Mad Scientist Journal: Spring 2015

Edited by Dawn Vogel and Jeremy Zimmerman

by Jen R. Albert, Jarod K. Anderson, Andy Brown, Loria Chaddon, Scott Chaddon, Robert Dawson, Kate Elizabeth, Michael Hudson, K. G. Jewell, Sierra July, K. Kitts, Rich Knight, Jamie Lackey, Meg Merriet, Leland Neville, L. L. Phelps, Torrey Podmajersky, Kaleigh Rodgerson, Diana Rohlman, D. J. Tyrer, Deborah Walker

Living pasta, sinister balloon animals, robotic torch singers. These are but some of the strange tales to be found in this book.

Mad Scientist Journal: Spring 2015 collects thirteen tales from the fictional worlds of mad science. For the discerning mad scientist reader, there are also pieces of fiction from Deborah Walker, Jamie Lackey, and Kaleigh Rodgerson. Readers will also find other resources for the budding mad scientist, including an advice column, horoscopes, and other brief messages from mad scientists.

Authors featured in this volume also include David-John Tyrer, Meg Merriet, Rich Knight, Jarod Anderson, L. L. Phelps, Robert Dawson, Leland Neville, K. G. Jewell, Sierra July, Diana Rohlman, K. Kitts, Jen Albert, Michael Hudson, Kate Elizabeth, Torrey Podmajersky, Scott Chaddon, Loria Chaddon, and Andy Brown. Illustrations are provided by Errow Collins, Luke Spooner, Shannon Legler, Justine McGreevy, Scarlett O'Hairdye, and Dawn Vogel.

About the Authors

Jen R. Albert

Jen lives in Toronto, Canada with one dog, one guinea pig, and one fiancé. She is addicted to reading and writing speculative fiction, and steals time to indulge in these obsessions whenever she can, usually late at night by the light of a single tallow candle. Jen puts up a respectable front and pays the bills working as an entomologist at a university in Toronto, so you could say that she’s a bit of a mad scientist herself.


Jarod K. Anderson

Jarod K. Anderson is a fan of comic books, tattoos, pulp detective novels, herpetology, folklore, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, video games, and all things sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. Growing up, he wanted to be either a ninja or a maple tree. These aspirations led him to teach college English. Teaching college English led him to try other things.

Jarod’s work has appeared in numerous online and print publications including Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, Fictionvale, The Colored Lens, Fantasy Scroll, and elsewhere. His work is forthcoming in Midnight Echo and Shroud Magazine. His bestselling books of speculative fiction writing prompts (co-written with his wife Leslie J. Anderson) include: Inklings: 300 Starts, Plots, and Challenges to Inspire Your Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy and 100 Prompts for Science Fiction Writers. Find Jarod online at: www.jarodkanderson.com.


Andy Brown

Andy Brown is a musician and entertainer living near Edinburgh in Scotland. (He doesn't currently own a kilt but does play bagpipes a little.) He is a pleasant enough fellow with a healthy interest in many things and an obsessive interest in many others. (Music, computers, astronomy, reading, writing…) He plays a wide variety of instruments to a wide variety of standards. His greatest happiness is his family and the fact that he wakes every morning still breathing. His greatest sadness is that he might die before warp travel, teleportation, and Klingons are discovered.


Loria Chaddon

Loria Chaddon is a 40-year-old photographer and writer, with delusions of responsible adulthood. Due to her regular use of Madame Mortencia’s Anti-aging Cream, (which she introduced to her husband, as well) she is often mistake for a much younger 30.

A gentle soul with a heart of murderous darkness, she accompanies her beloved husband in their shared travels through a dubious reality (accompanied by four hyperactive Hell Hounds disguised as dachshunds), both dreading, and anticipating, the day the monsters buried beneath their kindly masks might burst forth, to the dismay of all. Or she might bake some cookies.


Scott Chaddon

Scott Chaddon is a 25-year-old man in a 48-year-old body that looks 35 (possibly due to Madam Mortencia’s Anti-aging Cream). Condemned to exile from his beloved home in the far north, he strives to carry on in his strange new environment. He brings forth news from distant places and times, different realities and parallel universes to any who find interest and amusement in them. He’s at home in the surreal, buddies with the bizarre, and teases the twisted things creeping in the darkness (how else can he get the stubborn things out from under your bed?).


Robert Dawson

Robert Dawson has a Ph.D., teaches mathematics at a Nova Scotian University, and writes science fiction.


Kate Elizabeth

Kate Elizabeth lives in Melbourne, Australia. When she isn't working, she likes to write the occasional short story.


