The tricky ethics of using real world events in fiction

When do references to the real world become exploitative?

Last week’s chapter of Tales from the Triverse saw a city being progressively destroyed by a superior military force, with the story told from the point of view of a seven-year-old child caught up in the conflict. Hundreds of people die, the city is largely razed to the ground, and even the child does not make it out alive.

I’ve said before that writing fiction is one way I process the real world. When I’m trying to form coherent thoughts, or am grappling with something awful that has happened, I often turn to my fiction writing. In the case of last week’s chapter, a lot of it is me responding to the reports, images and video that have emerged from Gaza and Ukraine in recent years.

It’s not that I’m making a direct political statement on the matter, and the events in Triverse are not intended to be analogous to any particular real world situation. You can’t, for example, transpose a faction in Triverse onto a real world group, even if you see similarities. The story is about the rise of fascism, told through a scifi/fantasy lens, and so there are parallels to old and (unfortunately) recent history, but it’s not intended to be a mirror. In terms of imagery, then I am certainly evoking particular visuals that we’ve unfortunately all become too familiar with from news reports.

Much of this can be traced to me seeing awful things and needing a way to comprehend them. We can all feel a certain impotence when it comes to global events, and writing some words on a page is a way I mitigate that sense of helplessness. At the very least it helps me focus and think more clearly, and translating events onto the page helps me to avoid falling into a hopeless panic. In that regard, I suppose writing my fiction is a selfish act.

While Triverse is absolutely me exploring a wide range of concerns, the fact remains that I’m not a historian, and what I write absolutely remains fiction. I do find myself pausing when my fiction strays too close to real world events. Where is the line between maturely examining a difficult issue, and ghoulishly exploiting it for cheap entertainment? After all, Tales from the Triverse is intended to be an entertaining science fiction and fantasy story. Does wanting to entertain preclude addressing serious topics? My worry is that the entertaining side of Triverse undermines or insults the more serious topics — but then I have to remember that my writing is fiction, and is not intended to directly reflect any one thing.

In the front of my edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien writes in the foreword:

“As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical...But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.” JRR Tolkien

That last sentence is critical, I think. The Lord of the Rings can speak to any number of real world scenarios, from nuclear weapons and the climate crisis to the industrial revolution and AI, but none of that is directly intended or inserted by Tolkien. Many of the topics it seems to connect with didn’t even exist when Tolkien was alive. He simply told the story he wanted to write, and featured characters interacting convincingly in his fictional world: inevitably, being humans, we easily see patterns. But we see only what we take with us, to borrow from another fantasy epic.

My best hope for Tales from the Triverse is that it occupies a similar space. A lot of it comes from me thinking about Brexit, and Trump, and social media, and the trend towards authoritarianism in the West - but none of it is a 1-to-1 direct connection. For the most part, I’m not trying to tell readers what to think, although I am encouraging them to think. With luck, readers will bring what they want to the story, without me overtly imposing anything upon them.

It’s not that I don’t have a viewpoint — my politics are very clear to anyone paying attention, I think! Tolkien also definitely takes a stance on the key issues in the book. The aim is not to be apolitical, but to remain true to the story and the world and the characters. Nobody likes when characters start sounding like puppeteered facsimiles of the author, so I try to leave it to the ‘freedom of the reader’, as Tolkien says.

Going back to that line, and how to stay on the right side of it, and my concern about accidentally stepping over. Remember the movie The Creator? One of the trailers included real footage from the devastating 2020 explosion in Beirut, but altered to look like a futuristic scene. You can see it here still, briefly:

Some interesting background on how that shot snuck in can be found here. A lot of archival footage is used during post-production as temporary stand-ins and reference, and in this case it accidentally made it into the released trailer. It appears to have been a mistake.

Rather different is the case of the ridiculed recent War of the Worlds movie starring Ice Cube, which makes use of various real-world clips, again augmented with a science fictional context. A shot of a plane crashing is based entirely on a real plane crash tragedy. The guys over at Corridor Digital covered this one in detail:

Many of the clips in War of the Worlds appear to be taken from conflicts in the Middle-East. The studio is assuming here that an American audience either won’t know or won’t care. As one of the Corridor Digital guys notes, an equivalent example if the situation were reversed would be a film studio in the Middle-East using 9/11 footage in a new, sci-fi context.

Having watched Corridor’s examination of War of the Worlds only a few weeks back, writing last week’s Triverse chapter did make me pause: I’m not using real video, because I’m telling my story in prose fiction, but the same ethical issues apply, and the line isn’t as clear as one might assume.

Saving Private Ryan‘s opening is full of gore and violence, and is based entirely on real events. While the characters are fictional, what is happening to them is more-or-less factual. When we see a soldier on fire, or another stumbling about picking up his dismembered arm, we can assume that such terrible things did really happen. They don’t use actual footage from World War 2, but their recreation is highly specific. The consensus there is that it is appropriate, that the film is treating the subject matter with respect. As a teenager, I felt like I finally understood something of the horror of war, in a way I’d not before.

