Monthly Archives: May 2010

Amazing stories

Yesterday’s post containing an Amazing Stories cover encouraged me to go deeper into the archives for this image to which my attention was directed by Bacchus at ErosBlog.

(Image originally found on Flickr here.)

Also Erotic Mad Science, but what kind?  A guy with headphones and various early-era-of-radio apparatus.  And a tiny woman, who I suppose lives in the glass dollhouse behind her and who also appears to be wired up somehow.   Unlike yesterday’s 1952 cover, I’m not even sure what story this is supposed to be illustrating.  Cross referencing clues on the cover with an available on-line index from Science-fiction: the Gernsback Years suggests that this is the May 1927 edition.  (A view confirmed by a check of a more-or-less complete cover archive for Amazing Stories here.) The story by A. Merrit was called “The Moon Pool” and they also printed part of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine.  But is the story Bent Prout’s “The Singing Weapon”?  Or perhaps more poetically Will H. Gray’s “The Star of Dead Love”?

Perhaps it’s best not to know.  And I don’t say that because I think that any of the stories that were published way back then were bad.  Aside from The Time Machine I haven’t a clue.  Rather, I say so becaue I think that it may just be more fun to look at whatever bizzare scenario is contemplated in this cover art and invent one’s own story around it.  At least that seems to fit into the way I like to write.   The Apsinthion Protocol, for example, started out only as three characters one of whom (who would become Li Anwei) was tunred to liquid and then reconstituted by another (who would become Professor Corwin) watched with at once fascination and horror by a third (Nanetta Rector, in the end).  But it started with no backstory and not even any character names.  The rest of the script was, in a sense, written to have give the scenario something to fit into.

It would be intriguing to give the scenario above something to fit into.   Perhaps someday I shall try.  But I sure don’t want to discourage anyone else from trying in the meantime….

A different perspective

I must say I’m still not sure what dark crevice of my mind this bit of dialog in Where Am I? came out of:

TAKAYAMA

Don’t you feel, what is the word? “guilt” at having in effect murdered one of your professors?

iris

Thanks to you and your associates, Mr. Takayama, I have already been dead any number of times. It changes one’s perspective.

TAKAYAMA

Ah, an excellent answer, Miss Brockman.

Or even further and odder the moment where Iris gazes on the petrification device provided by Takayama’s mysterious and somewhat sinister organization and contemplates something awful — to most people.

Iris picks up the camera-petrifying device, which is sitting on her desk, and looks into its business end.

IRIS

(to herself)

It has its appeal, doesn’t it?

But it must be said that even these strange and disturbing thoughts have some sort of science-fiction antecedent.

(My source for this image is the blog Posthuman Blues.) If that isn’t as mad-science as it gets,  I’ll eat my rheostat.  I don’t know much about the story, although the Wikipedia entry on author Paul W. Fairman indicates that the story “The Girl who Loved Death” was published in 1952.  Casual nosing around hasn’t yet turned up a copy of the text of the story (did nobody ever love it? — the closest thing to a review I was able to find wasn’t terribly positive) but the cover itself surely speaks volumes.

The 1950s were supposedly a bland and conformist decade, the time of Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet, but looking more carefully one finds some very strange stuff back there.

Detached heads

There is an additional detached-heads visual tradition, and it appears to be Japanese.  Three images are all via Janitor of Lunacy, but I don’t know much more about their specific provenance.  (If anyone could offer any in comments I would be appreciative.)  The first has the look of a traditional ukiyo-e.

The next is much more in an anime style. It’s the most thaumatophile of the bunch, what with all those wires and a pretty Rotwang-like figure in the background.  Since the main character is a robot, it’s perhaps not surprising that she can be insouciant about the fact that she’s carrying her own head.

And the last falls into the category of “I really am at something of a loss to explain what’s going on here.”  But I include it because (among other reasons) the visual look of the rings which divide head from body here is the closest image I’ve found to the hyperspatial cinctures in Where Am I?

Like I wrote, if anyone could contribute any understanding here…

Mad science essential: Re-Animator

I started writing this post because I was pondering Dolly Gibson’s misadventures in Where Am I? and wondering about possible inspirations for a storyline in which a head is separated non-fatally from a body.  Something did come up, and I hope it’s of interest, but I have to get there with a bit of a digression.

