Literature / Emperor Mollusk versus The Sinister Brain

Mollusk: Intelligence is neutral. Application is everything.
Zala: Says the evil genius.
Mollusk: Evil is a relative term.

Mollusk, supervillain and exile of the Planet Neptune, successfully made himself Emperor of the planet Earth and has since retired from his conquering days. Unfortunately, that leaves him responsible for the continued safety for the fragile, accident prone and downright unlucky human race he now calls his own. Fortunately, he's smart and resourceful enough to get the job done.

Now a supervillain Brain in a Jar, a nihilistic death-cult and the various other alien races they share a solar-system with all have their collective eyes (for those who have eyes) set on the Emperor himself for their various plans.

Emperor Mollusk versus The Sinister Brain is the ninth novel written by A. Lee Martinez, a Comic-Science Fiction novel published in 2013.

In the 2013 anthology book Robots versus Slime Monsters, one of the stories — "Cindy and Cragg" — set within the setting of the novel, starring minor characters Cragg and Cindy.

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Emperor Mollusk versus The Sinister Brain contains the following tropes:

• Above Good and Evil: Being from a Proud Scholar Race who just happens to have ambition, Mollusk's moral code is very different from everyone else's. It's not that he can't comprehend baseline morality; he just doesn't care.
• Advanced Ancient Acropolis: The Everlasting Dynasty is the oldest living civilization on Earth, having once ruled most of the planet because of their technological superiority, only for time to cause the empire to collapse (as all civilizations do eventually), what remains being a small nation near Egypt. At the end of World War II, the fledgling Axis Powers tried invading them for their technological resources, only for their armies to be curb-stomped by the Dynasty's super-weapons.
• The Anti-Nihilist: What Emperor Mollusk and the Pluvian Philosopher Kings agree on is that while entropy will always win out in the end, it's one's strive to one day overcome it that is the prime initiative of sentient life. A universe without life would be entirely pointless, in contrast to a universe with life being mostly pointless. So the idea that he would be able to create a Quantum Certainty Generator, a machine that would allow anyone to control all probability in the universe in spite of entropy, should clue you in that the Council of Ego actually didn't build a Quantum Certainty Generator under Mollusk's instruction.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy:
  • Gustave Eiffel had originally designed the Eiffel Tower to disable alien fleets invading Earth. He was written off as a crackpot and the Eiffel Tower was built from an incomplete version of the design, a design Mollusk corrected when he became Emperor and using it to stop the Saturnites.
  • The Mongol Hordes of Genghis Khan, revealed to be alive today as a Brain in a Jar, managed to fight off an invading alien invasion from Titan.
  • Leonardo da Vinci teamed up with a resurrected Joan of Arc and fought off a Comet Monster in 1499 with nothing but a sketchpad, a gyroscope and a harmonic resonator built from iron and bronze.
  • The Assyrians stopped an incursion from Emirates of the Negative Dimension.
  • The Council of Egos are a Shadow Government conspiring for world domination, all of them being made of the preserved brains of various famous individuals, including the Marquis de Sade, P.T. Barnum, Elizabeth Báthory, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Florence Nightingale, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Soupy Sales, Cleopatra VII, Susan B. Anthony, Benito Mussolini, Zu Ding, Buffalo Bill, Leo Tolstoy, Davy Crockett, Antonio López de Santa Anna, Otani Kozui, Zabaia, Torquemada (which Torquemada is never expressly clarified), L. Ron Hubbard, Martin Luther, Queen Victoria, Nikola Tesla, Archimedes and Linda Lovelace. Adolf Hitler was also a member before he was "flushed" for being too argumentative, Greta Garbo, Confucius and Oscar Wilde didn't survive the complications from the conversion process, Jane Austen and Marie Curie went mad, and Albert Einstein was offered a place among them, but declined out of moral objection.
• The Bermuda Triangle: The Bermuda Triangle was originally the location of early nuclear testing. In a one in a million chances, this created a stable time anomaly that has populated the area with dinosaurs and mutants resulting from the radiation. After becoming Emperor, Mollusk had since started to use the area as a dumping ground for old inventions he had no use for, confident that the anomaly would protect them.
• Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: Female Lunans are typically ten-feet tall, have shaggy grey fur and have three to seven limbs on random parts of their bodies. Males on the other hand barely reach ten inches, have short fur and only possess two arms.
• Brain in a Jar: The titular "Sinister Brain" is a Card-Carrying Villain who sees himself as Mollusk's competitor for ruler of the Earth. He's actually a part of an Ancient Conspiracy of such brains called the Council of Egos who want to take over the universe. They consist of all the great minds of human history, except for Adolf Hitler, who got flushed for being too argumentative, and Albert Einstein, who turned down the offer, claiming the process had turned them into delusional megalomaniacs. The Council think this idea is so ridiculous that they spend a good deal of time laughing maniacally over it.
• Comically Lopsided Rivalry: The Brain sees Emperor Mollusk as a Worthy Opponent in a mutual bid for galactic conquest. Mollusk thinks he's just a cliched cartoon villain meddling with scientific principles he doesn't understand and imagining a Friendly Enemy situation that doesn't actually exist.
  Mollusk: I don't get what we're doing here. What is this conversation about?
  The Brain: I'm taunting you.
  Mollusk: Why?
  The Brain: Because it's part of how this is done. You're at my mercy, so now I taunt you. I subject you to a game of verbal cat and mouse until you have no choice but to admit I am your superior. Or maybe I am slowly peeling away the layers of your psyche to expose a mental weakness, some crippling vulnerability that I can exploit.
  Mollusk: Or maybe you're wasting my time.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The Eleventh God of Venus is known to explosively decapitate as a form of punishment for any Venusian who shows cowardice.
• Doomsday Device:
  • The System Killer was a bomb so powerful that it could destroy the solar system (and all nine planets within it) that was held by the Saturnites. While the possibility that it could accomplish such devastation was plausible given the Saturnite's trigger-happy dispositions, they never got the chance to use it since Mollusk nearly destroyed Saturn during surrender negotiations with his own doomsday weapon.
  • Using schematics sent to them by a future version of Emperor Mollusk and the various objects they steal throughout the book (the anti-time radio, the Eiffel Tower, Shambala's molluskotrenic engine), the Council of Egos build a Quantum Certainty Generator, a device that controls the universe on a quantum level and turns possibilities into certainties. It's subverted of course, as Future-Mollusk tricked them into building a telepathic ecstasy field-generator that traps them all in a Lotus-Eater Machine.
• Easily Conquered World: Played for Laughs, as Mollusk managed to crown himself ruler of Earth and the humans that make up most of its population using a complicated mix of mind-controlling chemicals and displacement of countries and individuals. By the time he makes himself known to the humans, they practically roll out the red carpet for him. Even better, he only did it as an intellectual experiment and had no real end-goal once he became Emperor.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Mollusk is perfectly willing to wage war and end lives if it means victory over a ruthless foe, but even he sees the incalculable destruction his Doomsday Device had done to Saturn as a step too far on his part.
  A few million life-forms snuffed out with the push of a button. It didn't feel like that anymore. It wasn't fun. It wasn't science. It was just ugly, indiscriminate death.
• Explosions in Space: When Curie's irradiated brain goes critical, Mollusk has it thrown into space before it could detonate.
• Formula for the Unformulable: Mollusk keeps a pie-chart quantifying "just how vast and indifferent the universe is."
• Frivolous Lawsuit: When Zala tries to help Atlantean civilians out of the rubble after the Jelligantic went on a rampage, the various citizens Zala and her robot guard saved waste no time trying to build a case to sue them for injuries in the rescue attempt.
• Genius Ditz: While The Brain is indeed an Evil Genius, he lacks Mollusk's pragmatism and is willing to do very careless things (as in "blow up the planet For Science!" levels of carelessness) to see that his Evil Plans happen. He's introduced having used Mollusk's anti-time radio to destabilize the Negative Space Wedgie in the Bermuda Triangle, creating a space-time anomaly that would have destroyed the universe if Mollusk hadn't been there to fix it, though he claims that it was All According to Plan.
• God-Emperor: Serket spends all her time wallowing in luxury and considers giving her servants substandard living conditions to be a sacrifice on her part. The only thing keeping their loyalty through it all is that they literally worship her as a God.
