Trust, loyalty, and the limits of hard-decision cynicism

Offering trust can be a way to build loyalty in a society where trust is scarce. Alex Clarke recalls that theme from a passage about Germany, although he cannot remember the exact quotation. Glynn Stewart accepts the idea to a point but finds that readers in his genre often expect a degree of cynicism he considers unrealistic. His own fiction frequently makes the ruthless man who claims to take hard decisions mistaken or villainous. The disagreement concerns what readers will accept as plausible, with Stewart resisting the assumption that cynicism guarantees realism.