Authors Electric

Iago and Othello I got to fretting over my fictional villains again the other night after flipping off the news (in more ways than one.) Too many real ones at the gates now. Though Trump and his barbarians are nothing new, their arrogance is more flagrant than any in my lifetime. The Death Star of demented greed appears at perigee, bloated with obscenely-financed self-assurance. You can't make these bastards up, even as parody. They're complicating my novel. Just when I think I've got the right shade of dystopia, my near-future narrative needs to turns darker. I've always found creating villains daunting. The memorable ones - from Iago, to Moriarity, to Voldemort - seem more challenging than heroes, particularly the multidimensional ones with whom we can empathize or at least identify with, like Medea, Lady Macbeth, and Raskolnikov. Not that villains are always needed. Protagonists can be their own worst enemies. A suitably sinister villain does, however, ap...