Now normally decapitation is a means of death, is indeed almost symbolic of death most inescapable.  And death means the end:  in Hamlet’s fictional universe it is the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns.  But in mad science, and therefore in the Gnosis universe, death has become something more of an exotic tourist destination, as Iris Brockman herself could tell you from lived (?) experience.

And that’s no coincidence.  Dead matter turned living is a core topos of mad science.   We can go all the way back to Ovid‘s Metamorphoses for the appropriate inspiration if we like.

Sanctius his animal mentisque capacius altae
deerat adhuc et quod dominari in cetera posset:
natus homo est, sive hunc divino semine fecit
ille opifex rerum, mundi melioris origo,
sive recens tellus seductaque nuper ab alto
aethere cognati retinebat semina caeli.
quam satus Iapeto, mixtam pluvialibus undis,
finxit in effigiem moderantum cuncta deorum,
pronaque cum spectent animalia cetera terram,
os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre
iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus:
sic, modo quae fuerat rudis et sine imagine, tellus
induit ignotas hominum conversa figuras.

I’m not as good at Latin as I really ought to be, so I’ll rely on A.S. Kline‘s prose translation:

As yet there was no animal capable of higher thought that could be ruler of all the rest. Then Humankind was born. Either the creator god, source of a better world, seeded it from the divine, or the newborn earth just drawn from the highest heavens still contained fragments related to the skies, so that Prometheus, blending them with streams of rain, molded them into an image of the all-controlling gods. While other animals look downwards at the ground, he gave human beings an upturned aspect, commanding them to look towards the skies, and, upright, raise their face to the stars. So the earth, that had been, a moment ago, uncarved and imageless, changed and assumed the unknown shapes of human beings.

Prometheus takes dead matter and makes it living, in forms that resemble the very gods themselves.

And unsurprisingly, when Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein, (Project Gutenberg text here) the locus classicus of mad science, she will subtitle it The Modern Prometheus. Once-dead matter becomes living.

And then when H.P. Lovecraft choses to parody Frankenstein, he will create a story called “Herbert West–Reanimator,” (Wikisource text here), in which the mad science gets even madder, and in which of course a decapitation features prominently and then, of course…

…exploitation filmmakers get hold of the concept and push it still further, resulting in an extraordinary mad science movie.

Dead matter becomes living in an amazing way.  And of course, there is a head in a dish on a desk.

But that’s not all.  While Ovid is lofty mythology and Mary Shelley is high literature and even Lovecraft writing a story that seems full of his own neuroses (his story contains racist elements that really burn, I’ll have you know), kickass filmmaker Stuart Gordon is clearly going in his own direction here — a direction that brings the whole dead-matter-is-living and decapitation-is-not-the-end thing right into Dr. Faustus territory with what tireless reviewer El Santo identifies as “what could be the most disturbingly vile sexploitation-horror set-piece of its era.”

Yes.  And it wouldn’t be EroticMadScience if we didn’t dwell on that a little, at least below the fold.

Continue reading →

Suborn and petrify

The means through which Iris dispatches Professor Mora once and for all draw on a certain curious A.S.F.R. micro-genre which, for want of a more obvious name, I’ll call the “suborn and petrify panel.”

To make something in the micro-genre, someone takes a picture of a pleasing model (usually female, usually naked or near-to-it) and modifies the image of the main figure (I assume using image software) to make it look like the model’s flesh has turned or is in the process of turning to stone, gold, or some other hard inanimate substance.   One then attaches a micro-narrative to the image, which explains how the figure was gotten out of her clothes in the first place (a pretext, like a modeling assignment or an assignation or just something as simple as taking a shower) and then turned into a statue by some magical or technological means.   Needless to say, this transformation comes as a surprise (probably a rather shocking and unpleasant surprise) to the character depicted.  It’s an intended petrificaton, unlike that which happened to Ashley Madder back in the Apsinthion Protocol, which was an accident.  Sort of.

A large source of these panels can be found at the Medusa Realm here.  One example, from the artist calling verself Eocene, is this.

