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Daughters of Frankenstein: Lesbian Mad Scientists! by [Megan Arkenberg, Claire Humphrey, Tracy Canfield, Traci Castleberry, A.J. Fitzwater, Sean Eads, Gemma Files, Melissa Scott, Steve Berman, Connie Wilkins]

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Traci Castleberry

Tracy Canfield

Daughters of Frankenstein: Lesbian Mad Scientists! Kindle Edition

by Megan Arkenberg (Author), Claire Humphrey (Author), Tracy Canfield (Author), Format: Kindle Edition

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In the field of mad science, women have for too long been ignored, their triumphs misattributed to mere men. Society has seen the laboratory as the province of men. Jacob's Ladder electric arcs, death rays, even test tubes have phallic connotations, subliminally reinforcing the patriarchy. The mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, advocated that women appear more masculine to earn respect. If Marie Curie had been allowed to develop her Atomic Gendarmerie for the Institut du radium, surely she would have been awarded her third Nobel Prize, for Peace. Thankfully, the women working to dangerous and/or questionable ends in the pages of Daughters of Frankenstein are unafraid of the patriarchy--indeed, as lesbian mad scientists, they prefer the company and comforts of their own gender. Androids? Pfeh, the gynoid is superior. Etheric dynamos have a more pleasing design, one that is vulvar, than Tesla coils. Eighteen imaginative, if not insane, women; eighteen stories told by some of the finest writers working in queer speculative fiction today.

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publication date

July 28, 2015
File size

2684 KB
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Editorial Reviews

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''All together, a pleasant summer read delivering exactly what it says on the tin. If this is up your alley, you'll probably quite like it: weird, fun, playful, and full of lesbians doing mad science and breaking out of social conventions.'' - --Brit Mandelo for Tor.com

''Here is a collection of science fiction and fantasy that offers you everything from ice weasels to shrunken immortality to robots to probability-calculating mutants, and on top of that you can be assured every time you start a story that it will be full of women and at least several of them will be queer. This is no small thing. There is a kind of profound relief in reading a collection where you know for a fact that you needn't brace yourself for boringly typical male protagonists, for casual homophobia, for a dearth of interesting women or for female characters that obviously ought to be dating but inexplicably will barely touch. It's a real pleasure to just focus on the stories, to appreciate the imagination on display and evaluate the craft without having to constantly push such tiresome tendencies aside.'' - --Miranda Meyer for AfterEllen.com

''Daughters of Frankenstein: Lesbian Mad Scientists is full of stories that follow their premises to the fullest. There's always a risk in an anthology with an extremely narrow focus that the stories will suffer from a certain sameness or an air of collective desperation. Editor Steve Berman has no trouble avoiding this trap as the 18 stories here range from poetic steampunk to Scooby-Doo homage....there's a wide and wonderful buffet of stories available within.'' --Karen Burnham for Locus --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Steve Berman's anthologies have been nominated for the Golden Crown Literary Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. He is the foremost editors in the field of queer speculative fiction and is the owner of Lethe Press. He resides in New Jersey. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B012Y9G6H0
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Lethe Press (July 28, 2015)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 28, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2684 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1590213602

Best Sellers Rank: #2,474,427 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1,206 in LGBTQ+ Science Fiction (Books)
- #1,964 in LGBTQ+ Short Stories
- #2,088 in LGBTQ+ Science Fiction (Kindle Store)

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Traci Castleberry
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Traci Castleberry lives in southern Arizona with two cats and her Lipizzan mare, Carrma. She's attended Clarion, Taos Toolbox, the Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBT Authors, and has an MA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University.
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Tracy Canfield
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Tracy Canfield's science fiction and fantasy has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and has been translated into Hebrew and Estonian, although the bio you're reading at this moment is exclusively available in English. In 2018, Choice of Games LTD. published her computer game I, Cyborg, an interactive novel where you play as a cybernetic copy of interstellar smuggler Ypsilanti Rowe, searching for a replacement part that'll keep you functional while dodging Ypsilanti's many enemies (and exes). Her short story "Starship Down" won the Analytical Laboratory Award for best short story appearing in Analog.
Canfield's PhD is in computational linguistics, and CNN called her a "Klingon scholar" for her work on the Klingon translation of the Jenolan Caves audio tour.
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Claire Humphrey
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Claire Humphrey's short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex, Crossed Genres, Fantasy Magazine, and Podcastle. Her short story ''Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All-Female Production of Waiting for Godot'' appeared in the Lambda Award-nominated collection Beyond Binary, and her short story "The Witch Of Tarup" was published in the critically acclaimed anthology Long Hidden. Spells of Blood and Kin is her first novel.
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Customer reviews

