Mad Scientist Journal: Summer 2014

Edited by Dawn Vogel and Jeremy Zimmerman

by Russ Bickerstaff, Andy Brown, Christopher DiCicco, Kate Elizabeth, Judith Field, Sean Frost, James Hanson, Bruce Harris, K. Kitts, Parker McKenzie, Clint Monette, Nick Nafpliotis, M. Kelly Peach, David Pring-Mill, Lorraine Schein, Antonio Urias, Marcelina Vizcarra, Deborah Walker, Sylvia Wrigley, Richard Zwicker

Breeding coat hangers, alien spies posing as children, a war against interplanetary mold. These are but some of the strange tales to be found in this book.

Mad Scientist Journal: Summer 2014 collects three month's worth of essays from the fictional worlds of mad science. Included are three new pieces of fiction written for the discerning mad scientist reader by Bruce Harris, Clint Monette, and Richard Zwicker. 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 Judith Field, Deborah Walker, Christopher D. DiCicco, Sylvia Wrigley, Andy Brown, James Hanson, K. Kitts, Nick Nafpliotis, Marcelina Jacobs, Antonio Urias, David Pring-Mill, Michael Peach, Kate Elizabeth, Sean Frost, Lorraine Schein, Parker Mackenzie, and Russ Bickerstaff. Illustrations are provided by Shannon Legler, Katie Nyborg, Luke Spooner, Scarlett O'Hairdye, and Justine McGreevy.

About the Authors

Russ Bickerstaff

Russ Bickerstaff is a professional theatre critic and aspiring author living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with his wife and two daughters. His short fictions have appeared in Hypertext Magazine, Pulp Metal Magazine, Sein und Werden, and Beyond Imagination among other places. His Internarrational Where Port can be found at: http://ru3935.wix.com/russ-bickerstaff.


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.


Christopher DiCicco

Christopher David DiCicco loves his wife and children—not writing minimalist stories. But he does. He has to. Work in Superstition Review, Bartleby Snopes, Litro, WhiskeyPaper, Literary Orphans, The Cossack, Psychopomp, and other fine publications. Visit http://www.cddicicco.com for more published work.


Kate Elizabeth

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


Judith Field

Judith Field lives in London, UK. She is the daughter of writers, and learned how to agonise over fiction submissions at her mother's (and father's) knee. She's a pharmacist working in emergency medicine, a medical writer, editor, and indexer. She started writing in 2009. She mainly writes speculative fiction, a welcome antidote from the world she lives in. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications in the USA, UK, and Australia. When she's not working or writing, she studies English, knits, sings, and swims, not always at the same time.


Sean Frost

Sean Frost is a software developer in Michigan, who writes comics and stories while watching horror and science fiction movies. He lives with four demanding cats and a very understanding wife. It is entirely likely that he has a few too many hobbies.


James Hanson

James Hanson is a physics graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He often finds himself torn between his love of cerebral hard science fiction and his fondness for bad 50s-era special effects. This is his first publication since high school.


Bruce Harris

Bruce Harris is the author of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson: ABout Type (available at www.batteredbox.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.


Parker McKenzie

Parker McKenzie is a hobby writer and archeology student living in the backwoods of British Columbia, Canada.

Between time spent sleeping and studying, he manages to squeeze in time to write, draw, and play video games into the wee hours of the morning.

He also has an alarming tendency to spend more time inside his own head than is likely healthy. A condition not helped by his love of fantasy and sci-fi.


Clint Monette

Clint Monette is a fleshy being who can often be seen watching television with another rather sweet fleshy being that he appears to be affectionate toward. When he is not at the television, he spends his time hunched over a small computing device while carefully rebuffing a small four legged creature. This creature enjoys stealing attention with a small lapping appendage, and has a demeanor that could be described as "peppy." What Clint is doing at the device isn't certain, but he appears to be creating things, and hoping against hope that they are good.


Nick Nafpliotis

Nick Nafpliotis is a music teacher and writer from Charleston, South Carolina. During the day, he instructs students from the ages of 11-14 on how to play band instruments. At night, he writes about weird crime, bizarre history, pop culture, and humorous classroom experiences on his blog, RamblingBeachCat.com. He is also a television, novel, and comic book reviewer for AdventuresinPoorTaste.com. You can follow Nick on Twitter, where he brings shame to his family on a daily basis.


M. Kelly Peach

M. Kelly Peach is married and the father of four children. A recovering addict/alcoholic with over twenty-three years clean and sober, he lives in northern Michigan and enjoys hunting, camping, fishing and walking in the woods. He is, however, a hardcore bibliophile, who has no plans to do anything about his addiction to reading and collecting books and writing speculative fiction. He has work published or appearing in Punchnels, Alternate Hilarities, and Alternate Hilarities 2: Vampires Suck and can be followed on Tumblr at peachmme.tumblr.com.


David Pring-Mill

David Pring-Mill is a writer and filmmaker. His film "Strangers in the Snow" won Best Romantic Comedy at the 2011 Mountain Film Festival. He recently completed production on a sitcom pilot. His writings have appeared or are forthcoming in places as diverse as Poetry Quarterly, The Higgs Weldon, openDemocracy, Independent Voter Network, and elsewhere. Follow him online: @davesaidso, pring-mill.com.


Lorraine Schein

Lorraine Schein is a New York writer. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Hotel Amerika, Gargoyle, Space & Time, and the anthologies Phantom Drift and Alice Redux. Her poetry book, The Futurist's Mistress, is available from mayapplepress.com. She has a story forthcoming in Gigantic Worlds and is working on a graphic novel.


Antonio Urias

Antonio Urias is a New Yorker born and bred. He was raised on a steady diet of grapes and books, often fantasy, and spent an inordinate amount of time telling stories, often involving cowboys. Not much has changed in the intervening years. He still loves grapes. He still loves fantasy. And he's still telling stories, though these days there are less cowboys and more magic. He can sometimes be found at his blog at http://antoniourias.wordpress.com.


Marcelina Vizcarra

Marcelina Vizcarra lives in the glacial aftermath of the Pleistocene Epoch in a house that would have been built by eight-foot-long beavers 10,000 years ago, if the giant beavers had acquired a taste for bungalow construction. She has three children. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Word Riot, The Colored Lens, and Vine Leaves Literary Journal.


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.


Sylvia Wrigley

Sylvia Spruck Wrigley obsessively writes letters to her mother, her teenage offspring, her accountant, as well as to unknown beings in outer space. Only her mother admits to reading them. Born in Heidelberg, she spent her childhood in California and now splits her time between South Wales and Andalucia, two coastal regions with almost nothing in common. You can find out more about her at http://intrigue.co.uk.


Richard Zwicker

Richard Zwicker is an English teacher living in Vermont, USA, with his wife and beagle. His short stories have appeared in Penumbra, Farstrider Magazine, Perihelion Science Fiction, and other semi-pro markets. A collection of his short stories, Walden Planet and Other Stories, is available on Amazon.