Leviathan

I read Leviathan this weekend, a book set in an alternate version of World War I. In the book there are two opposing sides to the war, the Darwinists, Britain, France, and Russia, and the Clankers, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. The Darwinists are follows of Darwin, who in this reality not only theorized about evolution but discovered the “threads of life” as in DNA, and how to mold it to make entirely new species. The Clankers are far ahead of their time in mechanics and have made giant machines that act as land battleships. The book is told through the eyes of Aleksander, the fictional child of Franz Ferdinand, and Deryn, a girl who has joined the British air fleet (she is stationed on a massive flying whale that is an ecosystem in itself). Around the middle of the book the air whale that Deryn is on crashes near the abandoned castle that Aleksander is hiding in in Switzerland. Aleksander goes to help them, but the entire time he is aboard the whale he is disgusted by it, and views it as a godless fabrication of what should be.
In reality though, how are the Darwinists animals any worse than the killing machines of the Clankers? An animal, strange or not, has some sort of feeling, and it’s alive. Something alive has the capacity to learn and change, and to make its own decisions at least to some extent. If it is alive it can find a way to coexist without totally destroying everything it touches. However, a machine has no capacity for learning or feeling. It cannot make any decisions its pilot or mechanic does not make for it. It cannot stop killing, as that is its purpose, and it will just as easily kill its creator as it will its creator’s enemy. While interfering with the genetic coding of nature seems to be rather godless, creating something for the singular purpose of warfare seems to be a lot more godless.