Best TrekLit Villain - Star Trek Magazine wants to know...

For the upcoming villains issue we want to include at the very least a sidebar, but hopefully a small feature about the best TrekLit villains over the years. I'm deliberately discounting characters created for the screen versions of the franchise - e.g. Dukat - who have been used as the focus of novels, but just want to know who you think the best villains created for TrekLit have been. I guess we can also include the comics (perhaps not the Gold Key ones unless there's someone incredible we shouldn't miss)...

Nominations via here, and if there's enough diverse choice, and enough time to do it, maybe we can run a poll as well.

Paul

PS For the benefit of those who kept listing him when we ran the poll on Best Villains earlier in the year, Real People don't qualify!!!

 

There goes my idea.

 

The Redeemers (New Frontier might not be my favourite series, but I enjoy it and I loved the Redeemers. Praise Xant! ).

Admiral A. Vokar ("Serpents Among the Ruins"). Everybody's favourite Jingoistic Romulan.

Governor M. Sen from "Rosetta" (I loved him. Wonderful villain. He sort of reminded me of a low-key, more realistic Emperor Palpatine, only he wanted to leave behind the power rather than consolidate it. That's so much more interesting and amusing.)

I quite liked Talma Pren in "Well of Souls". She's not a main focus as the above three are, but I loved how she tried to manipulate everyone- including Starfleet- and her attitude amused me, too. It was great to see a villain succeed in tricking the Enterprise (You can't outsmart McCoy, however, even when his only contribution is to appear on a viewscreen for a few pages )

The Wanderer is quite good. The combination of her great power and obvious youth (by Shedai standards, of course) is interesting. She really gives her people a face.

 

Dr. Evan Wilson. She managed to suck all the attention away from Uhura, in a book that had "Uhura" in the title. That's villainous, IMO.

 

Iliana Ghemor - we never actually saw her on the DS9 series, right? She was referenced in the episode "Second Skin" but I think the character's first proper appearance was in Treklit. Someone correct me if I'm wrong about that.

 

It's hard to pick just one. Some of my favorites have been:

-Ariel (Giriaenn) from Christopher's The Buried Age: Some would say she's not a villain exactly, because she was just doing what she thought was right. The ambiguity of it makes her interesting.

-The Neyel from Martin/Mangels The Sundered & The Red King: The Human offshoots were a great creation by Michael Martin & Andy Mangels. They gave the Excelsior a run for it's money, and made the crew look a little deeper into themselves to see what they could become under the right circumstances.

-The Caeliar from David Mack's Destiny trilogy: If it wasn't for them, we would have never had the Borg. This another kind of "villain" (or villains) that doesn't fit the mould of a mutashe twirling cackling bad guy. Good guys at heart, but their actions made them, if not BAD, then at least responsible for tonnes of wanton destruction across the galaxy.

-Andrew Ellis (Changeling pretending to be a SF officer in the Voy-R): He was a pretty decent adversary for Chakotay and the "fresh from the DQ" Voyager crew. Being in the DQ for the Dominion War meant the Voyagers never had to deal with the Founders, so it was nice to see them tackle an AQ villain (or GQ if you want to be precise).

I know these aren't all classic "villains" (other than Ellis), but I've always found that the best villains are the ones who don't think what they are doing is wrong. Ithink it makes for better stories and villains.

 

^Ariel, the Caeliar and the Neyel are all great, I agree! I personally couldn't bring myself to call them villains though. I certainly acknowledge your point about their unconventional antagonism, but for me personally they're too far from what I'd call villainous.

 

Antagonists is the perfect descriptive for those three . When I used them as villains, I was still on the fence about whether they were truly villains or not. The term "villainous" always makes me think of bad guys like Cobra Commander or Skeletor or Lex Luthor. Bad guys who only care about destroying their "hero" counterpart. In other words, boooorrrrrrring . As I said before; In my opinion, the best villains are the ones who don't consider what they are doing to be wrong.

 

Not... Sweeney!

 

Depends. We did see a video of herself she made, so that might count as appearing depending on who you ask.

 

As Paul said, he's excluding characters created for the screen. Iliana Ghemor was created in a DS9 episode, regardless of whether she appeared or not, so she doesn't qualify for this.

 

This is something that's come up a lot in the discussions we've had on the Top 10 running in the magazine - Lance Parkin covers it in the opening article, and at least two of the contributors defend the people they're discussing...

...and Sweeney was funnily enough one of the people I expected to get included from the comics!

 

^If you need another contributor, all you have to do is ask !

 

PM me on here...!

 

I'll say Adrik Thorsen from Federation, for sheer nastiness and persistence.

 

I have kind of a nostalgic soft spot for Commander Kumara from the original stories in Alan Dean Foster's Star Trek Log Seven and Log Ten. Kumara was Foster's attempt at giving Kirk the kind of recurring Klingon nemesis he never got onscreen, and he was an enjoyable villain, partly because of the almost amiable antagonism and history he shared with Kirk. (Wasn't there something about them briefly being roommates during some exchange program in their youth?) I always imagined him with the voice of Jonathan Harris, which fit his debonair malevolence quite well.

 

Me too one of the few bad guys to be memorable even years afterwards.

 

I asked ADF about Kumara when we spoke for the movie novelisation interview, and he was part of the script ADF wrote for the show's potential 4th season. He'd forgotten about the exchange thing... but who knows whether that could reappear now he's back on the Trek writing program!

 

Antagonists and villains are words often used interchangably, but usually because people have forgotten what the word antagonist actually means.
Who's the antagonist in Die Hard? It's Bruce Willis, i.e. the hero, not protagonist and villain Alan Rickman...

As for folks who don't consider what they're doing to be wrong... You can have evil do that- the Nazis tried to justify their Final Solution as right, according to their worldview.

OTOH, you can have good vs good - think of DC vs Marvel superheroes, or Zatoichi Vs Yojimbo, or all manner of crossover fanfics - I *still* want to see Buffy Vs Duncan MacLeod...

 

I'd third Adrik Thorsen.

Others that come to mind:

• The Grigari (Federation, Millennium)
• Androvar Drake (The Ashes of Eden)
• Salla of the Nazgul (DC Comics Second Series)
• Omne (the Phoenix novels)
• Colonel Mitra (The 34th Rule)