Today’s TTT is “Villains”.     We did this one ….over a decade ago, so I’m going to compose this list without looking at  that prior list, and try to focus on recent villains I’ve read.  Turns out it’s…a lot of science fiction.  But first, a Tuesday Tease!

With time, news becomes history. And history, it’s been said, is what happened to other people.For anyone who lived through September 11, time might dull the anger and grief that followed the death and destruction caused when terrorists turned four commercial passenger jets into guided missiles. But the memories won’t die. The pain of the deadliest terrorist attacks in American history cut too deep, leaving knots of psychic scars that make each day an experience of before and after, of adapting to a world changed physically by every security checkpoint and psychologically by every mention of the “homeland,” a word seldom used in the United States prior to the events now known as 9/11. (FALL AND RISE: THE STORY OF 9/11, Mitchell Zuckoff

(1) The daemon, DAEMON.   DAEMON is a novel about a machine intelligence that begins recruiting human agents  to help it take over/restructure society.  It’s really creepy.

(2) The antagonist in HUSK. I  read this recently and still don’t want to spoil it for people, but it’s slightly similar to DAEMON in being a distributed intelligence.  Imagine a villain that can watch you from every camera and take over robots to attack you.  

(3) Alt-Jason,  Dark Matter.   Blake Crouch.  A man fights for his family against….himself from another timeline, a man who resents the choices he made. 

(4) Dallas, the Joe Pickett series.  Dallas Cates is my favorite-to-hate villain of the Pickett series,  in part because he’s such a believable psycho – a charismatic and abusive rodeo star.  His multiple confrontations with Joe are far more memorable than the made-for-TV villains like Axel Soledad. 

(5) The Party, 1984 – or more specifically, O’Brien. 

(6) The Circle/The Every. Dave Eggers.  This is the same company, evolving from a social media giant in The Circle to one that monopolizes the consumer market as well. Imagine a fusion of Apple, Facebook, Google, Youtube,   tiktok,  wechat,  Amazon, etc –  a company so huge and pervasive it dominates culture. 

(7) The Bureau of Technological Control,  Influx. Daneil Suarez.  Not going to spoil anything, but the BTC are even more invasive than O’Brien. 

(8) Baron Harkonnen, Dune. Probably the most physically repulsive villain. He’s like a human Jabba the Hutt. (Actually, there was a human Jabba the Hutt, and every iteration of Harkonnen has been uglier.)

….honestly, I don’t read many books that have villains. For the last two, I’ll say…

(9) Earth. The Four Winds, Kristen Hannah.

(10) Mars. The Martian, Andy Weir.