Supervillainy: A Guest Post by John Scalzi
A hiss-terical story about the (un)luckiest nepo-baby of all time, Starter Villain follows an everyman who inherits his uncle’s supervillain empire. Discover John Scalzi’s inspiration for writing Starter Villain and the challenges he faced while writing, down below.
Paperback
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Starter Villain
Starter Villain
By John Scalzi
In Stock Online
Paperback
$16.99
$18.99
Inheriting your uncle’s supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who’s running the place.
Inheriting your uncle’s supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who’s running the place.
The problem I have with most supervillains in movies and books and television shows (and comics, and video games, and so on) is that they’re just not all that realistic. Not that super villains couldn’t exist — we have some current billionaires that fit the bill just fine, alas — but that in entertainment, they aren’t really all that thought out. Sure, they all want to take over the world, fine, great… but what then?
As in, you’re a supervillain, your goal is to be The Supreme Ruler of Everything. You’ve vanquished all the forces arrayed against you, and your ascendance to the top of every heap has happened. Congrats! Now what are you going to do about floods in Bangladesh? Or crop failures in Peru? Or lead-lined pipes in Michigan? You are in charge now, pal. You wanted this. So now deal with it. Or at the very least, now hire the people who will deal with it.
This is the side of supervillainy no one talks much about, the day-to-day aspect of crushing all opposition and becoming Emperor of Everything. Now you stop being a supervillain and have to become a super-bureaucrat, which is a whole lot less fun. Or, if you don’t become a super-bureaucrat, everything goes to hell, and then congratulations, you’re the Supreme Ruler of a Big Damn Pile of Crap, which, I mean, yay for you?
Now, there is a reason why, in entertainment, there is not much focus on supervillains shifting into bureaucratic mode: because the supervillains are the antagonists, not the protagonists, and the focus of our story is almost always the hero and their attempts to thwart the supervillain’s latest plan to take over everything. Action! Adventure! A big fight scene at the end! There’s no place to put the bureaucracy in any of that. Even in the entertainments where the protagonist is the supervillain, there’s often some hero (now the antagonist) trying to stop them, and then the story is about that.
The thing is, I am interested in how supervillainy might work in the real(ish) world. As in, how would you have a secret lair in a world where spy satellites exist and can find you? How would you keep actual governments from simply labeling you as a terrorist and seizing all your assets and compromising your communications with your minions? How do you project power into the world without being seen as a threat to countries like the US and China, who could, without doubt, turn you, and anyone unfortunate enough to be standing next to you, into kibble pretty much any time they wanted to?
And most of all, how do you make that story fun to read, with a main character that people want to cheer for?
This was the challenge of writing Starter Villain: Exploring the other side of supervillainy, the part where the supervillain actually has to do his (or her! Or their!) thing for longer than the two hours it takes to watch a film, or the 300 pages of a novel, or the length of a TV season. The part where the processes of supervillainy make sense as a business model, and where, while taking over the world would be just fine, thank you, if you don’t ever become Supreme Ruler, you still have a thriving and satisfying career.
Oh, and there are cats. Because how can you be a supervillain without cats? Where’s the fun in that?
— John Scalzi