‘Fifth Ward: Friendly Fire’ by Dale Lucas
Sci-fi and fantasy has long been a forum for exploring how humans interact and how societies expand and contract. Tolkein saw the carnage of WWI and built the world of Mordor. Asimov examines ‘otherness’ in his Artificial Intelligence series. Liu Cixin points out that history has patterns and we are likely doomed to repeat these patterns even as the look and feel of society changes.
The Fifth Ward series starts as as a standard dungeons and dragons-type world with the usual cast of dwarves, humans, elves and trolls but Friendly Fire contains the more Shakespearean notions of pride before fall, unintended consequences and treachery in service of a higher ideal. Tragedy in Shakespeare is often the result of an unwillingness to admit to an error or mistake.
Friendly Fire details a high level economic issue – dwarves, due to their natural abilities, are able to underbid human stone masons – and shows how individual actions, each seen as the ‘right’ response through a narrow lens of self-interest, lead to destruction. Even the dialogue shows that the characters are watching themselves make poor decisions. I see parallels to so many great human tragedies, some appallingly the result of the best intentions.
A powerful book for an interesting time in human history…
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