• Idle Rich: Serket and her servants consider the idea of a ruler that actually does things themselves (like Emperor Mollusk) to be grotesque.
• Immortal Ruler: Serket has been Queen of the Everlasting Dynasty for thousands of years thanks to a fountain with restorative properties. Though it's implied that while it grants eternal life, she still ages underneath her unrevealing clothing, needing servants to water her throat when she needs to talk.
• It's the Principle of the Thing: Emperor Mollusk doesn't care about The Brain's ambitions of galactic conquest. He just doesn't want him to use his tech to do it.
• Jerkass Gods: The Twelve Gods of Venus are not only real, but they enforce a strict Code of Honour that, if violated, leads to a particularly awful smiting. Non-Venusians are exempt, Mollusk free not to follow their commandments without Divine Punishment. In fact, Mollusk has had dinner with them and they're apparently on good terms.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: The Council of Ego's fate has them trapped in a telepathic ecstasy field-generator, living out a fantasy where they've conquered the galaxy when really they're all in storage, Emperor Mollusk the true victor.
• Myopic Conqueror: Mollusk admits that for as much as he had enjoyed the challenge of conquering Earth, he didn't consider what he would do with his own planet after he had conquered it. He took to the task of protecting them from outside threats both out of a sense of responsibility for them (since he was the one who turned them into helpless pacifists) and as just another way to further alleviate his boredom.
• Noodle Incident: Mollusk had to put the entirety of Portugal in stasis and had it replaced with a hologram without the rest of Earth noticing. It was somehow integral to his big endgame of conquering Earth, though we never find out why.
• Out-Gambitted: The events of the book were all orchestrated by the Council of Egos, who intend on enslaving Mollusk under instruction of a Future-Mollusk sending them instructions with the anti-time radio. Except it was all devised by Future-Mollusk, tricking them into building a Lotus-Eater Machine that traps them all in a dream-state while Present-Mollusk goes off scot-free, creating a Stable Time Loop.
  Zala: This plan of yours seems needlessly complicated. There must have been a simpler way than to put yourself through all that.
  Mollusk: If it were too simple, the Council would never have believed it. It had to be reidiculous, even unnecessary, in order to fool the the Council.
• Planet of Hats:
  • Neptunons are known for two things; they are wicked-intelligent scientists, and they're very paranoid. Most of their technological achievement is done so that they could protect their planet and themselves from any potential invaders. Ironically, all their technological achievement is why their planet is so desired by other interplanetary superpowers in the first place.
  • Venusians are a Proud Warrior Race of Lizard Folk known for their strong moral framework, which usually involves a strict chain of command. The fact that their Gods are real and inflict Divine Punishment if they don't adhere to their moral values no doubt has something to do with it.
  • Saturnites are a race of rock people who invaded the Earth for its resources. Much like the Venusians, they are a Proud Warrior Race, though they embody the "Soldier" side of the Soldier vs. Warrior dichotomy; most Saturnites do it not for honor, but because it's just a job.
  • Atlanteans are known for being highly-opportunistic hyper-capitalists. Their loyalties are easily bought, one can't get to anybody important without bribing their entire staff, and they are perfectly willing to sue people over anything. When Mollusk's Blob Monster destroys part of the city, the town's entire economy goes into overdrive; not for construction and repairs, but Frivolous Lawsuits by individual citizens over their physical well-being, mental well-being, whether their warning system caused them too much (or not enough) distress, investigations over who's to blame for all of it, etc.
• Planet Looters: The Saturnites intended on invading the Earth with the intent on harvesting all of its resources, turning humanity into a Slave Race to do all the mining for them. What they didn't account for was how the planet's ruler Emperor Mollusk would be able to out-gambit them by destabilizing Saturn's atmosphere just long enough to render their home planet unable to continue their war campaign.
• Planet Terra: While Earth is still called "Earth", the normal, baseline human-race that Mollusk rules over are all referred to as "Terrans" by aliens.
