This is the central point in a Piers Anthony novel – BEARING AN HOURGLASS – where a Senator “of indifferent qualities” gets a poison capsule placed in his medicine cabinet by the good guys, such that a more commendable legislator can replace him; our hero unsuspectingly helps the bad guys neutralize that poison (which would, technically, save an innocent life), but after some debate realizes he should go back and make sure a poisoned pill winds up in the Senator’s medicine cabinet after all.
Late in the third Hunger Games book, Mockingjay, Katniss and a group of rebels are making their way through the Capitol and wind up in the apartment of an ordinary citizen. I don’t remember the exact details, but Katniss kills the woman who lives there in order to prevent her from raising the alarm.
Missed the edit window, but I wanted to add that while the Hunger Games books are pretty violent and Katniss had killed a number of other people by this point, this was IIRC the first time she killed anyone who wasn’t trying to kill her. Even during the Games she’d never had to kill one of the nicer or more sportsmanlike competitors. But while letting the Capitol woman go would have been very dangerous for Katniss and her crew, the woman herself is really guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place (her own home!) at the wrong time.
C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons,” (1951) (on which the film Idiocracy is very, very loosely based, with a completely different ending): John Barlow, a middle-class American of the mid-20th-Century, is put in suspended animation by an experimental anesthesia, and awakes in an overpopulated world where dysgenic pressure has turned almost the entire population of the world into “morons” (a word you could still use clinically in 1951). However, there is also a hidden elite, a secret society of geniuses who have been carefully choosing their mates for generations and centuries (think Heinlein’s Howard Families, but selected for intelligence, not longevity), and who occupy low-profile advisory positions in business and government everywhere, gently correcting their inferior superiors’ blunders at every step, and who are desperately overworked trying to keep the morons from completely destroying the world – and keeping their own existence secret, for fear of pogroms and lynchings if the moronic general public knew about them. Once they tried simply withdrawing, holing up at their secret base in Antarctica, and before long the world was on the verge of total war. Barlow asks, “Why don’t you just let them go to Hell in their own way?” The answer is, because of all the tons of rotting flesh that would result. (A problem that would solve itself if they could just hole up for an entire year, but never mind.) So, they ask Barlow, who is from the past and looks at things from a different perspective, if he can think of a practical solution to the “population problem,” or “popprob.” He agrees, on the condition he be made World Dictator. The solution he comes up with
is genocide. He starts an ad campaign about how wonderful it is to live on Venus. All the morons believe it, and they all, to the last one, get on board rocketships to take them to Venus. But the ships apparently just crash into the oceans or somethng. Problem solved. The billions of morons and their bodies are neatly disposed of. No humans left alive on Earth save the carefully-bred geniuses, and Barlow. But, at the very end, the disgusted geniuses finally bundle Barlow himself onto one of those ships, and he dies. Because “Jack Ketch is never asked to dinner no matter how many shillings you pay him to do your dirty work.”
Now, Barlow is the protagonist but not a “hero” by the OP’s definition, he’s a greedy bastard. But the geniuses are such well-intentioned heroes – and Barlow can’t carry out his project without their help, which they give freely and with no apparent hesitation (though some regret it afterwards, to the point of suicide) – so, the conditions of the OP are exactly satisfied.
By the end, that’s true, but at this point in the movie, he was pretty much being sold as a good guy. He had been supposedly found redemption with his wife
Reminded by another thread, and possibly stretching the definition of hero (though I definitely consider him a strong hero, even if he’s not the protagonist):
spoilers for His Dark materials:
[spoiler] Lord Asriel, in His Dark Materials, essentially uses a child as a source of power to open a bridge between worlds.
At the time we had no idea as to the scope and grandeur of his longterm goals, and he just came across as a ruthless scientist willing to kill a child For Science, or to piss off the Church of his world. By book three we find out his true goals, and IMO Roger was a necessary sacrifice.[/spoiler]
See post 56 boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=15844726&postcount=56 and the followup in post 63 http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=15848619&postcount=63
Derp. Missed those, didn’t read page 2.
Not killing an innocent, but a story where a hero takes deliberate action that could be seen as immoral.