4 out of 5

12 global ratings

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QUEERcentric Books

Daughters of Frankenstein certainly exceeded my expectations.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 13, 2015

Reviewed by Kiersten Jane for QUEERcentric Books

I really didn’t know what to expect from Daughters of Frankenstein: Lesbian Mad Scientists.

Edited by Steve Berman, who is perhaps the most prolific editor of queer speculative fiction today, the eighteen stories in this anthology range from sober to zany, but all have a lot of heart.

Though I picked it up with some trepidation, Daughters of Frankenstein certainly exceeded my expectations.

In the anthology you’ll find Zombies, sleuths, pirates, robots, revolutionaries, aliens, Minotaurs, bank robbers, and Rosie the Riveter.

The stories vary considerably, but one thread running through the book is a wonderful self-awareness of the project and its place in a history that has largely forgotten or neglected female scientists, especially lesbian scientists. The cover itself is a delicious parody of mid-twentieth-century lesbian pulp fiction.

Jess Nevins sets the stage with a chapter about the history of female mad scientists, in the same vein as Emma Donoghue’s Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature (a personal fave).

My favourite characters in the anthology were in “Doubt the Sun” by Faith Mudge, “Meddling Kids” by Tracy Canfield, and “Hypatia and Her Sisters” by Amy Griswold. I laughed out loud while reading “The Moorehead Maze Experiment,” which is a spoof on the Stanford Prison Experiment written out as a transcript of a fictitious documentary.

It’s refreshing to read a LGBTQ book where the characters experiment with more than their sexuality. These women are remarkable for more than their bodies, their sex, and their sexual preference.

With their intelligence and ingenuity they push the boundaries of nature itself. Indeed, these women are queer in more ways than one and these stories are meant to shock, provoke, amuse, and inspire.

It was gratifying that the authors of Daughters of Frankenstein do not take diversity for granted. At the end of each story, I was never under the impression that they included diverse characters for diversity’s sake. In these pages class, race, ability, gender, and sexuality intersect as the characters challenge societal norms and test theories that often concern our very humanity.

4 people found this helpful

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Kari

Wonderful

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 25, 2019

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Lovely enchanting stories. Well chosen and edited . Very novel with excellent writing and ideas.Am now very interested to follow moat of these authors!

One person found this helpful

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Brigid Keely

Some of the stories were pretty great but there's enough stinkers and weird male-gaze-y stories ...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 17, 2017

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Really uneven. Some of the stories were pretty great but there's enough stinkers and weird male-gaze-y stories to get a lower score.

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Amazon Customer

One of the new batch of gifted women.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 19, 2017

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Megan Arkenberg is an artist to watch.

One person found this helpful

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Jean Roberta

The Lesbians Take Over

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 22, 2016

In the first story in this collection, Dawn – who won’t sleep because she’s afraid of dreaming –visits her lover Alyssa, who makes potions in her basement laboratory. Dawn reluctantly drinks Alyssa’s mixture to counter the effects of insomnia, and the readout of her brainwaves is like nothing Alyssa has ever seen.

In the aftermath of Dawn’s “trip,” a cat named Treacle appears in Alyssa’s house, having apparently crossed over from another world.
Alyssa tells Dawn: “You’ve dreamed there before.” Dawn nods. Alyssa goes on: “And you saw Treacle there.”

“Yeah,” Dawn answers. “She was different.”

“A person,” says Alyssa. Dawn asks how she knows this. Alyssa explains: “she wore striped socks and a pinafore over a frock dress.”
This reference to the title character of Alice in Wonderland (and specifically to Sir John Tenniel’s contemporary illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s 1865 fantasy novel) makes it clear where both Dawn and Alyssa have gone, not only in dreams: to Wonderland, where nothing is the same as in the world we know.

