There were many intermediary forms. Foremost among them was, of course, Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, he of the man-made monster—a good example of an obsessive scientist blind to all else as he seeks to prove his theories by creating a perfect man out of dead bodies. The first to suffer from his blindness and single-mindedness is his fiancée, murdered by the creature on Dr. Frankenstein’s wedding night in revenge for Frankenstein’s refusal to love and acknowledge the living being he himself has created. Next came Hawthorne’s various obsessed experimenters. There’s Dr. Rappaccini, who feeds poison in small amounts to his daughter, thus making her immune to it though she is poisonous to others and is thus cut off from life and love. There’s also the “man of science” in “The Birthmark,” who becomes fixated on the blood-coloured, hand-shaped birthmark of his beautiful wife. In an attempt to remove it through his science—thus rendering her perfect—he takes her to his mysterious laboratory and administers a potion that undoes the bonds holding spirit and flesh together, which kills her.
Both of these men—like Dr. Frankenstein—prefer their own arcane knowledge and the demonstration of their power to the safety and happiness of those whom they ought to love and cherish. In this way they are selfish and cold, much like the Lagadan projectors who stick to their theories no matter how much destruction and misery they may cause. And both, like Dr. Frankenstein, cross the boundaries set for human beings and dabble in matters that are either (a) better left to God or (b) none of their business.
The Lagadan projectors were both ridiculous and destructive, but in the middle of the nineteenth century the mad scientist line splits in two, with the ridiculous branch culminating in the Jerry Lewis “nutty professor” comic version and the other leading in a more tragic direction. Even in “alchemist” tales like the Faustus story, the comic potential was there—Faustus on the stage was a great practical joker—but in darker sagas like Frankenstein this vein is not exploited.
In modern times the “nutty professor” trope can probably trace its origins to Thomas Hughes’s extraordinarily popular 1857 novel, Tom Brown’s School Days. There we meet a boy called Martin, whose nickname is “Madman.” Madman would rather do chemical experiments and explore biology than parse Latin sentences—a bent the author rather approves than not, as he sees in Madman the coming age:
If we knew how to use our boys, Martin would have been seized upon and educated as a natural philosopher. He had a passion for birds, beasts, and insects, and knew more of them and their habits than any one in Rugby.… He was also an experimental chemist on a small scale, and had made unto himself an electric machine, from which it was his greatest pleasure and glory to administer small shocks to any small boys who were rash enough to venture into his study. And this was by no means an adventure free from excitement; for besides the probability of a snake dropping on to your head or twining lovingly up your leg, or a rat getting into your breeches-pocket in search of food, there was the animal and chemical odour to be faced, which always hung about the den, and the chance of being blown up in some of the many experiments which Martin was always trying, with the most wondrous results in the shape of explosions and smells that mortal boy ever heard of.
Despite the indulgent tone, the Lagadan comic aspects are in evidence: the chemical experiments that blow up, the stinky substances, the mess, the animal excrement, the obsession.
The tragic or sinister mad scientist evolutionary line runs through R. L. Stevenson’s 1886 novel, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which Dr. Jekyll—another of those cross-the-forbidden-liners, with another of those mysterious laboratories—stumbles upon, or possibly inherits from Hawthorne, another of those potions that dissolve the bonds holding spirit and flesh together. But this time the potion doesn’t kill the drinker, or not at first. It does dissolve his flesh, but then it alters and re-forms both body and soul. There are now two selves, which share memory, but nothing else except the house keys. Jekyll’s potion-induced second self, Hyde, is morally worse but physically stronger, with more pronounced “instincts.” As this is a post-Darwinian fable, he is also hairier.
