Overview: Editorial Review

From "Frankenstein" to "Jurassic Park", the mad scientist is one of the modern world's most instantly recognizable cultural icons. This is an exploration of popular culture's perennial fascination with demented doctors, crazed clinicians, and technologically obsessed fiends. A prototype outsider, shunted off to the sidelines of serious discourse - to B-movies, pulp novels and comic books - the mad scientist, the author argues, serves as a necessary lightning rod for otherwise unbearable anxieties about the consequences of modern science and technology. Skal chronicles the mad scientist's quest for world domination, from 19th-century literature to the snap-crackle-scream apotheosis of 1930s Hollywood to the mad-science mystique that colours the cult of the computer, UFO abduction folklore, and the demonization of contemporary medicine.