing the ground for the 20th century’s greatest fantasy novel, JRR Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”. It was first released in three volumes from 1954-55, but it is not a trilogy so much as one long novel with six sub-sections. Tolkien himself fought hard to have the book published as one piece. At first, the Lord of the Rings seemed destined for the same sort of obscurity as Morris’s and Eddison’s romances, and it took over 10 years to gain wide acceptance.

It was with the controversial publication of the American paperback editions, in 1965, that The Lord of the Rings finally took off. The row over the pirate edition probably helped draw the attention the book deserved, and it became one of the soaring bestsellers of 20th-century fiction. Its immense success stemmed from the incredible richness of Tolkien’s grand narrative, and the sheer power of the land of Middle Earth.

Readers who made it past the first chapters – which are really just cozy – soon found themselves succumbing to the spell of the grander narrative. It is as a timeless quest that the book really succeeds. The mysterious portents, the hard travelling, the stunning landscapes, the encircling foes, the urgency of the task in hand, the magical revelations – all are handled with a superb sense of story-telling rhythm. It is a slow rhythm, for it is a very long novel, but in its leisurely way it builds an almost tidal power.

The Kinslaying at Aqualonde by and (c) Ted Nasmith

Tolkien continued to work on detailing Middle-Earth throughout his long life, and the results have been published in “The Silmarillion” (1977) and many other posthumous volumes edited by the author’s son. Whatever their scholarly brilliance though, these later works are missing the central quality which vitalizes The Lord of the Rings – that sense of raw story, in all its glorious force.

Tolkien became a huge seller in the 1960s. His work cleared a space for all forms of fantasy to take root in the marketplace. It took twelve more years before Tolkien’s direct legacy became apparent, though. The year 1977 marked the turning point – not “The Silmarillion”, but the first appearance of two big new instant bestsellers by previously unknown American writers. Both would have been inexplicable, and probably unpublishable, if Tolkien hadn’t gone before.

Terry Brooks’s “The Sword of Shannara” was condemned by some reviewers as a ‘rip-off’ of Tolkien, but it still sold spectacularly well and set a pattern for many more novels to come. Stephen R. Donaldson’s “Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” was a more original and interesting work. There is no doubt that it was inspired by Tolkien’s example. Donaldson offered a detailed secondary world – the Land, where the hero, magically displaced from our Earth, embarked on a mighty quest to defeat the corrupting powers of evil. Although the Land bore a hint of resemblance to Middle-Earth, Thomas Covenant himself was a very different character to any hero of Tolkien’s. A depressive, frequently hostile loner who suffers horribly with leprosy, Covenant cannot bring himself to believe in the Land. The alienation and resentment of this denial makes him do some terrible things, and tragedy piles on tragedy as he leads the Land to the very edge of ruin before finding the strength to let himself truly engage.

With the arrival of Brooks and Donaldson, high fantasy entered an era of commercial acceptability, becoming a type of novel which has made its authors and publishers rich. This was a vast change from the earlier part of the century, where works such as “The Worm Ouroboros” did well to sell a few hundred copies on first publication. It leads the field, now: it is simply what fantasy means to most people. If current trends are anything to go by, it will continue to give a great deal of pleasure to millions of readers for years to come.

Someone or other from the main webpage at Hello! magazine. (Please don't waste your time telling me who.) If you came here seeking Britney's genitals, then -- Great God! -- I recommend heaven666.org

Fragmented, meaningless information breeds a lobotomised readership who crave only further fragments. It’s self-reinforcing, and best of all, it’s cheap.

So when talking heads babble meaninglessly about bloggery out-competing journalism, they’re really talking about the new journalism — 100 words on today’s stock-market dip, or 250 words on how to have a shinier orgasm, maybe as much as 600 words on a day in the life of a fictitious Rwandan orphan made up by some jaded hack who’s never even been to Paris, let alone Africa.

Sure. I can churn that sort of mindless crap out all day long, and so can anyone else. We’re all journalists now.

New-wave media-friendly journalists care of the Washingtonian. Note: No criticism or praise implied.

But it’s important to remember what real journalism feels like. Done well, journalism is as creative and powerful as any writing of ‘literary merit’. In fact, some might argue that it even takes greater skill, because it has to remain entirely within the scope of what is real. That kind of constraint adds complexity.

I’ve never really tried to produce any real journalism. I simply don’t have the resources — the funding, the contacts, the time to travel and research. I’ve done some magazine and newspaper articles, sure, but they’ve been the kind of froth I mentioned above. I write books, and I blog. That no more makes me a journalist than it makes me a surgeon.

This means I can’t turn to my own files for an example of what I’m taking about. Instead, here are a few links to some pieces of genuine journalism. They’re all fascinating, and I suspect that the first one may well be extremely important to all of us in the years to come. You can’t get through any one of them in five minutes. They’re not safe, bland mulch. These pieces will demand your attention, shake your certainties a little, and possibly challenge some of your assumptions. In places, they even attain a sort of beauty.

Please, read them, and remember what it is we’re losing.

