Writing Good Villains

Right now in my writing I am in need of a sinister villain.  The story I am writing, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, is the story of a super genius who has lost all the people he loves in a terrible fire caused by a lab accident.  The themes of the book include that human beings are inherently good.  Another theme is that those good human beings need other human beings, friends, family, acquaintances, experts, clowns, entertainers and those people who will ultimately help a person define himself and become the person he or she is meant to be.  The science fiction in the story includes instances of time travel, electro-magnetics, genetic manipulations of age and even species, alien encounters, and robots who are nearly human.

So how do I make a good villain to support stuff like that?  Villains are by definition not good.  They pervert the basic nature of human beings to serve their own selfish ends.  Goldfinger uses his financial and technical genius to defeat James Bond and enrich himself with Fort Knox’s gold.  Of course, he’s a bad guy, so the good guy, Bond, defeats him.    Moriarty is a dastardly villain who tries to outthink and outwit Sherlock Holmes for the selfish satisfaction of beating Sherlock, possibly to prove himself the most intelligent force in the universe.  Of course, he’s also a bad guy, and when both he and Sherlock plunge over the waterfall, only Sherlock survives to be victorious.

My villain has to be so caught up with self benefit, that he must be willing to pervert goodness and cause others to suffer and die.  What better villain, then, to use other than the government assassin robot that the genius rebuilds into a pseudo-replica of his own son?  And because of his robotic, soulless nature, violent government assassin programming, and human elements introduced by his re-animator, he becomes a philosophical and existential mess.  The assassin Crackerbutton is transformed into a boy-robot whose cooling unit overcompensates for loss of mass and turns him into the Snowboy.  Okay, I know I should explain why he’s evil and how things work out, but forgive me if I save that for my book.  In a selfish and perverted way, I am seeking to entice you into buying that book and reading that book to see if the Mickey-villain stands any chance at all of being what I am claiming it to be.