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The Language of the Night: The Evolution of the Villain [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-03-17

Instead of a wicked witch, you would have a queen — bright as an AI deepfake, deep as a Ted talk, beautiful as a Tiktok! All shall love me and despair…..

We’ve come a long way from the looming evil of Mordor.

Science fiction and fantasy writers — well, writers in general, really — seek to envision evil as the force to be battled, whatever the stakes. There’s always an antagonist, a bad guy, a villain who stands between the protagonist and their goal. There has to be: novels are conflict and resolution, after all, right?

So we have The Great Eye, the Corporation, the enemy — be it a soul-stealing virus or a mysterious magic-wielding culture of Hierarchs that comes from the North or the bully in the next town who just wants to take over your town.

As you might guess, evil imagined by John Scalzi is going to be something rather different. In Starter Villain, Scalzi takes the supervillain as his subject: it’s not exactly a tale of good versus evil; it’s more a story of, well, ordinary versus evil.

Starter Villain falls more into the Redshirts category in the Scalzi canon than it does in the Old Man’s War one. What that means is that it’s light and funny with a deep thread of anger and an insightful take on human ambition. Where Redshirts is about finding purpose in life and defining what that purpose will be, Starter Villain is about an everyman who is offered a great measure of power, but his real ambitions are more … well, tangible.

Charlie Fitzer has reached a point in his life where he has few options. Late-stage capitalism hasn’t been kind to him, and his only companions are his cats Hera and Persephone, both of whom adopted him. He’s the kind of person who cats are willing to adopt and he’s willing to be adopted by them, so we identify with him, and not only because of the cats part, but also the late-stage capitalism thing.

He has about reached bottom when his long-estranged uncle dies, leaving him as heir to a parking garage empire. Except the bequest comes with a condition: that Charlie stand up for him at the funeral home, where the people who show up for the memorial are not exactly mourners, as becomes clear when one of them tries to stab the corpse.

“Let me guess,” I said to the stabber, “you’re the asshole who sent the floral arrangement with the ‘Dead? Lol okay’ message on it.” “That’s not me,” the stabber said. “It might have been my boss.” --page 43

It turns out that all the “mourners” are not mourners, but employees of Uncle Jake’s competitors, all sent to make sure that Uncle Jake is actually dead. (He is. Dead, that is.) From this, Charlie deduces that either the parking garage business is a lot more savage than we on the outside think, or there was more to his uncle than he knew.

Of course it’s the latter. His uncle was a villain. And Charlie has inherited his empire, complete with a volcano lair (unlimited geothermal power), smart dolphins and cats, and a badass assistant to advise him as his uncle’s enemies circle like vultures, wanting to pick apart his villainous empire, thinking that Charlie is so far over his head that he’s easy pickings.

Part of the novel’s charm is the application of common sense in the face of ostentation. Yes, there’s a lot of humor and wisecracking — that’s signature Scalzi. If you like Scalzi, you’ll like Starter Villain. When Charlie observes to his “assisant” Til (for Mathilda) that all the young men gathered to pitch their projects at a Shark Tank-like Lake Como gathering are staring at her, she corrects him: No, they’re staring at Charlie, because he’s the only man their age and he has his own table and his own cat. They know he’s Someone, but they don’t know who he is. And it’s making them furious.

If you look beneath the surface, though, there’s a deep critique of business culture, corporatization, and commodification. And that’s signature Scalzi, too.

One of SFF’s great strengths is the ability to ask “what if.” As in, “what if being a supervillain were a real thing? What would it look like?” What would evil look like in today’s world? Turns out it wears a suit and speaks like a tech bro. What would the supervillain business be in today’s world? How would it interact with governments in a world where there are almost no secrets and villainy wears a corporate face and pays taxes (or avoids them — that part is reality, too).

That’s what the book is about: the supervillains Charlie meets style themselves as Ernst Stavro Blofeld, complete with a pet cat (and that’s a mostly-underappreciated plot point for much of the novel), but their role in the world is more a combination of wastrel heir and office manager. The old school villains knew how to function, but the new generation is all flash and arrogance. No wonder they’re flailing.

One of the novel’s charms is that Charlie knows he’s in over his head, and he knows what he doesn’t know. Unlike the LARPing James Bond villains, he has a leg up on his opposition: they think he knows nothing at all. Big mistake

A starter job is of course an entry level position in either a company or a vocation. This works if you think of Charlie as a starter villain. In gaming, though, a starter villain is the first bad guy the player encounters — they’re warm ups for the real bad guys that player will meet later. It works both ways.

It’s not the heaviest lift, but it’s a really fun outing, and it makes poking fun at Elon just a little more pleasurable. I mean, talk about a guy who would never be adopted by any self-respecting cat….

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