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Peter McLean was born near London in 1972, and went to school in the shadow of Norwich Cathedral where he spent most of his time making up stories. By the time he left school this was probably the thing he was best at, alongside the Taoist kung fu he had begun studying since the age of 13. He grew up in the Norwich alternative scene, alternating dingy nightclubs with studying martial arts and practical magic. He has since grown up a bit, if not a lot, and now works in corporate datacentre outsourcing for a major American multinational company. He is married to Diane and is still making up stories. In this piece, to accompany the publication of his second novel for Angry Robot featuring Don Drake, Dominion, he discusses why we all seem to go for the bad boys…

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I read an article in Starburst magazine recently called “The Rise of the Antiheroes”. It’s about the superhero movie genre, which I don’t follow closely, but all the same it made me think. Click here if you want to read it.

This is the line that made me think:

We want edgy characters with depth and personalities… Antiheroes are interesting because they’re complicated, just like us. We see their actions and their intentions, creating interest and intrigue.

I think that’s very true, but the thing that caught my attention is that the article frames this as a new trend and I don’t think it is, at least not in genre fiction. When I was a kid in the 1970s we all went and saw Star Wars and we were all suddenly obsessed with science fiction. I was only 5 then and not a big reader, but we had a TV at home. In the UK in the 70s, science fiction on TV consisted of Doctor Who and re-runs of original Star Trek that, after seeing Star Wars on the big screen, really didn’t look that great.

Then in 1978, Blake’s 7 appeared on TV. They didn’t have a lot of money to spend on special effects either, but the thing it did have that made it jump out at us impressionable kids was the characters. They were different. They were escaped convicts fighting the government, and they had a lot more about them than the rather wooden Starfleet officers we were used to.

The thing that’s really interesting to look back on is how we played our schoolyard games based on this show. No one wanted to play Blake. Blake was the titular hero of the show, the chief good guy. And he was boring. Avon, on the other hand, while still on the side of the “good guys”, wasn’t boring at all. Avon was a badass criminal mastermind who was only working for Blake because it was better than going back to prison. Blake wanted to overthrow the corrupt government and free the oppressed masses. Avon wanted to get rich. Everyone wanted to play Avon. Everyone wanted to be Han Solo when we played Star Wars, too.

It was the same with a very badly dubbed Japanese cartoon we got on British TV the same year, called Battle of the Planets. This show was about five teenagers who called themselves G-Force, had a spaceship and a load of cool vehicles, and inexplicably dressed in bird costumes. It was strange even by 70s standards, but that’s not the point. The two main characters were Mark and Jason. Mark was the chief good guy, a shiny hero of a fighter pilot. Jason on the other hand was the brooding, moody one with a sneer and a fast car. Guess what? Avon syndrome struck again in the schoolyard, and everyone wanted to be Jason. No one liked Mark, he was boring.

If you want to go further back, look at the work of Michael Moorcock. Moorcock has written a staggering number of books, most famously the Eternal Champion cycle. Champions sound very heroic, but who is the most famous of all the aspects of the Champion? Elric. When Prince Elric first appeared in The Dreaming City in 1961 he was leading a fleet of mercenaries on his way to kill his own cousin, armed with black magic and a cursed runesword that eats souls.

Writing in 2014, Author Jason Sheehan called Elric “far and away the coolest, grimmest, moodiest, most elegant, degenerate, drug-addicted, cursed, twisted and emotionally weird mass murderer of them all.” He’s still Moorcock’s most popular character, and there is a great deal of Elric in Jorg Ancrath from Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence.

So why do I think this is? As the Starburst article said, we want edgy characters with depth and personalities. Of course we do. One-dimensional characters are boring, but does that mean “nice guys” are boring? In real life, no of course they’re not. My own main character, Don Drake, is not someone I’d want to hang around with in real life. But in fiction I think the “white knight” character all too often does come across as one-dimensional and dull.

The antihero, on the other hand, is a complex beast. He’s not a villain, but he’s out for himself. Sometimes his interests may well align with the “greater good”, like Avon in Blake’s 7, but sometimes they won’t. It’s what happens when they don’t, and the choices the character makes in that situation, that makes an antihero interesting. Avon and Han Solo, and Don Drake for that matter, are fairly amoral characters but can be swayed away from pure self-interest by a strong enough cause or high enough stakes. Jorg Ancrath, by comparison, is a purebred psychopath. He’s still an enormously popular character.

I don’t think antiheros are new, and I don’t think they’re going to go away either. They may not be the heroes we want, but perhaps, like Avon and Jason, they are the heroes we want to be.

Perhaps we deserve them.

Dominion is out November 1 (US/Canada) / November 3 (UK/Rest of the World)