Although the Cliché of Mad Scientist as Villain is most familiar from sf in Pulp magazines and Comics, the notion that powerful minds are likely to become dangerously overheated is far older than sf. John Dryden (1631-1700) famously wrote in Absalom and Achitophel (1681): "Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide." (> Anti-Intellectualism in SF). There is much proleptic Satire of the mad-scientist trope in the Laputa section of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev 1735). Rash or hubristic scientists like the title character of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) may not be literally mad, but are generally classed under this heading; the experimenter in The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) by H G Wells is certainly not quite sane. Notable sf mad-scientist prototypes who experiment on themselves are the Antiheroes of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and H G Wells's The Invisible Man (1897). The former externalizes the split of his own personality; the latter's self-achieved Invisibility provides delusions of invincibility that feed his growing megalomania.
Dr Zarkov in the original Flash Gordon strip was influential, though this character was on the side of good and later became less loony. Another memorable figure from Comics is Superman's recurring foe Lex Luthor. H P Lovecraft created Herbert West – Reanimator (February-July 1922 Home Brew as "Grewsome Tales"; vt March 1942-November 1943 Weird Tales; 1977 chap), filmed as Re-Animator (1985). Further sf mad-scientist yarns include Sydney J Bounds's The World Wrecker (1956) and Philip McCutchan's sf thrillers. Rather more distinguished and ironic are Kurt Vonnegut Jr's Cat's Cradle (1963), Flann O'Brien's The Dalkey Archive (1964), and Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972; vt The War of Dreams 1974). The benignly scatty or dotty scientist – usually absent-minded – is a well-established humorous Cliché, as in Norman Hunter's The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm (coll 1933) and its sequels.
Mad scientists are popular in otherwise mundane crime fiction and Technothrillers as creators of convenient McGuffins, most often Weapons. An example is Leslie Charteris's The Last Hero (13 July, 9 November 1929 Thriller in 2 parts as "The Creeping Death" and "The Sudden Death"; 1930; vt The Saint Closes the Case 1941; further vt The Saint and the Last Hero 1953). Edgar Wallace deploys a risibly mad biologist in "The Man Who Hated Earthworms" (in The Law of the Four Just Men, coll 1921; vt Again the Three Just Men 1933), whose titular phobia leads to attempted extermination of all worms, threatening Disaster to the Ecology. Sax Rohmer's villainous Dr Fu-Manchu creates various super-science Inventions to further his repeated Yellow Peril assaults on Western civilization; for his filmed exploits, see The Face of Fu Manchu (1965).
Also in film, Rotwang in Metropolis (1926) is a notable archetype and the James Bond franchise offers such examples as Dr No (1962) and You Only Live Twice (1967). Further cinematic mad scientists appear in Homunculus (1916), Dr Cyclops (1940), The Lost Planet (1953), The Fly (1958) plus its sequels and remakes, Dr Strangelove (1963), Scream and Scream Again (1969), Futureworld (1976), The Black Hole (1979), The Man with Two Brains (1983) and Back to the Future (1985). This list is far from exhaustive.
Sophisticated treatments of the trope are still possible. One oversized character in The Book of the New Sun (1980-1983) by Gene Wolfe is an avatar of both the Frankenstein Monster and Frankenstein, having experimented on himself in hope of gaining physical Immortality. Greg Bear's / <Slant> (1997) features a female scientist whose dangerous activities are shaped by the specific mental disorder of Tourette's syndrome (> Psychology). [DRL]
see also: Gothic SF; The Wild, Wild West.
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