Mad Scientist of the Week!
Here at the Official Website of the literary movement known as the New Space Princess Movement, we have run into a ferocious conflict, and the movement is on the verge of shattering into two opposing and irreconcilable factions. Faction One, consisting of me, insists that the official definition of “Space Princess” should also include the Mad Scientist’s Beautiful Daughter, since, obviously, any Mad Scientist worth his salt could conquer one or more planets in space, and make his daughter a princess. The opposing faction, which consists of the other member of the huge and world-enveloping literary juggernaut known as the space princess movement, some guy whose name I don’t remember, no doubt maintains the contrary position, that Space Princess means “Space Princess” and does not mean “Mad Scientist’s Beautiful Daughter with no Title of Royalty.”
Like most literary movements, we will occupy our time writing manifestos and countermanifestos and sneering at each other with elaborate yet cutting witticisms at the finer literary salons rather than, you know, getting any writing done.
I wish I could remember the name of the other guy in our huge, huge literary movement, because otherwise the members of our enemy movement, the New Mundane Science Fiction Movement, or maybe our enemy is the New Weird Movement, or the Old Weird Movement, or the Weird Stone of Brisingamen, or the People’s Front of Judea, with dismiss us as lightweights in the speculative fictional world. He wrote to me once and said he was a member, but that might have been before he found out my many unpleasant personal habits. It is to sigh.
In any case, to spur debate, and as a public service, the Space Princess Movement here posts the first official weekly picture of a Mad Scientist. This is for those of you who forget what science fiction is really all about.
HERR DOKTOR ROTWANG inventor of the Femmbot.
For those of you who do not recognize them, these still are taken from the completely accurate documentary film METROPOLIS. After the war, the Technocracy used their neuralizers to induce eletrohypnotic amnesia on an unsuspecting populace, so as to occlude this evidence of scientific magus of the Sons of Ether paradigm successfully creating an artificial woman. Unable to find and destroy all copies of the film, the Technocracy alleged them to be a fictional invention of film-maker Fritz Lang. But, if so, why did Lang flee Germany to escape the Nazis shortly after the Nazi base on the moon was constructed, using Vril-powered flying disks, the secret of whose propulsion was hitherto known only in Agardtha, the subterranean super-city occupied by the monstrously posthuman Enlightened Ones? The sick Nazi dreams of producing the superman took their inspiration from somewhere — is it a coincidence that Buddhist legends whisper of a race of perfected immortals dwelling in caverns under Thibet, connected by titanic tunnels (which just so happen to follow the major ley line nodes) to areas beneath the crust that once supported primordial Atlantis and Lemuria, but now are merely desolate ocean (except for the curiously isolated Easter Island, somehow spared the catestrophe that sank Lemuria, but on which grim and cyclopean stone face loom, evidence not only of ancient astronauts, but of the Old Ones darkly hinted at by HP Lovecraft before his mysterious, if not too-convenient, death — assuming the body found is his, of course!)?
Is it a coincidence, I say?
Why, I ask you, nay, I demand, are NASA plans to revisit the moon now crushed by the current administration, so soon after the impact of a NASA moon-bomb demonstrated that water exists on the Moon? And if water, why not life? But what kind of horrific inhumanoid life could survive in the depths of that cold and dying sphere?
Could the sudden and inexplicable reluctance of NASA to trifle with the Moon be because the Grand Lunar of the insectlike socialist Selenites, together with the socialist Kalkars of Va-nah, are one and the same as the warlocks of Sulva, described as being too delicate for marital congress, but only able to mate with cunningly-devised artificial homunculi of their brides — in other words, a female robot precisely of the type the inventor Rotwang devises as a memorial and replacement for Hela, his long-lost love?
And what of the Monolith found at Tycho crater, and the mysterious signal it sent to Jupiter? What is the true purpose of the spaceship Discovery? And why was the Moon a symbol of lunacy and madness among the Chaldeans, Archimages and Astrologers of the East? Could it be because of BRAIN SIGNALS issued by the monstrous and undying overlords of that pallid, barren-seeming sphere have an effect on psychically sensitive souls unfortunate enough to be within range of its psychobiomagnetic influences? Of course — but signals issued to whom? To the Ark of the Covenant? Or to the sunken city of R’Lyeh? I dare not speculate! I will only predict that by the time the Discovery reaches its the destination as foretold in the cave-drawings of pre-literate Andalusian witch doctors, it will be a ghost ship, occupied by nine corpses, one lobotomized computer, and one man descended from a Wold Newton family.
For those of you who do recognize them, these are still taken from Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS, regarded by most as the seminal science fiction movie that established the main thematic tropes and visuals of sci-fi films for years to come, standing to SF film much as HG Wells stands to SF literature.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
