MAD SCIENTISTS/MONSTERS—iconic pulp creator who loses control of experiment; monster destroys creator; confusion of “Frankenstein” as naming creator and monster; educating mad scientists.
The “Mad Scientist” is a ubiquitous figure in pulp sf magazines in particular, but has many, many iterations outside of them, before and after. Consciously indebted to Frankenstein, the term threatens to be too large…to refer to too many works..to be usefully deployed. When such a figure is present, to show signs of its original, it should focus on the responsibility of the Creator as the ill-conceived experiment careens out of control. There is a sense of “presumption,” the word used in titles to some of the first plays adapted from Shelley’s novel, in the mad scientist’s character. Readers, and so adaptations of Shelley’s work, often associate the figure with blasphemy, though that seems tied to over-readings of Shelley’s changes to the 1831 edition and not to the original themes introduced in the 1818 first edition of her novel. The mad scientist is a kind of debased Byronic Hero…one flattened of its complexities. Still, this stock sf character has been used as a shorthand to tell many a cracking good story, providing a key trope in its shared story telling tools that make up the genre. One irony is that while Victor is the first mad scientist (a few decades before the term “scientist” actually exists), with numerous mad doctors in his wake, he is not, as many call him, “Dr. Frankenstein.” Victor fails to get his degree, leaving university early to complete his experiment. (Perhaps the lesson of the work is to stay in college, listen to your professors, and take your degree, or else calamity follows?) Further, the word scientist is not coined until 1834, so Victor Frankenstein is perhaps better described as a natural philosopher (especially with his reliance on alchemy). However, it has been strongly established that Shelley’s work is steeped in cutting-edge science of her day, from galvanism to air pumps. As a working writer, Shelley wrote many of the entries for Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men (1829-46), so we can perhaps see Victor as himself a “Scientific Man,” and. further, we might be impressed enough by his achievement, though it ended badly, to give him an honorary doctorate.
“Frankenstein Monster” is a general name for the connected, mirror-image term to the “Mad Scientist,” encompassing in itself the confusion of the Creator and Created that names both of them “Frankenstein.” The “Frankenstein Monster” is, in short, a misapprehension, but, a far-reaching and influential misreading that certainly gets at the central connection between the two figures. For the purposes of the database, we simply bring MAD SCIENTISTS/MONSTERS close together in one hybrid term. The mad scientist’s monster is a destructive (and not especially existentially challenging) monster; our formulation is borrowed more or less directly from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction on the “Frankenstein Monster”:
“The term is in general use, not only in sf Terminology but in common parlance, to mean a Monster that ultimately turns and rends its irresponsible creator.”
In sf, the fear of the man-made-monster can link to a more general fear of technological advance, or Ludditism, as described by Isaac Asimov’s phrase, “The Frankenstein Complex.” As The Encyclopedia explains:
Isaac Asimov’s Robot stories refer repeatedly to the “Frankenstein Complex” – a term he introduced in “Little Lost Robot” (March 1947 Astounding) – generalizing the Paranoia-spawned fear of retribution for impious creation from biological to mechanical beings. Discussions of future AI possibility are likewise frequently tinged with the Frankenstein complex[…].
References:
See LAST MAN and POSTHUMAN for more on “awakening” A.I.s.
In the Encyclopedia, see:
See: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/mad_scientist
and: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/frankenstein_monster