Category Archives: Writing

Two kinds of female character in mad science

(This is the first part of a short essay.)

Utter the phrase “female experimental subject in mad science” and I’ll bet that the first image that nine out of ten hearers conjure in their minds would be something like this:

(Found at Storybook Whorehouse.) Call her the Distressed Damsel. A beautiful woman captured and restrained (or sedated), stripped either completely or at least down to scantily clad, and then forcibly subjected to some obscene, perversion of nature technological intervention. The Distressed Damsel might be doomed to perish or to some fate even worse than that (as a way of establishing the wickedness of an antagonistic mad scientist), or might exist for the purpose of being rescued by a hero. As John Villalino has pointed out, many mad science stories will contain at least one Distressed Damsel of each type. One goes to first to her mad science doom as a way of establishing the antagonist (and, of course, allowing the audience to enjoy the titillation of watching her get bound, stripped, and mad-scienced up), while the other will be rescued as a way of bringing the story to what most viewers would find a morally satisfying conclusion.

I won’t deny that the Distressed Damsel story has its charms, but somehow I find myself even more excited by a rather different kind of story, one built around a kind of experimental subject I’ll call the Kitty Carroll. An image for her:

That’s Kitty Carroll, being turned invisible in the 1940 film The Invisible Woman. Something important to note about this female mad science subject: She might be naked (albeit demurely behind a screen as this is a 1940 movie), but she’s not in restraints, she hasn’t been kidnapped, she hasn’t been sedated. She’s here as a volunteer, answering a newspaper classified ad. Her response to the mad science? I want a part of that! As I wrote about her two years ago:

Let’s reflect on what Kitty has implicitly gone for here: “So, you want me to take off all my clothes, step into this machine that has hitherto never been tested on a human being, zap me with heaven-knows-what, and turn me invisible? Sure, I’m game!”

I think I’m in love.

And dammit, I think I’m still in love. The kind of fiction I create shows a longing for Kitty Carrolls wherever I can find them. The first instance that Lon illustrated for me in the first chapter of The Apsinthion Protocol:

Nanetta Rector embraces the mad science rather than fleeing from it. As will her friend Moira Weir. As will all four of the heroines of Study Abroad, albeit with a little pharmacological boost from Dr. Strangeways. Kitty Carrolls all.

I wish I could find more examples of Kitty Carrolls in fiction created by professionals — perhaps the paucity of such are a good reason for making my own. To be sure, I can think of a few. Janice Starlin in Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman might be an example of one — she pushes really hard to get the mad science youth-making transformation tested on herself. I’ve suggested before also that one the most erotic things I’ve had about Invasion of the Bee Girls is not so much a scene (hot as the transformation scene is) as a thought: that Dr. Susan Harris, the lady mad scientist and head Bee Girl, is herself a Kitty Carroll, that everything we saw being done to Nora Kline as a Distressed Damsel — getting naked, getting irradiated, getting smothered in goop and covered in bees, and transformation into some sort of seductive, lethal transhuman — Dr. Harris must have done to herself at some point to become what she is by the time the movie begins. Talk about embracing the mad science!

I think perhaps I’m in love in a way that will probably be the end of me, but it will be worth it.

And why am I so in love with Kitty Carrolls? Tomorrow I get to embarrass myself with psychological speculation.

Artisanal Erotica added to blogroll

It is my pleasure to announce the addition of Artisanal Erotica to the blogroll here, a very promising-looking story site clearly being run by folks who are taking the process of making their own seriously.  Plus they have a lovely header illustration of the process of one-handed reading.

I must confess somewhat shamefacedly that when I first saw their URL, though, I experienced a real-life version of The Problem with Pen Island trope, so I guess I must count as a pervert through-and-through.

Footnote:  I believe this is the 800th post here at EroticMadScience.  And it seems like only yesterday I was scratching my head and wondering how this WordPress thing was supposed to work…

Experimental site: Nothin’ but the comic

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, 11 November 1842

In the great spirit of mad science, I have put up a new experimental site GnosisCollege.com, which I invite the world to visit.

