New Apsinthion Protocol art by Niceman

It’s very gratifying, just after having run a ten-post series “on making your own,” to be able to demonstrate a little bit of practicing what I’ve preached, by posting some new art I was able to commission from Niceman.

Apsinthion Dissolve by by Niceman, commissioned by Dr. Faustus at EroticMadScience.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. (Click on image to see full-size.)

The scene should be familiar — Li Anwei and Professor Corwin providing Nanetta Rector with a very convincing demonstration of the viability of a functionalist theory of mind in action, via the apsinthion protocol. If you’ve read the script, you might recall:

The rise of the fluid continues to the point where it has reached Anwei’s abdomen. She has disappeared up to her mid thigh.

NANETTA

What is going on here? What is happening to Anwei?

CORWIN

(mildly)

What is going on here is perfectly safe.

The fluid has reached up to Anwei’s breasts, and Anwei has vanished up to her crotch.

Sound of a loud CRY from Anwei, muffled by the tube.

NANETTA

She is in pain!

CORWIN

Cries like that might indicate…something rather the opposite of pain.

NANETTA

This is insane! Stop this! Stop this right now?

CORWIN

But My dear Miss Rector, didn’t you hear? To stop this now would risk death to Anwei.

Nanetta rushes up to the tube and pounds on its sides with her fists.

NANETTA

Anwei! Anwei!

What is left of Anwei pays no attention to Nanetta.

That was fun to write, but even so, the gratification was considerably heightened by being able to see it in an explicit visual realization. Niceman may modestly describe himself as “just a farmboy nerd” over at Deviant Art, but he has a deft hand with rendering software and very much the right sort of vision for thaumatophile art, as the result above shows. So if you like what you see, by all means pay him a visit over at Deviant Art or, if you’re a subscriber, at Renderotica. You’ll be glad you did.

Electric underwater

Professor Corwin is surely right to observe that “…in salt water, Monsiuer Volt and Madame Ampere are not your friends,” although he’s slightly misquoting when he attributes the line to Charles Stross. He is at least showing decent taste in casual reading. The book he’s slightly misquoting from is this:

(Found at Stross’s website antipope.org, which has an even larger version here.) If you think it’s true. as I do, that it would be very cool to have a version of H.P. Lovecraft who in’t sex negative (or for that matter full of all sorts of racial anxieties), you must read this book, in the unlikely event you haven’t already.

This book and its companions are quite the send-up of the whole James Bond mythos as well.

Created women

The process through which Aloysius and his ad hoc band of resisters swiftly wreck Colonel Madder’s mental equilibrium is the sort of Hail Mary play that makes basically no sense outside of a mad science-driven fictional world…

…and perfect sense within it. The fictional concept of resurrecting the dead to create an artificial woman has a long history. One of its most distinguished moments would be the appearance of ravishing Elsa Lanchester as The Bride of Frankenstein.

(Image source cinemastrikesback.com.) Though for my money, I think I like better the 1967 Hammer Horror production Frankenstein Created Woman, which among many other strengths has some very arresting imagery.

(Image source Frankensteinia, an entire blog devoted to things Frankenstein.) And of course Peter Cushing. Cushing might be best known to American audiences as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars, but before that he had a whole series of brilliant British horror-movie roles. Naturally he gets a site of his own, from which this French-language poster is taken:

That’s an EroticMadScience two-fer at least, because not only does it make us of the whole “created/resurrected woman” theme, but it also makes good use of the tube-girl meme.

Unsurprisingly, “woman created to make trouble” is itself a very old idea: certainly as old as Pandora, represented here in an 1872 painting by Jules Joseph Lefebvre.

And Pandora is also an Erotic Mad Science two-fer. Not only is she herself a woman created on purpose by a god associated with technology, but she is part of a plot by Zeus to punish mankind for the transgressions of Prometheus who, if mad science ever had a divine patron, would surely be it.

Professor Corwin’s lectures

I should like to note that the references in Professor Corwin’s lectures are not just things made up for fictional purposes. He is teaching a bona fide course on consciousness and hedonics. In his first lecture, he discusses the work of Daniel Dennett, in particular Consciousness Explained and also Susan Blackmore, in particular Consciousness: An Introduction. Corwin also alludes to some rather more speculative work, citing the Nick Bostrom of Oxford University‘s Future of Humanity Institute, and in particular Bostrom’s famous Simulation Argument (an argument that we are either going extinct soon, or that a posthuman civilization is very unlikely to run large-scale history simulations, or that it is highly likely that we are in fact living in a simulation).

In his second lecture, Corwin goes even further into the speculative by citing perhaps the most challenging thinker in his course, the negative utilitarian David Pearce, who believes in the moral imperative to use technology to transcend the human condition and end all suffering.

Deep and controversial stuff. Small wonder Professor Corwin is so popular with undergraduates, and so unpopular with conservative moralists.