“I Don’t Know, But I’m Trying to Find Out, Okay?”

In the audio drama Welcome to Night Vale (2012-) and its spinoff novel It Devours! (2017), the character of Carlos the Scientist functions as a figure for both the larger enterprise of technoscience and a critique of Western technoscience. By pitting the narratives of the mad scientist and the heroic scientist against each other in a single person, Carlos’s character development arc shows that both cultural figures rely on the White masculinist tropes and values embedded in Western technoscience. Ultimately, Carlos’s arc depicts the limits of these structures and provides a solution in line with feminist epistemologies, emphasizing situatedness over universalism and communitarianism over individualism.

Dead is not better: The multiple resurrections of Stephen King’s Revival

Stephen King’s 2014 novel, Revival, plays with its title in several respects. It is first a familiar Frankenstein-esque narrative about a mad scientist who seeks to revive the dead. It is also, however, about religious revivals, both in the specific sense of the religious gatherings held by minister and main antagonist Charles Jacobs, and in the more general sense of attempting to find something in which to place one’s faith in a world where accidents can claim the lives of loved ones. Beyond this, Revival plays with its title in two more senses. First, it elaborates on the recurring theme in King of existentialist angst precipitated by the death of a child or loved one, which King uses to question God’s benevolence or existence. In order to ask these questions, King also resurrects the spirit of Mary Shelley, taking from Frankenstein the theme of reanimation of the dead. The narrative’s conclusion, however, offers yet another revival as it transitions us from the horror of Shelley to the weird fiction of Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft. Thus, through these various revivals, King’s novel charts the evolution of twentieth- and twenty-first-century horror from Shelley to Lovecraft and our contemporary ‘weird’ moment.

Survive, Revive, Thrive: Chapter 4: Opening the Sails

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. - Pablo Picasso, Spanish painter/sculptor, 1881-1973 It’s Time To Look at the Horizon “Opening our sails” is a metaphor that the worst of the storm has passed or is passing, and it is time to get our-selves shipshape, making necessary repairs and preparations, and get back on course. As individuals, and certainly as SPE, we must be ready to cautiously open our sails. The pandemic may be at or near its peak, and despite relatively strong economic performance in most sec-tors, we know that the global economy remains fragile. As an industry, we don’t have the luxury of waiting. We must provide energy and feedstock in advance of global needs, so it is time to get busy and plan not for what was but for what will be. The energy map, meaning the needs, resources, economies, and priorities of the world, is changing. The oil and gas industry will continue to adapt, but as I have mentioned many times, the need for the service we provide is greater now than ever before. We need to be prepared for both increasing demand and public apathy for what we do. This is nothing new, and capital investments in oil and gas should begin to increase as we enter the new year. Perhaps not at the rates we saw during the “shale revolution,” but investors know how essential we are to a strong global economy and will act accordingly. I believe Picasso was right. We must develop the discipline to sacrifice for our passions completely, for what we are doing is too important to wait and too important to sleep. Person-ally, I have a compulsive need to serve and to create. The service part probably came from having older parents who came from, let’s say, very modest circumstances, and the creative part perhaps from the desire to take things apart and put them back together with the fewest possible parts left over. I mention this because each of us has an artist, a writer, an engineer, a doctor, and maybe even a mad scientist inside them. And each of us has our own compulsions. In the post-pandemic, we need to channel that same discipline that Picasso implies. Our passions are our compass, and our energy derives from our compulsion to fulfill those passions. My challenge to you, as an industry, is to align your passions. Someone recently told me that the pandemic had provided us the opportunity of a generation to realign our priorities. I believe it is the opportunity of a lifetime. We can choose to fear the future, or we can create it. It is that simple.

‘At the Expense of Human Values’

Ex Machina plays against type extremely well, and it is, in part, particularly effective because of the genre tropes are relatively consistent. There’s really only one term to cinematically describe a reclusive, temperamental genius working on a project he hopes will change humanity: the mad scientist. In the history of science fiction film, the mad scientist has traditionally either been directly responsible for a crisis (potential or realized) by creating the problem, or indirectly responsible by trying to control something so powerful that no one could possibly control it. The latter was used largely in the 1950s and 1970s by reflecting the two perceived threats during those eras: atomic/nuclear power and pollution, respectively. But in these films, the extent of the power being studied must be balanced against what that scientist is trying to accomplish. In Ex Machina, Nathan’s portrayal is a fascinating one, embodying the Silicon Valley, “work hard, play hard” bro-culture we see in the U.S. tech industry, and he’s able to completely detach his own actions/desires from his work, a cognitive dissonance that allows him to create a line of slaves at the same time he tries to reproduce artificial intelligence. This chapter will place Nathan within the larger context of science fiction’s history of mad scientists, analyzing similarities and determining what those differences mean.