Ennui Becomes Us: Randall Schweller’s masterful analysis of the inevitable growth of disorder in global and cultural affairs.

How I Convinced a Death-Row Murderer Not to Die: Michael Finkel writing on his complicated relationship with the death-row killer who stole his name when going on the run.

They Killed My Lawyer: Financier William Browder’s simple tale of the death of Sergei Magnitsky, an honest man who was brave and foolish enough to stand up to corruption in Russia.

A Rough Trade: Martin Amis’ classic ‘01 report from the trenches of the American porn industry.

NOTE: All these links came from Give Me Something To Read, Marco Arment’s selection of top articles bookmarked for later perusal via Instapaper. Both are well worth checking out.

The Conan stories first appeared in the pulp magazine “Weird Tales”. They were gloriously uninhibited, explosions of adventure, heroism and machismo as embodied by mighty Conan himself. Conan was everything a hero ought to be – lethal swordsman, master thief, cunning general and ferocious lover, with the body of a titan and a fierce distrust of magic. Howard’s stories were packed with action, and punctuated with buxom damsels in various states of distress. Although Howard killed himself at a tragically young age, he produced enough short stories and novellas (and a novel) to establish Conan as one of the mythic legends of western culture. Others soon followed – and the most effective of these was Fritz Leiber.

Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser

Leiber began writing his good-humoured, roistering tales of the barbarian Fafhrd and his sneak-thief companion the Gray Mouser in the late 1930s. Cheerfully described as the greatest swordsmen in any plane of existence, the two made their way through a dazzling array of villains, crises and compliant lovers. Somehow they always found the time to engage in some good-natured banter, deflate some pompous egos, and repeatedly save the city of Lankhmar. As with Conan, most of the Fafhrd & Grey Mouser tales are short stories, and just one is a full-length novel – “The Swords of Lankhmar”, from 1968. As usual for the twosome, it is delightfully extravagant fun.

Sword & Sorcery was taken in a different direction by the British writer Michael Moorcock. He created a red-eyed, albino anti-hero, Elric of Melnibone, for “Science Fantasy” magazine in 1961. Moorcock’s brand of Sword & Sorcery is dark and ironic. Elric is crippled by his albinism, a lethargic weakling given incredible strength and stamina by his sword – the half-sentient “runeblade” Stormbringer. The demonic blade consumes the souls of its victims, passing a portion of the stolen life-force to its wielder. Elric dislikes his proxy vampirism, and hates his weapon, as it apparently hates him, yet the two are inseparable. It’s not moral outrage on Elric’s part, however; he’s quite evil most of the time. His feelings for Stormbringer are more the product of resentment at his own weakness – and the blade’s habit of eating the souls of everyone that Elric actually cares about.

As with other Sword & Sorcery works, most of the Elric stories are short, and many were first published in magazines. Moorcock later expanded his universe to encompass many different incarnations of Elric’s soul in different worlds and times, almost all in the same gleefully inventive vein as his early stories. He remains the dominant author of the sub-genre in modern times.

Sword & Sorcery owed absolutely nothing to J. R. R. Tolkien. It was a pulp-magazine form, suited to shorter lengths, and it appealed for the most part to male readers. As a genre, it was accused of fascism, sexism and all manner of sins, but in the hands of its best practitioners it had wit, imagination, an interesting darkness, and above all excitement.

But there is a hint of method to my madness.

Deep in the bowels of the Internet, something is stirring. It’s the red-headed bastard child of Punk, thanks to a wild and filthy night orgying with MTV, William Burroughs, Robert Anton Wilson and Lewis Caroll. As culture has expanded and exploded in the computer age, we’ve become more and more comfortable and familiar with concepts and ideas that used to be niche. Spell-flinging wizards. Vampires. Cthulhu. Giant stompy robots. Aliens cutting ventilation ports in cows. What used to be hardcore geek niche is mainstream now, and the younger you are, the more natural all this stuff is.

At the same time, entertainment has become, well, burstier. MTV blips are the usual example, but in every area, stuff is being served up in smaller and smaller chunks, with brighter lights and louder bells and whistles.

The result is a new wave of absurdity. I’m not going to get all Lit Critic and start talking about Dadism or post-modern playfulness; they’re old boxes, and they’re unhelpful. The movement — and it _is_ a movement, one which is gathering steam — has decided to call itself Bizarro. The only real aim or rule of Bizarro is to be entertaining. It is almost always weird and absurd, frequently straddling lines between fantasy, horror and sci-fi. Their worlds are not predictable, and the narrative structures often lack form.

John Dies at the End, by David Wong.

The Bizarro movement is centred on fiction, but its tendrils are extending out to art, animation, sculpture and music. Despite the lack of previously established norms, Bizarro work is usually easy to follow. It’s a sign of the quality of the pioneers involved that it is still good, because most of the old structures are there because they’re easy tools for creators to use.

Bizarro is not comfortable. Much of it is deliberately provocative, even offensive. It’s certainly unhinged, too. But if the chaotic juxtapositions and genuinely free creativity it can offer are to your tastes, then there’s a very rich vein of material waiting for you.

