Human in Death: Morality and Mortality in J. D. Robb's Novels

2017 | Essays

Fiction, by effectively combining profit with delight, creates a world for entertainment and moral reflection. This book explores the best-selling futuristic suspense series In Death, written by romance legend Nora Roberts under the pseudonym J D Robb. Centring on troubled NYPSD Lieutenant Eve Dallas and her billionaire tycoon husband Roarke, the In Death novels offer a compelling model for human flourishing. Through close readings of over fifty novels and novellas published over two decades, Ali analyses the ethical world of Robb's New York circa 2060. Ali explores Robb's depictions of egalitarian relationships, satisfying work, friendships built on trust, and an array of models of femininity and family. At the same time, the series' imagined future replicates some of the least admirable aspects of contemporary society. Sexual violence, police brutality, structural poverty and racism, and government surveillance persist in Robb's fictional universe, raising urgent moral challenges. So do ordinary ethical quandaries around trust, intimacy, and interdependence in marriage, family, and friendship.

Ali celebrates the series' ethical successes, while questioning its critical moral omissions. She probes the limits of Robb's imagined world and tests its possibilities for fostering identity, meaning, and mattering of human relationships across social difference. Ali capitalises on Robb's futuristic fiction to reveal how careful and critical reading is an ethical act -- the happy confluence of profit and delight.

Kecia Ali (Author)