But it’s still a pretty exciting opening to a movie!

Does it work because Saving Private Ryan is a war movie, takes its material seriously, and is set in the ‘real world’? Take the same kind of gore and put it into a straightforward horror movie and it gets viewed quite differently: in fact, a lot of horror and action movies revel in violence (as a teenager I loved all sorts of splattery b-movies).

Then there’s the remake of Battlestar Galactic. Its opening devastation is very much a response to the 9/11 terror attacks, but it’s the third season’s desert-set guerilla warfare and suicide bombings that really ramp up the metaphorical connections to world politics of the 2000s. I thought it was clever and insightful, if a little on the nose, and it was one of the very few pieces of fiction (or even non-fiction, to be honest) that were dealing maturely with the ‘war on terror’ at the time. I’m sure some people would have preferred the show stick to punching evil robots.

It’s not unusual to see a reactionary response to strong themes in fiction: the demand that politics be ‘kept out’, although this tends to be code for “I don’t like my views to be challenged.” The complication is that apolitical art doesn’t really exist: even the most mundane, generic, formulaic bit of pop is still making choices and decisions and depicting the world in a particular way. Paw Patrol is generic toddler entertainment, but it goes all-in on respect for authority and police, which is giving young kids a very specific idea of the world. Throwaway superhero popcorn movies are still making points about strength and governance, whether consciously or not. Blundering into political commentary by accident is still commentary. Then you have the opposite end of the spectrum, such as Captain America: Brave New World’s bizarre determination to say absolutely nothing about the world, even within an overtly political plot setup — I reckon that reticence tells us a lot about popular filmmaking in 2025, compared to 2014’s The Winter Soldier. Note also the reported cancellation of an Assassin’s Creed game set in the American Reconstruction period, due to it being “too political in a country too unstable.”

Silence can be as loud as a shout.

Point is, as creators we all wade into these waters whether we want to or not. Tolkien was writing about a magic ring, a Dark Lord and centuries of warfare. I’m writing about clashing cultures, migration and integration in an overtly fantastical setting. Inevitably, readers are going to see things in the text that the author may not have intended, and that’s generally a good thing — it’s part of the deal.

When we’re doing our jobs as writers, stories should be triggering all sorts of sparky thoughts. We want readers to form a personal connection, to be the final contributor to the story and engage in that two-way conversation, with the page as an intermediary. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Sometimes that means running into unexpected misinterpretations, like the accidental-then-deliberate, meme-ified misreading of The Matrix by Extremely Online people. Or men who watch Fight Club and somehow come away thinking it’s an instruction manual for life. Or those who claim to be long term fans but complain about modern Star Trek being ‘woke’ — presumably having not paid attention to the franchise’s entire history. Or tech bros that watch The Terminator and 2001: A Space Odyssey and think “yeah, that’s a good idea!”

The only way to avoid that kind of misinterpretation, I think, is to do what Tolkien most wanted to avoid. We can become ‘dominating’ authors and force our viewpoints into readers’ minds, making everything very obvious and surface-level and dictated. Everyone can pick their fiction so that it specifically and algorithmically fits their world view. But that seems far less interesting to me. It’s how you treat an infant when you’re reading bedtime stories. Far better to risk misinterpretation in pursuit of more exciting engagement with the text.

To come back to the start, how can we figure out if we’re treating topics with the necessary respect? How do we identify the line between valid reference and cynical exploitation? I wonder if the answer is in empathy, and in making an effort to better understand those we’re writing about. The producers of War of the Worlds presumably didn’t much care for the origins of the archival footage they were using, or the people affected by those events — they just saw a cool visual.

Making the effort to empathise hopefully moves us away from using a situation, a place, a historical moment, as simple set dressing or a cheap shortcut — instead, we’re attempting to form a connection to the people who were there, and draw a line from them to us.

I don’t know if that’s enough, but it’s all I’ve got.

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Meanwhile.

I’m thinking of doing Movember next month. That’s the annual fundraising event to raise awareness of mental health and testicular cancer. As some of you may know, I have a beard and have always had a beard from the age of about 22 onwards. I tend to look a bit like this:

Without a beard, I look like this:

You can see the problem.

By the end of November I could look like one of these idiots:

Anyway — I’ll ping the link round to my donation page once we hit November. Exciting!

Years back I interviewed Kieron Gillen for a podcast I was producing and he’s very much one of those people who generously opens up their brain and lets you jump in and have a rummage. As such, if you’re the sort of person who is interested in how stories get made (and if you’re reading my newsletter…you probably are), always be sure to listen to KG when you get the chance.

Such as:

It’s sometimes reassuring to hear another author of serial fiction have a similar approach to my own. It suggests I’m not mad, or, at the very least, that we’re both mad.

Right, that’s me done for this week. See most of you on Friday for more Tales from the Triverse. It might be the most nuts chapter I’ve written so far.