on villains

the telegraph wrote about the "50 greatest villains in literature". and directly from the world of science fiction and fantasy (at least as i see it, for some of the books i'll mention below are not generally acknowledged as belonging to the sf&f genres), we get:

satan, from john milton's paradise lost, in number 1;

voldemort, from j.k.rowling's harry potter, in number 5;

count dracula, from bram stoker's dracula, in number 13;

mr hyde, from robert louis stevenson's the strange case of dr jekyll and mr hyde, in number 20;

sauron, from j.r.r.tolkien's the lord of the rings trilogy, in number 25;

cthulhu, from hp lovecraft's the call of cthulhu, in number 26;

mrs coulter, from philip pullman's his dark materials trilogy, in number 35;

surtur, from david lindsay's a voyage to arcturus, in number 37;

o'brien, from george orwell's nineteen eighty-four, in number 41,

grendel's mother, from beowulf, in number 43;

the white witch, from cs lewis' the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, in number 45.

not a bad score. not at all.

(found the telegraph's article here, by the way)