Can we take a moment to appreciate the fact that K.A. Applegate might be the only sci-fi writer EVER who both (a) condemns the mass killing of aliens even if they are attacking the earth AND (b) shows why it’s sort of necessary in the situation?
It seems like too many other sci-fi stories go the route of Avengers or Doctor Who (S1) or Independence Day where a protagonist wiping out thousands of aliens is portrayed as uncomplicated heroism and we all celebrate at the end. Either that or they go the route of Avatar the Last Airbender (S3) or Buffy the Vampire Slayer (S5) where the characters that don’t want to engage in violence don’t have to get their hands dirty because a deus ex machina comes along and prevents that from having to happen. In both cases doing the right thing is also a matter of doing the easy thing.
Applegate, by contrast, doesn’t let her characters get away with an uncomplicated happy ending. She doesn’t say “they were aliens so it’s okay to kill them,” and she doesn’t offer them a third way out of their impossible choice. She gets into the hell that is war and doesn’t use the sci-fi genre to let her gloss over the dirty details.
Orson Scott Card also does this really well in Ender’s Game!
We’re going to have to agree to disagree about Ender’s Game, because while that book has a powerful anti-war message, it also [SPOILERS FOR ENDER’S GAME] features a main character who has no idea that he’s making decisions with real people’s lives at stake at any point while making those decisions. Ender literally believes that he’s playing a video game when he annihilates the buggers and the human navy, and so none of those decisions near the end of the novel reflect the thought process of “oh god I have to end lives to save lives and there are literally no good answers.” He’s actually more concerned with impressing his mentors and building up useful skills at the time than he is with any kind of moral quandary—which is, of course, exactly why everyone lies to him about it being a training simulation—but it’s hard to say what he would do when faced with the choice between consciously ending thousands of lives or passively allowing the potential for billions to end, because he never actually gets the chance to make that choice. [END SPOILERS] Still an awesome piece of sci-fi, but…
But where I think K.A. Applegate goes a step beyond that into disturbing-moral-paradox land is that [AND NOW FOR SOME ANIMORPHS SPOILERS] when Jake and Marco and Ax make the decision to wipe out 17,000 yeerks because the alternative is the death or enslavement of 5 billion humans, they know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve also been up close and personal with the yeerks at that point—Jake and Ax have both literally shared brain space with yeerks, however briefly—which means that unlike Ender they don’t have the option of dehumanizing the enemy, diffusing responsibility onto authority figures, or otherwise morally disengaging from their actions. Applegate shows us time and again that what the yeerks do to their hosts, making them into “The most total slaves in all of history, because even their own minds [aren’t] theirs anymore” (#20) is an atrocity to the point where any halfway decent person cannot allow it to stand, pretty much no matter what it takes to end that atrocity. [END ANIMORPHS SPOILERS] Both stories have messages that are not simply pro-war or anti-war so much as they are about the impossibility of moral simplicity in times of war. However, Animorphs features child characters consciously making impossible moral decisions under conditions of grey-and-black morality; Ender’s Game does not.