The 5 Most Monstrous Child Characters in SF/F

Gaia (Light, by Michael Grant)
A rapidly-aging child possessed by darkness, hell-bent on murdering everyone within hours of her birth? Oh my god, so much no thank you. Grant’s fast-paced, wildly fun series culminates in Light, in which Gaia initially appears “indeterminately badass,” and quickly scales up to “monstrously homicidal” as she attempts to destroy, well, everything. This is a story where missles are fired directly at a young girl in an attempt to kill it with fire (they fail), so that should give you some idea of just how nasty Gaia is. Definitely one of the most monstrous child creations to ever grace the page.

Joffrey Baratheon (A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R.R. Martin)
King Joffrey is one of the most hated characters in both the book and TV versions of Martin’s epic. The product of incest, alternately coddled by his doting mother and disdained by his father, Joffrey’s initial hints of sadism and misanthropy quickly bloom into full-on sociopathy once the crown hits his head. What makes Joffrey monstrous, though, is that while he’s totally insane, he’s not dumb, and readers and viewers can easily imagine the nightmarish decades of his potential rule over Westeros, especially once he’s (inevitably) destroyed, killed, or banished anyone, including his mother, who might wield influence against him. To say we all breathed a sigh of relief when… well, spoilers, is an understatement.

Ender (Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card)
Ender commits genocide. While he isn’t aware that his actions are real when he does so, that doesn’t necessarily make him sympathetic, as one imagines there’s a psychological test to be made out of whether children opt for genocide over, say, any other option. Ender is often shown acting in sociopathic and cold-blooded ways, after all; he gets into Battle School through an act of brutal aggression he’s calmly able to justify intellectually, and his brother is clearly a sociopath who even Ender fears—it runs in the family, doesn’t it? Whether purposeful or not (and there are some hints that Ender would have chosen his final attack against the Buggers even if he’d been aware of its reality), the fact remains: Ender destroyed an entire race of sentient beings. It doesn’t get much more monstrous than that.

Alia (Dune, by Frank Herbert)
Any child named an Abomination before she’s even born has the odds stacked against her, of course, and Alia turns out to be exactly as monstrous as expected. Although she seems to tame the voices of her ancestors and her own powers, she’s also a murderous little minx who eventually becomes a power-mad, drug-addled, doomed ruler—though to be fair, that’s when she’s more or less an adult. Let’s consider instead the 4-year old Alia, who wanders a battlefield cutting down straggling enemies with a crysknife, and be happy she’s fictional.

Susan Pevensie (The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis)
Oh, sure, on paper Susan does nothing particularly monstrous, and most people interpret her absence in The Last Battle as Lewis’s vague feint towards misogyny and a dislike for women who favor fashion, makeup, and (shudder) boys. But let’s stick with the facts: Aslan, a wise and somewhat cuddly (but never tame) god who has welcomed everyone else into the next world after the apocalypse (including several who are severely flawed and have made serious mistakes throughout the series), doesn’t allow Susan in. You can hem and haw all you want, but whatever Susan did to deserve that, it must have been bad.
Did we miss any bad seeds?