Happy Friday!! Machiavellianism in Science Fiction (WARNING: SPOILERS IN THIS ANALYSIS)

It's Friday, and I'm here for another post, my fourth one this week. Wow, I've produced a lot. So, this post represents a polar opposite from the last one, in terms of frequency in SF. If romantic love is rarer than hen's teeth in science fiction, than Machiavellianism is a dime a dozen, still, it is so common because it makes for a such a good character base in SF. Science fiction is full of "evil Emperors," "CEO tyrants," "Rogue Vigilantes" and other villains and anti-heroes that all have traits of Niccolo Machiavelli's principles in Il Principe, his landmark political treatise in the 16th century. Though the expression of Machiavellian traits varies from character to character, story to story, and series to series, it is safe to say that almost every SF series and story that I have seen has some kind of Machiavellian character in it. Be it Duke Lito and Lady Jessica in Frank Herbert's Dune, the Sith Order in Star Wars, the Umbrella Corporation and the Templar Knights in Resident Evil and Assassin's Creed, respectively, Teru Mikami and Light Yagami from Death Note, and Kaan from Star Trek, and many, many others that I am aware of but will not list for the sake of brevity, all have the same characteristics. They lust power, and they will instill the fear of God in the people they seek to manipulate to achieve that end. They all show no empathy at all when it comes to achieving their own ends, and will unhesitantly and in some cases gleefully kill their enemies in the most sociopathic way possible. Not to mention, it is a cliché amongst SF writers to give their "villians" the same demented, cackling laughter, but it just works. That cackle that Emperor Palpatine has when frying Yoda with Sith lightning at the end of Episode III, or the sick, mad laughter that Light Yagami engages in during Death Note's final sequence before giving a speech that would give Adolf Hitler a run for his money, and then getting shot 7 times by the one man he trusted, in both the Japanese and English versions, these two scenes have become something of pulp classics among SF and SF-anime fans. The point of this is, that Machiavellian behavior also has a literary benefit, as the fatal flaw in Machiavellianism always dooms the Machiavellian character: They place their trust in the wrong person.