In Tuf Voyaging, Haviland Tuf is a guy who stumbles upon a derelict spaceship from a long gone race. The ship is a huge thing packed to the brim with biological development labs and computers, a reservoir of genetic material and bio-technology. He is a bit of a weirdo, but decides to use the spaceship to go around to planets and solve their problems using the technology. It’s told in the form of a series of short stories.
Three of them involve a planet where he has to make return visits. The problem is that the planet is hemmed in and the population cannot colonize other planets, but they have a cultural need to have large families. They have a huge population explosion and nowhere to expand. He tells them they need to institute population controls, but they refuse, so he has to keep coming up with ways to feed the people (mmmm, meatbeasts). He even gives a lady a pregnant cat as an object lesson.
Finally, he’s called in third time and so he
sets off a sterilization agent so that the bulk of the population will be rendered sterile, pretty much at random, not selectively. For their own good. They refused to act, so he did.
You missed a couple of things. First, the final time he is there, the planet has developed enough tech to overcome his defenses and force him to do something, or else. And most importantly, he tells the woman that he has been talking to throughout the stories about the sterilization effects, before they go off. He leaves it up to her if they will be used, or not.
:: retches ::
Look, Waldo, I thought we had an agreement. Everybody promised to refer to Piers Anthony as a TYPIST, not a novelist, and in return I agreed to not to go back in time and blackmail a FOX executive into fucking with Firefly so that it would only last half a season, instead of, as in the original timeline, five.
Never mind. On your own head be it. As long as I’m back there I think I’ll fuck with the movie franchise too.
Well, not exactly. He does point out to them that if they breach his defenses that will detonate the small nuclear warhead he’s placed in the part of the ship that holds the technology they want. He also later points out that he could offer alliance to their enemies and with them to help his defenses destroy all life on their world.
YMMV, but Mantel’s take on Cromwell is probably the most Marty Stuish thing I’ve read in serious literature since Colleen McCulloch’s portrayal of Julius Caesar in her
*Masters of Rome * series. Mantel writes Cromwell almost superhumanly talented in virtually all forms of human endeavour and clearly the reader is supposed to admire him.
I don’t think Cromwell views Anne as innocent in Mantel’s novel though, and the destruction of her lovers as part of her downfall is merely a convenient way of punishing them for.their real crime in Cromwell’s eyes - their participating in Wolsley’s disgrace years earlier.
Not a fan of dirty old misogynists?
I’m not a fan of really, really, really bad writing. The first three APPRENTICE ADEPT novels were good reads when I was (or however old, it’s been many years), but not only did he beat his series to death, but they all became basically puzzle stories with no more heart than a golem.
Did you ever read the Author’s Note at the back of Bearing an Hourglass? It was literally the most self-congratulatory thing I’ve ever read. The way he praised his own prose, I thought I must’ve been reading a copy that’d been translated to sanskrit and back.
EDIT: for the sake of completion, what’shisname in On a Pale Horse also goes about turning off old peoples’ life support (at their request). The way they talked about death made me wonder what keeps Piers going at his age - I bet it’s internet porn.
You have now forced me to erase from history that scene in the Firefly pilot in which Kaylee and Inara make out, leading to the (half) season long love triangle with them and Zoe.
Never seen Firefly, I don’t watch stuff that got cancelled unfinished. Do your worst!
Does Death Note fit the part about innocent? Light kills dozens of non-criminals to save himself from getting caught over the course of the series. But it’s self-preservation, in a way, so are Ray Penbar and his colleagues innocent, for example?
No. Oh, hell, no!!
In Craig Thomas’s Cold War novel Firefox, an Eastern European - maybe even Russian? - member of a British spy network agrees to allow himself to be killed and then have his face so badly disfigured that his corpse will pass for someone else, in order to support an elaborate scheme to steal a high-tech Soviet jet fighter. And the good guys kill him just like that.
And since we’ve drifted away from the literature-only rule…
In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “In the Pale Moonlight,” Starfleet good-guy Benjamin Sisko agrees to deceive the Romulans as to the Dominion’s plans in order to bring the Romulans into a massive war on the Federation’s side, a war that the Federation would otherwise lose. Sisko raises no objection to the destruction of a shipful of innocent Romulans (well, as “innocent” as any Romulans ever really are) in order to maintain the deception.