Michael Hudson

Michael Hudson is originally from Springfield, Missouri and moved to Austin, Texas while in the Army. He lives there with his girlfriend and their lazy, poop-machine of a cat, Prince.


K. G. Jewell

K. G. Jewell lives and writes in Austin, Texas. He bakes a mean boule. His website, which is rarely updated, is lit.kgjewell.com.


Sierra July

Sierra is a University of Florida graduate. Her fiction appears in Robot and Raygun, T. Gene Davis's Speculative Blog, Perihelion Science Fiction, and SpeckLit, among other places. She blogs at talestotellinpassing.blogspot.com.


K. Kitts

Dr. K. Kitts is a retired geology professor who lives in the high desert of New Mexico. She served as a science team member on the NASA Genesis Mission and worked with both Apollo lunar samples and meteorites. She has dozens of non-fiction publications, but she no longer wishes to talk about “what is” but rather “what if.” She is currently writing both short and novel-length science fiction.


Rich Knight

When Rich Knight isn’t teaching, he’s writing. A lot. He has been published in many publications such as Complex, Cinemablend, and Weightwatchers, and is starting to venture out into fiction. “Lasagna With Legs” is his first published sci-fi/fantasy short story. His novel, The Darkness of the Womb, can be found at http://thedarknessofthewomb.com/. You can also find him ranting about something or other at his blog: http://knighttakesrook.blogspot.com/. Swing by.


Jamie Lackey

Jamie Lackey lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and their cat. She has over 130 short fiction credits, and has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Cast of Wonders. Her debut novel, Left-Hand Gods, is available from Hadley Rille Books, and she has two short story collections available from Air and Nothingness Press. In addition to writing, she spends her time reading, playing tabletop RPGs, baking, and hiking. You can find her online at www.jamielackey.com.


Meg Merriet

Meg Merriet is a writer of short stories, novels, and plays with an inclination toward gothic fairytales and gritty, dark narratives. Her short story "The Bedfellow" appeared in the Spring 2014 issue of The Antigonish Review, a journal published by St. Francis Xavier University. She currently resides in Jersey City and is developing the play "The Shapeshifter" for production at Art House. "The Nightingale of Atlantic City" is dedicated to Raven Kneally, who taught Meg how to climb gates, how to dance the "Twitch," and all the joys of anime, video games, and reckless adventuring.


Leland Neville

Leland Neville lives in upstate New York where he is a full time writer. He previously worked for a news magazine in Washington, D.C., and taught in both a high school and a prison. His short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Bartleby Snopes, The Barcelona Review, Pulp Modern, and Workers Writes. Non-fiction has appeared in U. S. News & World Report and The New York Review of Science Fiction.


L. L. Phelps

L. L. Phelps is an American speculative fiction author currently living in Taipei. You can find her often on twitter @LLPhelps1 and occasionally on taipeiwritersgroup.wordpress.com. Her stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction and the anthology, Dragon: Ten Tales of Fiery Beasts.


Torrey Podmajersky

Delivered by time travelers to a newly-cooled Earth, Torrey Podmajersky spent her formative years in de facto world domination. Since her peaceful abdication, she and her knifemaking husband embroider the outskirts of imaginalia with monsters, tools, and words.


Kaleigh Rodgerson

Kaleigh Rodgerson was born in Linden, Michigan. She is an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, where she studies writing. She has been previously published in Qua and writes both poetry and prose fiction.


Diana Rohlman

Diana lives in the Pacific Northwest, invariably spending the rainy days inside, writing, with a glass of wine nearby, and her dog offering helpful critiques. Her website can be found at: https://sites.google.com/site/rohlmandiana


D. J. Tyrer

D. J. Tyrer is the person behind Atlantean Publishing and has been widely published in anthologies and magazines in the UK, USA, online and elsewhere, most recently in Steampunk Cthulhu (Chaosium), Tales of the Dark Arts (Hazardous Press), Cosmic Horror (Dark Hall Press), and Serial Killers Quattuor (JWK Fiction), as well as Tigershark ezine. In addition, The Yellow House (Dynatox Ministries) is available in paperback and on the Kindle from Amazon.

D. J. Tyrer's website is at http://djtyrer.blogspot.co.uk/

The Atlantean Publishing website is at http://atlanteanpublishing.blogspot.co.uk/


Deborah Walker

Deborah Walker grew up in the most English town in the country, but she soon high-tailed it down to London, where she now lives with her partner, Chris, and her two young children. Find Deborah in the British Museum trawling the past for future inspiration or on her blog: http://deborahwalkersbibliography.blogspot.com/. Her stories have appeared in Nature’s Futures, Cosmos, Daily Science Fiction, and The Year’s Best SF 18.