Dynamite with a laser beam, guaranteed to blow your mind… in my humble opinion there is no character greater, no figure so interesting, as the classic sci-fi femme fatale. I’ve been obsessed with evil women from a formative age and it wasn’t long before I stopped reading about them and started writing about them. The following list isn’t only a love letter to some of the most iconic villains of the silver screen but an overview of the characters who inspired my own upcoming debut novel, Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock.
Mystique (X-Men)
If I wanted to get intellectual about why I found myself rooting for the bad guy from a young age, I might spout off something about queer coding and subversive sexuality. If I wanted to be truthful I would probably talk about watching Mystique choke out a politician in the first X-Men movie. Mystique’s morals were pretty flexible as well; unlike Jean Grey she didn’t have an evil/good switch on her back and as a young comics reader, trying to keep track of her motivations and intentions were all part of the fun.
Not only is Mystique blue and highly athletic, she is also canonically bisexual since the 1980s—although it’s hard to apply labels to someone who can effortlessly switch between genders and has been alive for a very, very long time. I would let her pick the restaurant, but the odds of her turning up to dinner with a human are admittedly low.
Laura (Under the Skin)
A very different kind of shapeshifter, Laura is an alien who wears a Scarlett Johannson-shaped woman suit in order to lure in her male victims. She spends most of her time on the hunt, driving around Glasgow in a white van looking for prey. Being Glasgow-based myself this would make dinner a lot easier to arrange.
Laura isn’t much of a conversationalist but if I arranged a table by the window then perhaps she would enjoy people watching. Her detached stare was something that fascinated me when I first saw this film. Unlike other fish out of water characters, Laura doesn’t fit the “born sexy yesterday” trope. Her interest in the world isn’t childlike wonder but something more complex. In my own novel, the world is completely new to my protagonist, The Assassin, and there are shades of Laura in her initially cold and businesslike reaction to it. Like an alien, I wanted her to see things through the eyes of a stranger, not a tourist.
One thing to take into consideration is that Laura can’t eat human food; if she’s unable to choke down a bite of chocolate cake, then steak might be a tall order. In the novel of the same name by Ian Reid, she’s been sent to harvest human flesh (a delicacy on her own planet) so perhaps she could nibble on a waiter instead.
Number Six (Battlestar Galactica)
Despite being a Cylon, Number Six would be incredibly gracious and charming, pulling out my chair and casually picking out the best thing on the menu. By the end of the meal I have no doubt I would be enthusiastically betraying the human race for her.
Long before the thought of clones had ever popped into my mind, Number Six had left her mark on my psyche. In many ways, she was the aesthetic model for my Lulabelle with her Marilyn Monroe hair and perfect white smile. In the same way that my Bubble City is crawling with Lulabelles, Number Six has her own gang of copies, each with their own unique motivations and memories.
The only downside here is that if she was wearing her iconic red dress then I would definitely feel like a slob in comparison. In a way this might end up saving humanity; what with worrying about food stains on my shirt I might completely miss her hints to pass over the launch codes.
Ava (Ex Machina)
An intelligent human android with the face of a beautiful woman, Ava plays a deadly game of cat and mouse with her creator. Is she a murderer? Yes. Would I still go to dinner with her? Also yes.
The bigger question is would she accept the invitation? Self indulgently, I like to imagine that after her escape from a creepy billionaire bunker she would enjoy the chance to sit down and chat to someone other than said creepy billionaire. On a personal level, I don’t think she’s even that evil, only misunderstood. However, like poor unfortunate Caleb, I might be letting my huge crush on Alicia Vikander cloud my judgment here.
The way I see it, the answer to Eva’s morality lies in whether or not you believe she is intelligent (in which case she killed Caleb for nothing) or simply following her programming (to escape at any means necessary). None of this has much bearing on how she would feel about a steak dinner, but it is a point of fascination for me. If her only directive was to escape and this has been accomplished, what then? How would she react to social interaction that is completely frivolous and without purpose?
Would it even be appropriate to take her out for dinner if she can’t eat? At the very least all these questions would serve as good icebreakers.
Pris (Blade Runner)
With Pris, the runaway replicant, the struggle would be to get her to sit still in the seat when she would clearly rather be doing deadly cartwheels around the room or backflipping off tables.
Pris didn’t get much screen time but her story—a pleasure model willing to kill for the chance at a little more life—always struck me as incredibly tragic. She dies before getting to make any speeches about ‘attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion’ and I would honestly just enjoy the opportunity to hear her side of the story.
You may have noticed an android theme popping up here and in my defense the theme of evil femme-bots is far from uncommon. You don’t need to be an empath to work out why a robot designed to look like an impossibly desirable woman might turn out murderous.
Jobu Tapaki AKA Evil Joy (Everything, Everywhere, All at Once)
In a list made up primarily of robots and aliens, Joy would probably be the person most likely to appreciate a free meal. At the very least she would be capable of digesting it.
Realistically, she’s also probably the most fun option out of everyone and what’s more, the least likely to kill me on sight. Even though she already has a girlfriend, we could swap notes on navigating the modern gay dating scene. On top of all this, if eating steak got old, all she would have to do was snap her fingers and we could be eating a picnic in the park, chicken wings in the pub or doing a tasting menu at the Ritz.
Joy might be a relative newcomer to this category but she’s undeniably my favorite. She may be the ruthless embodiment of destructive nihilism but there’s a wild kind of freedom to her and it’s refreshing to have a villainess who isn’t a vamp or a seductress. In a way, she brings us right back to Mystique with her defiance of boundaries and set roles. With so many of the other characters on this list, their complexity lies in the roles laid out for them and their desire to break free. While I’m a sucker for those stories I’m here for the characters who know where those lines are and choose to tap dance back and forth across them.
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Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock will be coming out this January and it’s a novel packed full of female characters who will manipulate, lie, steal and kill. Sometimes for survival, sometimes for love and sometimes just for fun. Writing this list I realized that all these characters are also hiding in the pages of my book, in shades and reflections. It wasn’t a conscious choice but it’s not something I’m surprised by; I’ve carried them with me since I heard my first laser gun go off and saw the first flash of silver space dress.
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Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock
Maud Woolf is a one-time bookseller at Forbidden Planet. She was a student on the Glasgow University Creative Writing course and graduated with an MLit with distinction. She has had a number of short stories published in online magazines but this is her debut novel. She lives in Glasgow. Her first book is Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock.