Ex Machina

Ex Machina (2014) impressed critics and audiences alike with its bold ideas and all-too-realistic depiction of the unexpected consequences of constructing a sentient being. In his feature directorial debut, Alex Garland uses efficient storytelling, a compelling narrative, and heady concepts to create a modern science fiction masterpiece that explores gender, scientific advancement, and the very concept of humanity, all in a compelling, suspenseful film. Artificial intelligence has long been a sci-fi staple, but here, Garland posits what would happen if, for once, humans, rather than AI, were the real villains. In exploring Ex Machina's ideas about consciousness, embodiment, and masculinity, all through the lens of a misogynist mad scientist, Joshua Grimm argues the result is a fascinating, truly unique film that immediately established Garland as a breakout voice in the landscape of science fiction film.

Forma Mentis Networks Reconstruct How Italian High Schoolers and International STEM Experts Perceive Teachers, Students, Scientists, and School

This study investigates how students and researchers shape their knowledge and perception of educational topics. The mindset or forma mentis of 159 Italian high school students and of 59 international researchers in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) are reconstructed through forma mentis networks, i.e., cognitive networks of concepts connected by free associations and enriched with sentiment labels. The layout of conceptual associations between positively/negatively/neutrally perceived concepts is informative on how people build their own mental constructs or beliefs about specific topics. Researchers displayed mixed positive/neutral mental representations of “teacher”, “student” and, “scientist”. Students’ conceptual associations of “scientist” were highly positive and largely non-stereotypical, although links about the “mad scientist” stereotype persisted. Students perceived “teacher” as a complex figure, associated with positive aspects like mentoring/knowledge transmission but also to negative sides revolving around testing and grading. “School” elicited stronger differences between the two groups. In the students’ mindset, “school” was surrounded by a negative emotional aura or set of associations, indicating an anxious perception of the school setting, mixing scholastic concepts, anxiety-eliciting words, STEM disciplines like maths and physics, and exam-related notions. Researchers’ positive stance of “school” included concepts of fun, friendship, and personal growth instead. Along the perspective of Education Research, the above results are discussed as quantitative evidence for test- and STEM anxiety co-occurring in the way Italian students perceive education places and their actors. Detecting these patterns in student populations through forma mentis networks offers new, simple to gather yet detailed knowledge for future data-informed intervention policies and action research.

Destructive Villain or Gigantic Hero?

In “Caligari,” reprinted from Siegfried Kracauer’s hugely influential monograph From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film, Kracauer details the history of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the German Expressionist masterpiece that established the cinematic template for the “mad scientist” character trope. In particular, Kracauer outlines the process by which “a revolutionary film was thus turned into a conformist one,” both presaging and helping to pave the way, in his estimation, for rise of the Third Reich.

Vivisecting the Villain

The supervillain is not unique to the superhero genre and predates comic literature. There are five types of supervillains: the monster, the enemy commander, mad scientist, criminal mastermind, and the inverted-superhero supervillain. These types of villains are non-exclusive. The supervillain’s main goal is often destructive, selfish, and anti-social. Villains are proactive while heroes are reactive.

Doctor Who meets Loving Vincent Van Gogh (A case study of the “tortured artist” stock character in popular culture)

Methodologically connecting at its core the experience-based and interpretation-based aesthetic approach to popular culture/popular art(s) on one hand and the basis-building views of what is called arch-textual thematology on the other, the paper seeks to examine, following its particular embodiment, one of the most stable, recurring and probably therefore one of the most iconic stock characters - the “tortured artist” stock character. This example of a “stereotyped character easily recognized by readers or audiences from recurrent appearances in literary or folk tradition” (Baldick, 2008, p. 317) can be - besides other principal and distinctive examples such as the “mad scientist”, the “lady/damsel in distress” or, let’s say, the “everyman” - witnessed all across culture, including the sub-sphere of popular culture, and the arts. The implied cultural significance and “omnipresence” of the “tortured artist” stock character can be aptly illustrated by Vincent Van Gogh and not only as a real-life tortured artist prototype or even archetype but also as a popular model for numerous and various cultural depictions - from poems by Charles Bukowski through the “moving pictures” of Loving Vincent to an episode of the well-recognized British TV show Doctor Who.