So, serious question for anyone who's ever read Drew Wagar's Premonition:

What exactly makes The Club the "bad guys"? From what I can gather, they're a cabal of super-influential people who are silently pulling the strings to... prepare humanity for the arrival of the Thargoids and prevent its extinction. Yes, their methods can be a bit diabolical- but really, what eeevil have they committed?

Let's take stock of what the Club has done:

- Sent out numerous expeditions to find and chart suitable earthlike worlds to fall back upon. Right away they have a backup plan. Makes sense to me.

- Scrapped the London treaty that limited the size of fleets for the Federation and the Empire. Contracted with Wreacken Construction to build a massive battlefleet for both, slyly preparing humanity for the Thargoids' arrival.  

- Encouraged the popularity of the engineers, creating numerous independent commanders with ships that have been tuned to peak lethality/exploratory capability.

- Encouraged the development of new technologies that gave humanity numerous new spacefaring abilities.


Yes, I'm playing Devil's Advocate a bit- but in the grand scheme of things, I'm having a hard time seeing why The Club is being portrayed as the bad guys. On a macro level, their actions are clearly meant to preserve as much of humanity as possible, even if on a micro level they're somewhat ruthless. Their "secret"- the eventual return of the Thargoids- was an impossible one to keep. The true secrets were the steps taken to safeguard humanity and give it the best chance for survival possible.

Interesting points. Personally, I have always perceived the Club as something similar to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in the Halo series. They have good intentions (in ONI's case, maintaining the unification of humanity, followed by its preservation), but their methods are underhanded at best, and at worst, tragically unethical. For ONI obviously it is the spartan II and III programs, while for the Club, it is the manipulation of disposable personnel (their exploration ships) and more well known characters such as Salome. I would argue that it is not necessarily that they are evil, but rather that people do not trust what they are doing, since they won't hesitate to exploit and dispose of any one of us independent commanders if it even had a sliver of possibility of furthering their goals. That's my take on it at least.