From the author of Hollywood Gothic and The Monster Show, the definitive book on the men in white coats who haunt our technological dreams and nightmares. From Frankenstein to Jurassic Park, the mad scientist is one of the modern world's most instantly recognizable cultural icons. Now, David Skal explores 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. Employing a witty, highly readable style, Skal lovingly chronicles the mad scientist's quest for world domination, from nineteenth-century literature to the snap-crackle-scream apotheosis of 1930s Hollywood to the mad-science mystique that colors the cult of the computer, UFO abduction folklore, and the demonization of contemporary medicine.
- ISBN10 039304582X
- ISBN13 9780393045826
- Publish Date 17 August 1998
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 4 April 2008
- Publish Country US
- Imprint WW Norton & Co
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 304
- Language English