And it's been firmly established that any such accusation about Dave Mack's intentions in writing A Time to Heal is at best a fundamental misreading of the text, at worst a malicious lie. [redacted] As I've already pointed out, it is grossly oversimplistic and wrong to assume that a writer's only motive in telling a story is political commentary or allegory. That may be an influence, but it's merely one of the many factors that shape a story.
For another thing, it was clear that [redacted] was presented as an evil, horrifying thing. Yes, [redacted] was for the best, but it required a disturbing moral compromise to do it, and what really underlined that compromise was that [redacted] that took things way too far. If anything, that was intended as a cautionary statement, pointing out the dangers of crossing the line in the name of what you think is right. It was saying that if you compromise your principles at all, even for the best of reasons, you can't pretend you haven't been seriously tainted.
I can't understand how anyone can read a David Mack book and see only a simplistic, black-and-white moral parable. His books are full of unnerving, ambiguous situations, stories where the heroes have to make uneasy moral compromises and questionable choices, stories where the nominal antagonists can be sympathetic and admirable, stories where it's unclear whether anyone has really done the right thing. If you think Dave is endorsing or celebrating any of the dark actions taken against the antagonists of his books, you're not paying attention at all. What Dave is doing is not letting his characters off the hook. That's his trademark as a writer. He doesn't pull his punches. He doesn't just bring characters to the brink of death, he kills them hard. He doesn't just have characters flirt with the line between good and evil, he shoves them across it and down the slippery slope, so that they have to face the full, horrifying extent of what it means to make an ethical compromise. He doesn't leave them, or the readers, the comfortable recourse of pat, easy answers. Mirror Spock has to become as ruthless and violent as the Empire he hopes to overthrow. Bashir has to shoot to kill in order to survive on his spy mission. Lonnoc Kedair has to live with a friendly-fire mishap that she caused. And Admiral Ross has to face the knowledge that when he made a deal with the devil for the good of the Federation, he wasn't as able to control that devil as he'd fooled himself into thinking.