Bizarro Central is probably your best port of call if you want to know more.

Personally? I think I’m in love…

At least, that’s what they told me later, so it’s probably all utter rubbish. Personally, I slept through the whole thing.

Devil's Dyke by Dominic's Pics

It was a pair of teenagers who woke me up, freeing themselves of the burden of their shared virginity somewhere overhead. Persistent little sods, frankly. Hell of a place to pick to get frisky, too. I’d been out of it for ages and ages, and it was a long, slow drift back towards consciousness while they kept up the racket above me. It was the magnitude of her lie that really snapped me out of it, though – he must have been getting jumpy about the amount of time they’d spent up on the mound.

She had a penetrating voice, and I heard her clearly. “Light above, don’t worry, no-one’s going to find us. I love you.”

The lad’s future unfolded in front of me. Her brothers would arrive on schedule, and when they had finished with him, he was in for a quick, shamed marriage and years of hen-pecked drudgery. How tragic. I grinned into the darkness, and suddenly realised I was awake.

I was lying on a stone plinth in a low, dome-shaped chamber at the base of the mound. The floor was littered with blessed icons and holy symbols, scattered there liberally by the exorcist who’d put me there – Garrod? Jerrod? I forget, now – but they’d lost their virtue down through the years. Most had decayed into shapeless blobs, anyhow. My vault had been built from stone, but I could see that they’d filled in their entry tunnel with earth. I flexed my arms and legs, then swung myself round and sat up.

Crypt by Sekhmet Neseret

Not even a moment of dizziness. Only the Arm of the Light Incarnate would come up with a spell of living death that protected the victim from muscle wastage.

I edged forward cautiously, and bands of white fire immediately sprang up around the plinth, a ward to keep me from being moved. I snatched my legs back up onto the slab immediately, feeling the sting where the energy had singed them. The sudden light was painful, the intensity and colour as bad as the actual brightness.

I shaded my eyes and squinted, until it was comfortable to see again. The vault didn’t look any better illuminated than it had in the pitch blackness. Those flames had to be dealt with. I forced myself to relax, breathing slowly and deeply, and calming my body piece by piece until I’d gained some tranquillity. Then I seized that empty space and concentrated on it, feeding my thoughts and emotions into the void one by one until there was nothing left. With quiet came perception, and an awareness of energy and form. A solution followed. I reached down through the void, down and down again, into the howling, hungry abyss beneath, and dredged up a word, a foulness cloaked in sound. It fought me, clawing as I dragged it into my mind. I held it there a moment, savouring its decadence, and then spat it into the chamber like a thunderclap.

The walls shook, the barriers of flame guttered and died, and I leaped off the plinth, laughing, to stand up straight for the first time in over a dozen centuries.

Up above, I could hear my inadvertent saviours making a panicked exit, whimpering about the ‘Devil’s Hill’. I’d probably have laughed at that, too, but my good mood had just been spoiled by the realization that I was going to have to dig my way through twenty feet of solid earth with my bare hands. You’d have thought the oh-so-merciful forces of Light Incarnate could at least have seen fit to leave me a shovel for when I finally broke free.

I crossed the chamber and started digging, using a couple of the holy icons as primitive trowels. The exorcist, Yared or whatever, had been damned lucky, catching me after the battle of Scribrand Pass. The five nations had been on the point of collapse, and I’d been so eager to crush them I’d taken my eye off the ball. I had utterly exhausted myself, kept nothing back for emergencies. Stupid of me.

Well, this time it was going to be different.

Screw politics. I was going to the beach.

–

(unrelated:)

While the ultimate poles of good and evil may be unhelpful abstractions, the struggle between them is played out in the storyverse through intermediaries. The side of good is typically positive, and that of evil negative, but the lines can blur, or even invert. The important thing is that the conflict endures. It is the engine of growth and development. The world is formed in the dance of creation and destruction.

Negative experiences are required for growth and development. Without them, there is no stimulus to act, no chance to learn the difference between right and wrong, and certainly no opportunity to stretch your abilities. What hero could ever come into her own without a foe to push her to her limits? Conflict drives technology, social change, personal maturation, even evolution itself. To live, in the end, is to struggle – permanent euphoria is as counter-productive as permanent anguish.

Jim Olds

There have actually been real-world tests of this principle. In experiments pioneered by neurobiologist Jim Olds more than 40 years ago, rats were wired to give them the ability to directly stimulate the pleasure centres in their own brains. After a short period of adjustment to the sensation, each rat quickly turned all its attention to triggering bliss. Food, sex, physical pain and even exhaustion were ignored; the rats just kept on firing their pleasure stimulators until they passed out, or died. Similar factors are thought to be the primary issue in the biology and psychology of human addiction. We’re just not designed to be able to successfully exist in a perfect world.

Good and evil cannot meaningfully exist in the world in isolation. Either one would be so destructive to the patterns of life that we know that it would wipe us out. There’s no doubt that ultimate good would be a much more pleasant way to go, but in the end the final result is exactly the same. No more people. And that’s as true of the real world as it is of any story.