Dr. Jekyll is then betrayed by the very scientific method he has relied upon. Time after time, the mixing up of the potion and the drinking of it produce the same results; so far, so good-and-bad. But then the original supply of chemicals runs out, and the new batch doesn’t work. The boundary-dissolving element is missing, and Dr. Jekyll is fatally trapped inside his furry, low-browed, murderous double. There were earlier “sinister double” stories, but this one—to my knowledge—is the first in which the doubling is produced by a “scientific” chemical catalyst. As with much else, this kind of transmutation has become a much-used comic book and filmic device. (The Hulk, for instance—the raging, berserk alter ego of reserved physicist Bruce Banner—came by his greenness and bulkiness through exposure to the rays from a “gamma bomb” trial created by Dr. Banner himself.)
Next in the line comes H. G. Wells’s 1896 Dr. Moreau—he of the Island, upon which he attempts, through cruel vivisection experiments, to sculpt animals into people, with appalling and eventually lethal results. Moreau has lost the well-meaning but misguided quality of the projectors: he’s possessed by a “passion for research” that exists for its own sake, simply to satisfy Moreau’s own desire to explore the secrets of physiology. Like Frankenstein, he plays God—creating new beings—and the results are monstrous. And like so many of the sinister scientists who come after him, he is “irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on.…”
From Moreau, it’s a short step to the golden age of mad scientists, who became so numerous in both fiction and film by the mid-twentieth century that everyone recognized the stereotype as soon as it made its appearance.
Its lowest point is reached, quite possibly, in the B movie called variously The Head That Wouldn’t Die or The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. The scientist in it is even more seriously depraved than usual. The head in question is that of his girlfriend; it comes off in a car accident, after which incident most men might have cried. But the mad scientist is building a Frankenstein monster out of body parts filched from a hospital, underestimating as usual the monster’s clothing size—why do those monsters’ sleeves always end halfway down their arms?—so he wraps the girl’s head in his coat and scampers off with it across the fields. Once under a glass bell with wires attached to its neck and its hair in a Bride of Frankenstein frizzle, the head gives itself to thoughts of revenge while the scientist himself haunts strip clubs in search of the perfect body to attach to it.
There’s another element in Book Three of Gulliver’s Travels that bears mention here because it so often gets mixed into the alchemist/mad scientist sorts of tales: the theme of immortality. On the island of Luggnagg, the third in Swift’s trio of capital-L islands, Gulliver encounters the immortals—children born with a spot on their foreheads that means they will never die. At first, Gulliver longs to meet these “Struldbrugs,” whom he pictures as blessed: surely they will be repositories of knowledge and wisdom. But he soon finds that they are on the contrary cursed because, like their mythological forebears Tithonus and the Sibyl of Cumae, they do not receive eternal youth along with their eternal life. They simply live on and on, becoming older and older, and also “opinionated, peevish, covetous, morose, vain … and dead to all natural affection.” Far from being envied, they are despised and hated; they long for death but cannot achieve it.
Immortality has been one of the constant desires of humanity. The means to it differ—one may receive it through natural means, as in Luggnagg, or from a god, or by drinking an elixir of life, or by passing through a mysterious fire, as in H. Rider Haggard’s novel She, or by drinking the blood of a vampire; but there’s always a dark side to it.
Luggnagg is Gulliver’s last noteworthy Book Three stop. Through his encounter with the Struldbrugs, he’s drawing close to the heart of Swift’s matter: what it is to be human. In Book Four he plunges all the
way in: his final voyage takes him to the land of the rational and moral talking-horse Houyhnhnms and brings him face-to-face with an astonishingly Darwinian view of humanity’s essence. The filthy apelike beasts called Yahoos he encounters there are viewed by the Houyhnhnms as beasts, and treated as such; and, much to Gulliver’s dismay, he is at last forced to recognize that, apart from a few superficial differences such as clothing and language, he, too, is a Yahoo.
