What Happens When Science Fiction Villains Don’t Feel So Fictional

I wrote the villain. A podcast just confirmed the world I built wasn’t far off.

A few years ago, while researching gene editing for a speculative fiction series that would become The Helix Chronicles, I came across the work of Dr. George Church. I was fascinated. Synthetic biology, DNA data storage, species revival. It all felt like the edge of something astonishing, the kind of science that makes me want to keep reading long after I have technically gathered enough information to write the chapter.

But the farther I went, the more interested I became in a different question: What happens when brilliant ambition gets far enough ahead of the ethical guardrails?

That question eventually helped shape the fictional world of The Helix Chronicles. A biotech cabal emerged. At its center was a billionaire visionary convinced he was saving humanity, even as he became increasingly comfortable deciding what humanity should look like. He wasn’t based on Church, or on any single real person. What interested me were the recurring ingredients around powerful technologies: enormous ambition, blurry ethical boundaries, concentrated authority, and the dangerous ease with which I know what’s best can become a governing philosophy.

Then recently, I listened to Behind the Bastards’ two-part series on George Church and had one of those unsettling little moments: Oh no. I’ve seen this movie before.

The podcast draws a much more critical portrait than the straightforward scientific profiles I had encountered years earlier, spending time on Church’s ambitions, public statements, associations, and the broader techno-optimist world around some of his work. I’m not treating a podcast as the final word on a complicated person or career, but hearing those pieces assembled through that particular lens was fascinating. Someone else had wandered into territory I’d been exploring through fiction and was asking some uncomfortably familiar questions about ambition, influence, and what happens when technological possibility starts making its own case for inevitability.

That interested me more than any eerie feeling of having “predicted” something. Fiction writers don’t have magical forecasting powers, despite what we would very much like you to believe around book-launch time. We notice patterns. We take something happening now, turn one or two knobs farther than reality has, and ask what breaks.

And when I think about the biotech antagonists who interest me most, the frightening part isn’t really the gene editing. It’s the conviction behind it.

The best villains rarely believe they’re villains. Mine certainly don’t. They have evidence, intelligence, resources, and a coherent explanation for why everyone should get out of their way. They can explain the benefit. They can quantify the risk. They can probably produce an excellent slide deck.

They don’t twirl mustaches. They deliver TED Talks.

That’s the territory I keep coming back to in my fiction. Technology gives people new capabilities, but power determines who gets to use them, who absorbs the risk, and who gets a vote when somebody decides the future should follow a particular blueprint. Add enough money, enough institutional access, and enough certainty that this is for your own good, and science fiction does not have to travel particularly far.

Which is probably why I’ll keep writing these people.

The technology changes. The temptation doesn’t.

I’ll see you in the bookstores,

Monica

Note: This post discusses themes raised by publicly available reporting and podcast commentary about real-world science. The characters and organizations in my fiction are fictional and are not portrayals of George Church or any other individual.

If you’d like to hear the episodes that sent me back down this particular bioethical rabbit hole, I’ve linked the two-part Behind the Bastards series below.