As you can tell from the screencap above, this is a very stripped-down site, consisting only of comics page from The Tales of Gnosis College boxed in Gnosis College’s blue and orange colors, with some hand-coded navigation at the bottom of each page and pretty much nothing else. It’s there for two reasons:

  1. To provide a new comics-reading experience with larger-sized images than appear on EroticMadScience.com, and;
  2. To provide a version of the comic that can be readily loaded and read on mobile devices

It works decently well for me both on my screen and on my phone, but of course I appreciate feedback form readers, either in comments or via e-mail.

Erotic Mad Science now on Twitter

EroticMadSci — that’s me, now.

For a long time I resisted, or was just plain lazy, given that social networking seems like sort of the last thing a mad scientist ought to be engaged in.  (Aren’t we supposed to be secretive types?  Monomaniacally working in our dungeon laboratories?)  But hey, I have all this material I want to publicize, and social networks seem to be the way things are done here in 2011.  And I’m obliged to live in 2011 (at least until I finish my time machine, that is).  So now I’ve got a twitter account, and will try to be diligent about tweeting.  You can see a widget in the right-hand side-bar.

I promise to try to be both informative and entertaining.  Tell your friends!

Tales of Gnosis College e-mail subscription option

Drop us a line at Gnosis College!A number of readers of the <em>Tales of Gnosis College</em> have expressed an interest in being able to read the comic in a monthly rather than a daily format.  Since I’ve been doing monthly “virtual issue” compilations this is already available for readers:  torrents of individual chapters are available in PDF, CBZ and MOBI formats available as torrents, and recently I’ve also made PDF chapters available for direct download via SendSpace.  As best I can tell, both methods are working well.

I’m always interested in making the reader experience smoother, however, and so I’m now offering an additional option for people who might not be able to visit this blogpage frequently, which is e-mail reminders of the availability of monthly pages.  No need to remember anything or visit anywhere — just let Dr. Faustus do the work of remembering all that.  Just send me a mail at subscribe@eroticmadscience.com and I’ll add your e-mail to a bcc list that I expect will go out once a month or so.

I promise not to spam or sell the list — mad scientist’s honor.  And of course, I’ll always remove anyone who writes and asks.

The Erotofluidic Age

A while back at ErosBlog I had the pleasure of reviewing an audiobook of a story called “The Ontological Engine” by Vinnie Tesla.  And when I say “pleasure” I don’t mean that as just a formality.  The story was a great merry romp of steampunk-era erotic mad science (an unusual genre to be sure, but definitely to my own taste).  It was the first part of a promised longer story, and I’ve been eager with anticipation ever since.

Well mad science fans, the long wait is finally over.  Just out from Circlet Press:

No one who enjoyed “The Ontological Engine” will be disappointed.   Those who haven’t read “The Ontological Engine” are in for an even greater treat.

The story starts when Daedalus Tesla, a brilliant but eccentric scientist, is obliged to leave his position at an unnamed Cambridge college when it is discovered that he has been using the wife of a professor in his experiments.  Entirely innocent and in-the-interest-of-science experiments, of course, but it’s the Victorian era and people are prone to drawing unwarranted inferences.  Removing to his country seat, Tesla continues his experiments, taking into his confidence and employ an engineer named Victor Dalrymple.  Along the way they attract into their circle Eleanor Pertwee, the comely vicar’s daughter whose consciousness has clearly been strongly shaped by reading French novels…

Tesla is working on what he calls “ontological forces,” primal currents in the very structure of reality which, with enough mad science apparatus and an appropriate power source, can be attracted and focused in a spatial locality.  The “appropriate power source” is, unsurprisingly, human sexual energy (of which Miss Pertwee just happens to have in abundance) and the consequences of their collection are to effect fantastical metamorphoses that would Ovid himself swearing off the bottle.