• Poison and Cure Gambit: Parodied. When Mollusk takes Zala to meet an old assassin friend of his from the Celebrants of Oblivion, the man manages to convince her that he had poisoned her (thinking Mollusk brought her there for him to kill) and that she needs to drink a flask so that she doesn't die. He then reveals that it was the real poison and that the actual cure is in a pill. When she takes the pill, he gives her a hypodermic needle and says that's the cure to the poisoned pill.
• Red Herring: A nihilistic, entropy-worshipping death cult called the Celebrants of Oblivion is mentioned a few times at the start of the novel and Mollusk even takes Zala to meet an assassin from the cult for information gathering, so you'd think they would have a bigger role in the plot at large. The Celebrants have nothing to do with the conspiracy going on in the plot. In fact, Mollusk admits that he's a member, albeit in an "honorary degree" sort of way.
• Retired Monster: Being Above Good and Evil, Emperor Mollusk rejects everyone else's moral standard and sees himself not as a Galactic Conqueror who is in denial of his own villainy, but an entity who just happened to commit a lot of crimes and now no longer does.
• Rich Bitch: Queen Serket has ruled over the Everlasting Dynasty for thousands of years and she lives to spoil herself with luxuries. She throws banquets she won't eat and commissions several statues of herself weekly, and she considers cutting down on these luxuries to ensure that her servants are able to live (like providing them food, shelter and dental) to be a massive sacrifice on her end. She has since allied herself with The Brain because he refills her coffers for every drop of undying water she gives him to ensure these luxuries.
• Rushmore Refacement: Mollusk had his likeness added to Mount Rushmore on a whim.
• Sanity Slippage: Every member of the Council of Egos who survived the conversion process all show some level of psychological instability, something implied to be a side-effect of the process itself. In particular, Jane Austen was left catatonic while Marie Curie became a rabid beast the Council uses as their personal attack-dog.
• The Shangri-La: Shambala is a secret acropolis hidden away in the Himalayas where the monks who live there live in quiet meditation, philosophy and martial artistry. They also possess an engine that harnesses unlimited energy (named "molluskotrenic" when Emperor Mollusk found out about it) that is now used to generate unlimited electricity for the entire Earth. By the time Mollusk and Zala make there way there, The Brain had enslaved the population with mind-control implants and turned them into his personal army.
• Shiny New Australia: Scranton and Sheboygan were strategically important for his conquest of Earth.
  Mollusk: Don't ask me why I needed Scranton and Sheboygan.
• Shout-Out:
  • When Zala voices her reluctance to take down the Gynoecium non-lethally, Mollusk remarks that he "finds [her] lack of faith disturbing."
  • When The Brain steals the Eiffel Tower using a six-story tall Spider Tank of Martian design.
• Solar System Neighbors: Pretty much every planet in Earth's Solar System — as well as the Sun, Earth's Moon and Titan — are populated with intelligent life. Earth seemed to have been the only planet that hadn't yet mastered space-travel before Mollusk took it over.
• Starfish Aliens: The Sol Collective are a race of sentient helium gas that are native to the Earth's Sun. They lack any understanding of the concept of sound and communicate by flashing various colors. They nearly went to war with Jupiter when its ambassador wore a uniform with an assortment of colors that told them "Your mothercloud has a high melting point."
• What Happened to the Mouse?: While every other brain in the Council of Egos is named, the actual identity of the Sinister Brain Mollusk deals with throughout the book is never revealed. The only clues we ever get is that he was brought into the Council for his skills in espionage and, in lieu of a name when Mollusk asks for it, asks to be addressed as "Omega." Not liking the name, Mollusk decides to call him "Buddy."
• World of Weirdness: Every planet in the Earth's solar system is populated with space-faring alien life who are now walking on Earth just like anyone else. Atlantis, Mole Men and Bigfoot nations share the Earth with humans, or "Terrans" as they're called, and all sorts of interplanetary or interdimensional strangeness happens on an almost daily basis. After retiring from conquering, Mollusk's job as Earth's Emperor is mainly him using his impressive tech and intellect to fight off anything that threatens it.
• You Didn't Ask: When Mollusk finds out that Serket let the Brain take a few drops of the Fountain of Youth for his peculiar intelligence, Mollusk asks why she never let him have any if that was all it takes. She implies that she would have if he had asked.

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