Kinda twisted, yes?  (Yes! Yes!)  I don’t want to speculate too much about the psychology that drives the creation of images and micro-narratives of this kind.  I do know what drives Iris and her elaborate set-up that leads to doing the same to Professor Mora.  Iris is really mad, and it’s not enough just to dispose of the problem professor.  She wants to humiliate an enemy in the process.

What a process, at that!  Another image from the artist calling verself Rodin.

And Iris’s revenge runs deep, not just because it’s humiliating to find yourself naked when you really shouldn’t be, but because Iris has created a living metaphor:  the process of exposing Professor Mora’s body is at the same time the process of exposing Mora as intellectually fraudulent.  Well done, Iris!

That last is an entry in the micro-genre from the artist calling verself “Drake,” who I think went on to more ambitious projects over at Medusarrific.

In her web

We might feel some pity for Dolly and her fate, but we might feel perhaps less so for Buck.  It would that Cleo Mount came back from her rainforest adventure with both some unusual appetites and some unusual abilities, and Buck is about to find out that sometimes your partner has some unusual plans for your relationship.

That the spiderweb — a complex structure of lines designed to catch and hold living things fast — should show up as a fantasy bondage prop is perhaps unsurprising.  Here is an example:

If you visit the source for this image, you’ll find it’s actually a Harry Potter fanfiction scenario.  It’s a big Internet; I’m sure it’s not the strangest.

Spiders themselves work in quite nicely, playing into a sexual archetype of creatures who lure men to their doom…

…but perhaps do make them happy before the end, as Cleo promises to do to Buck.

The previous two images from the “Spider and other bug girls” board up at Monster Girl Unlimited.  You wantz monstergirls?  They gotz monstergirls. [Update on May 9, 2018: Well, they don’t gots them anymore, as the board has been taken offline for some nebulous ToS violation. What’s here might be all that’s left of it.]

Like I wrote: big, big Internet.  Or should I say, big big web? 🙂

Spider encounter

Well, Cleo Mount, little heard from in the last three Gnosis scripts, is about to re-appear in a big way in Where Am I? It might be worthwhile to reflect that way back in Study Abroad Cleo had a rather…intimate encounter with a rather…gigantic spider.  For a good cause, of course.

All good fun.  And I swear at the time I wrote that scene I was not aware of the following image, which appears to be circulating various places around the web.

As I read the caption in the lower-right of the photo (you can click through to get a larger version), this picture is also in a good cause — AIDS awareness, if I read it right.

Who says mad science isn’t good for something? Even if the the spider, while ginormous, does look a little fake. Perhaps a better looking spider could be found in the image to the left, which illustrates a story called “Spider” by Donna George Storey at The Erotic Woman.  If it appeals, you might want to check out this post at ErosBlog.

Watching the power

It’s no surprise that after her unusual music lesson, Tanya Yip starts developing and acting on a rich inner erotic life. And it’s probably also no surprise that, stumbling on the view of Tanya’s activity, Tom and Dick get a little distracted…

Rojan colored drawing, circa 1930

Seeing another masturbate can quite the experience for the seer, especially if things are going well for the seen.  It can even be quite the experience reflexively:  Susie Bright, dispensing auctorial wisdom for writers of erotica in How to Write a Dirty Story, recommends filming your own face at the moment of orgasm and watching that.

Happily in this day and age you can also readily see the faces of others as well:  there’s even a (subscription) site called ifeelmyself.com dedicated to erotica of exactly this kind — click through on the left to see their (free) promotional trailer.  I promise that you’ll get a little distracted…

Higher superstition

Sometimes the running sores of prior life experience don’t quite heal altogether and thus show up in things we write years or even decades later.

Adherents of the academic movement known as postmodernism, at least with respect to the the poseur attitudes they struck toward science and technology, were the viri that made me break out in such sores for years.  Condescending, glib, smug…and for the most part shockingly ignorant of the substance of what they aimed to criticize. they blighted my academic years and left me with the enduring sense that the academic enterprise was at least in part fraudulent.   So it was perhaps inevitable that I would create a character like Aphrodite Mora and the seminar she runs at Gnosis.

I wish I could point to something erotic about this particular scene, but sadly I find willfully cultivated obscurity something of a turn off.  But I can at least point to a source text for the scene, which is to wit the excellent and witty book shown to the left, especially pp. 54-5 thereof.  Enjoy!