Evil Villains That Just Can't Cut It


You know, evil villains just can't cut it in most forms of literature and entertainment. Take the evil AI from the Terminator series, Skynet. Not only does it build its facilities in easy to find and easy to penetrate locations, it also builds them to standards that are very accommodating to human beings.

I mean, really - if you were a robot, and humans were your main enemy, wouldn't it be fairly obvious to make your own facilities in the fashion most inhospitable to human life? Maybe on the surface of the moon? Deep in a trench a few miles down in the ocean? If you're a robot, why not just induce nuclear winter and kill all those pesky humans *AND* get a planet free of all that nasty biological infestation it suffers from?

I think if I ever write a novel featuring an evil villain, I will write the character with enough intelligence to have The Evil Overlord List right on his bookshelf, along side The Prince and Jean-Paul Gaultier's "How to make your troops recognizable individuals with one size fits only them uniforms!"