As Swift’s friend Alexander Pope wrote shortly after the publication of Gulliver’s Travels: “The proper study of Mankind is Man.” In our own age, that study is not only proper, it’s more necessary than ever. The botched experiments of Swift’s projectors and our own exponentially successful scientific discoveries and inventions are both driven by the same forces: human curiosity and human fears and desires. Since, increasingly, whatever we can imagine we can also enact, it’s crucial that we understand what impels us. The mad scientist figure is—to paraphrase Oscar Wilde—our own Caliban’s face in the mirror. Are we merely very smart Yahoos, and, if so, will we ultimately destroy ourselves and much else through our own inventions?
Science was just coming into being in the age of Swift. Now it’s fully formed, but we’re still afraid of it. Partly we fear its Moreau-like coldness, a coldness that is in fact real, for science as such does not have emotions or a system of morality built into it, any more than a toaster does. It’s a tool—a tool for actualizing what we desire and defending against what we fear—and like any other tool, it can be used for good or ill. You can build a house with a hammer, and you can use the same hammer to murder your neighbour.
Human tool-makers always make tools that will help us get what we want, and what we want hasn’t changed for thousands of years because as far as we can tell the human template hasn’t changed either. We still want the purse that will always be filled with gold, and the Fountain of Youth. We want the table that will cover itself with delicious food whenever we say the word, and that will be cleaned up afterwards by invisible servants. We want the Seven-League Boots so we can travel very quickly, and the Hat of Darkness so we can snoop on other people without being seen. We want the weapon that will never miss, and the castle that will keep us safe. We want excitement and adventure; we want routine and security. We want to have a large number of sexually attractive partners, and we also want those we love to love us in return, and to be utterly faithful to us. We want cute, smart children who will treat us with the respect we deserve. We want to be surrounded by music, and by ravishing scents and attractive visual objects. We don’t want to be too hot or too cold. We want to dance. We want to speak with the animals. We want to be envied. We want to be immortal. We want to be as gods.
But in addition, we want wisdom and justice. We want hope. We want to be good. Therefore we tell ourselves warning stories that deal with the shadow side of our other wants. Swift’s Grand Academy and its projectors, and their descendants the mad scientists, are among those shadows.
Last week I came across a “project” that’s a blend of art object and scientific experiment. Suspended in a glass bubble with wires attached to it—something straight out of a 1950s B movie, you’d think—is a strangely eighteenth-century Lilliputian coat. It’s made of “Victimless Leather”—leather made of animal cells growing on a matrix. This leather is “victimless” because it has never been part of a living animal’s skin. Yet the tiny coat is alive—or is it? What do we mean by “alive”? Can the experiment be terminated without causing “death”? Heated debates on this subject proliferate on the Internet.
The debate would have been right at home in Swift’s Grand Academy: a clever but absurd object that’s presented straight but is also a joke; yet not quite a joke, for it forces us to examine our preconceptions about the nature of biological life. Above all, like Swift’s exploding dog and the proposal to extract sunshine out of cucumbers, the Victimless Leather garment is a complex creative exercise. If “What is it to be human?” is the central question of Gulliver’s Travels, the ability to write such a book is itself part of the answer. We are not only what we do, we are also what we imagine. Perhaps, by imagining mad scientists and then letting them do their worst within the boundaries of our fictions, we hope to keep the real ones sane.
An Introductory Note
SF is not only something I’ve written about, it’s something I’ve written. I’ve discussed my three full-length forays into ustopia-writing in the chapter called “Dire Cartographies,” but sprinkled here and there throughout my work, like breadcrumbs in the tangled wood, are a number of smaller homages to the various SF forms.
I’ve selected five of these: “Cryogenics” is a dinner-table conversation about getting your head frozen—a motif that appears not only in the review of Bill McKibben’s Enough but also in Oryx and Crake, published—weirdly enough—at the same time. In “Cold-Blooded,” the Earth is visited by aliens that happen to be giant insects; in “Homelanding,” the aliens are being shown around by other aliens, who turn out to be us. “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet” is a riff on the time capsule theme so familiar to aficionados of classic SF. Finally, “The Peach Women of Aa’A” is an excerpt from The Blind Assassin—a spontaneous oral concoction presented by its male romantic lead to his lover in response to her demand for happy endings.