We follow the story through many evolutions, introduced along the way to a set of strange siphon-headed creatures called geoducks (and if you actually know the correct pronunciation of “geoduck,” give yourself a gold star), a set of improbable and socially-awkward transmogrifications, and a randy lady engineer.  The long culmination of of the story involves ontological-energy-powered travel to an alternative-world England in which state-sanctioned sex conscription has been introduced (shades of Slaveworld!).  Among the inhabitants of the alternative world are an unusual group of people called “violas,” whose presence makes possible narrative sentences like the following.

Lacking any objections to his implicit demand, I turned my attention to lapping at his engorged clitoris and pressed a finger into his vagina, finding it quite as wet and swollen as I had anticipated.

Yes, that does read his clitoris and his vagina.  No, it isn’t a misprint.  Yes, it does make perfect sense in the context of the story.  But no, I’m not going to explain it here.  If you’re curious, you’ll have to read it to find out how it works.

Vinnie has woven quite a few strands into the tapestry.  The base of the story is in classical Victorian pornography and contemporary steampunk.  (Your erotic vocabulary will expand considerably on reading this, believe me).  But Vinnie manages to work in quite a lot of science fictional elements and, this being the postmodern age it is, some pretty wry pop-cultural references, which I also don’t want to give away but encourage you to look for.  But I shall give you this snippet of dialog:

“I’m afraid the ——shire Teslas are a scant three centuries in these parts, having constructed Tesla Hall inthe reign of Queen Elizabeth. We are a restless people, and no doubt will be moving on again any century now.”

That reminds me of P.G. Wodehouse more than anything else.  It takes a deft touch to blend comedy, pornography and science fiction like this.  A judicious reader should also be impressed especially by Vinnie’s female characters, which are much the way I like them:  adventurous, outspoken, and bold.  Alternative England also has in it a female official called the Arbitor who’s quite appealing, in a fearsome sort of way.

Enough of me:  I urge you to get out there and read.  The Erotofluidic Age is available in mere seconds as an e-book through the modern miracle of digital-encoded electrotelegraphic transmission at Circlet Press here or Amazon here.  In addition, you can read Vinnie’s own comments on the work at the Circlet Press blog, accessible here.  Enjoy!

 

 

Ebook experiment with Tales of Gnosis College

Thanks to a program called Calibre, it appears to be the case that I can now convert image archives into readable e-books of various kinds, so I’m conducting an experiment with The Apsinthion Protocol.   If you have a Kindle, you can try downloading and reading e-book editions of the first two chapters.  As a bonus to those who participate in this mad little experiment of mine, you can get the extra pages of Chapter Two which have not yet posted out in advance of those available to all other readers.

You can download Chapter One here and Chapter Two here.  They should work on Kindle’s 1,2, and 3.  I haven’t tried sending mine through Amazon, although loading it up through USB worked fine.  The pages are small, but clear.

As with any of my experiments, I much appreciate feedback,whether in comments or through e-mail.  Thanks!

Violet Blue makes my day

…and and week and month pretty much with a a wonderful post on Erotic Mad Science.

I’ll resist the tendency to gush and just say this:  if you don’t read Violet Blue’s Open Source Sex blog regularly, you should start.  Now.   I can’t think of a more dedicated chronicler of sex and technology on the web — and that comes from someone who’s spent a lot of time looking for such things.

And kudos to Niceman, whose fantastic anniversary CG work got featured by Violet.

Announcing: Adventure to Nowhere

Although it might be high fantasy rather than mad science, it is nonetheless a privilege and a pleasure to be able to announce that Lucy Fidelis, who drew the first micro-comic ever to appear here at Erotic Mad Science, Shrinking Stacey, is now launching a new webcomic of her own, Adventure to Nowhere, with new updates available in English and Portuguese ever Friday.  It will be a fine chance for all of us to enjoy new installments of Lucy’s appealing style.

I’ll be tuning in to support Lucy in her new venture and hope that many of you readers will too.  Click on the image (or title) above to get to Lucy’s new site.