Evil is a Niche Born of Incentives

Who decided your rent should be so high? It's a trick question. No one did. Workers flowed toward opportunity, a well-intentioned zoning map ensured that nothing new got built, and a pension fund of schoolteachers in Amsterdam that owns your building required its yield. The rent simply emerged from a push and pull of intentions.

If a name did come to mind, perhaps a greedy landlord or a corrupt municipal official, blame the old myths. They gave us good versus evil. Strike down the Dark Lord, and the world shall be healed. Except almost no one sees themselves as evil. When a system rewards harm, someone will arrive to do the harming. Evil is a niche born of incentives. Strike down whoever occupies the niche, and if the vacancy remains, the world fills it again.

A complex, dynamic world needs a map that updates as the terrain changes. It needs new causal frameworks translated into new myths. A single story carries a good argument, or two. A mythology is a parliament of them. Its gods and monsters are paradoxes the reader is invited to synthesize. The reward of that synthesis is a map to our own world.

So the fantasy in _Maya_ is the mythos, what the world feels like from the inside. The hard science fiction is the logos of why it had to emerge that way. The fantasy returns and asks, sure, but where next?

Zain and I spoke with _Locus Magazine_ about _Maya: Seed Takes Root_, new possibilities in storytelling, complex systems, narrative engineering, the taxonomy of intelligence, and the purpose of mythology. You can read the conversation in their August issue.