There were many other possible choices—the Lizard Men of Xenor, the attack of the Giant Sponge, the singing contest for world leaders, the Sasquatch, Man, and Two Androids … but some of the breadcrumbs should always remain in the forest.
Cryogenics:
A Symposium
A. When I’m sixty-five I’m going to get my head cut off and flash-frozen. They’ve already got the technology, they’ve set up the corporations … Then it’ll stay frozen until they’ve learned how to clone the rest of my body from a single cell, and they’ll thaw out my head and reattach it. By that time, I figure the environment and all that stuff will be through the downturn and things will be more straightened out.
D. More Pinot Grigio? An olive?
A. Thanks. Some people are doing the whole body, but right now all I can afford is the head.
C. Ah. Market forces at work.
B. I take it you think your mind will survive this process, memories intact?
A. That would be the idea. Information storage, then retrieval at a later date …
B. Mind, or brain? Some people think the two are not coextensive. For instance, your brain might be a sort of grey Tastee-Freez, while your mind …
C. How about freezer burn? Ever seen frozen eyes? They go the colour of …
D. Would your new body be sixty-five too?
E. This Chilean sea bass is yummy!
B. We shouldn’t be eating it. They’re wiping it out. They are actually strip-mining the entire ocean. They’re aiming for a huge underwater golf course.
D. I know, I know, but I forgot, and anyway it’s already cooked so we might as well.
B. I was thinking more like twenty-three, for the body.
C. So you’re going to have this wrinkly old head on top of a beefcake? Not very delectable.
D. I wouldn’t want to climb in the sack with something like that!
A. You won’t be around, honey-bunny. Anyway they’ll do plastic surgery. I’ll look great. But I’ll get to keep the wisdom I’ll have accumulated by then.
E. You are such a dreamer! This whole thing is sooo grotesque!
A. New scientific ideas always seem grotesque to the masses.
E. I am not the masses! Anyway, what would stop them from taking your money, then after a few years with your head in the freezer they’d declare bankruptcy, pull out the plug, and toss your head in the garbage? That’s what they’ll do!
A. No need to be rude. I have faith in the process.
C. I’ve got a worse idea! They unfreeze your head and hook it up to a monitor, and run your most painful memories on it as cheap entertainment. Your whole life would be as a sideshow freak!
E. Or th
ere would be a natural catastrophe—an earthquake, a tornado—the grid goes down—your head rots … Could you pass the slave-worker poison-sprayed artificially ripened grapes, please, and yes, I know I shouldn’t have bought them. I did wash them, though. So don’t worry.
A. I’ve thought of that. They’ll have solar panels, with the lines running down into a shockproof underground cavern …
B. Look, let’s face it. Pollution, vanishing ozone layer, genetically engineered organisms go on the rampage, the icebergs melt, the sea floods all coastal plains, plagues wipe out civilization … Only a few survive, reduced to roaming bands of brutal scavengers. They travel at night to avoid the deadly rays of the sun, and, all large land mammals having gone extinct, they eat rats, cockroaches, roots, and one another.
A. I’ll be sleeping out that part, remember?
B. Wait … they come upon the underground cavern. There’s no guards anymore and the hinges have rusted off the door. The nomads break in, they pry open the fridge, and what do they see?
D. A wedge of leftover Brie, half a head of celery, a thing of yogurt way past the sell-by date … Let’s have coffee. This is shade-grown coffee, so don’t look at me like that. Oh yeah, they also find that damn pike you caught last summer, sweetie, it’s stinking up the entire freezer, what exactly are your plans for it?
B. Don’t be frivolous. This is about his head. They open the freezer, and they see …
C. I think I know where this is going.
B. They see protein! They say, Get the cooking pot. They say, Feast time!
In Other Worlds Page 19