This story sets the tone for a diverse anthology of stories that are both original and full of allusions to actual history as well as to literary history. The stories are preceded by a brief introduction by Connie Wilkins and an essay, “From Alexander Pope to Splice,” by librarian and pulp-fiction historian Jess Nevins. This overview of female “mad scientists,” both fictional and real, dates back to writer and amateur scientist Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) and to medieval scholars before her. Women who have wanted to understand the physical world and to change it are shown to have existed for much longer than most of us have been led to believe.

Some literary historians trace sci-fi by women to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (first published 1818), a cautionary tale that warns of the consequences of meddling with natural processes by creating a hideous new being that is tragically rejected by humans. By contrast, several stories in this collection feature the creation of humanoid female robots that are capable of complex thought and emotions, and who interact with humans to everyone’s benefit.

One theme of this collection is the thin line between “artificial intelligence” and the more organic kind, and several central characters show their lesbianism by falling in love with female robots. The most moving of these stories, “Doubt the Sun” by Faith Mudge, takes its title from a Shakespeare poem: “Doubt thou the stars are fire/Doubt that the sun doth move/Doubt truth to be a liar/But never doubt I love.” A lonely girl who learns to restore a burned, abandoned “Gorgon,” a kind of bionic experiment, names her Athene and develops an indivisible bond with her. Eventually, Athene is able to return the favour when her human rescuer seems damaged beyond repair.

There is much reference to political and social history in these stories, and to the inventions that are inspired by desperation. The fast-paced period piece “Bank Job Blues” by Melissa Scott is set in the Dirty Thirties and follows a gang of female bank robbers. In the brilliant “Riveter” by Sean Eads, “Rosie the Riveter” of the Second World War (the image that encouraged actual woman to support the war effort by filling factory jobs left vacant by men at the front) is an actual woman who fascinates Adolf Hitler’s mistress. “The Eggshell Curtain” by Romie Stott shows an unusual relationship between two women during the intellectual and social upheavals that led to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Each of these eighteen stories contains a perfectly-realized miniature world in which strong, quirky, resourceful women create what they need, for better and worse. The tone of these stories is extremely varied, from the young-adult-adventure tone of “Meddling Kids” by Tracy Canfield to over-the-top comedy of “The Ice Weasels of Trebizond” by Mr. and Mrs. Brenchley to the realistic horror of “The Moorhead Maze Experiment” by Tim Lieder, in which a lesbian academic couple of the 1970s subject university students to a devastating psychological experiment.

If you read only one anthology of science fiction this year, Daughters of Frankenstein should be it. Each story presents a thought-provoking thesis wrapped in a delicious plot.

One person found this helpful

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InkedRainbowReads

FiveStars This absolutely brilliant novel explores many of the published cases and stories ...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 19, 2015

FiveStars
This absolutely brilliant novel explores many of the published cases and stories of the daughters of Frankenstein, and, even those you might never have even imagined, heard or, even considered.

The introduction by Connie Wilkins begins this wacky novel with humour and high spirits. Jess Nevins follows this with facts, knowledge, and actual extracts that give this novel its very uniqueness. The enlightenment we gain just reinforces the very essence of the tales that follow.

After being made aware of the facets of The Daughters of Frankenstein and other such characters, the remainder of the book is full of short tales, and, because of what we have learned we can immediately identify with each tale and how it closely associated with the facts and information we have previously ascertained. This is why I found this book so fascinating, you could recognize each tale and base it on fact. This along with the humour, the comedy elements and the at times outrageous and zany concepts that each tale depicted made it such a thoroughly mind blowing read.

I would recommend this book to any one who enjoys, Sci fi, the macabre, fiction and also those who enjoy factual quotes and who value a good sense of humour and want to read a book that takes you away from the mundane and into unknown, a book that is truly different and well worth reading.

I received a free copy of this book to read and review for Inked Rainbow Reads.
Chris

2 people found this helpful

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H.S.Graf

Eine wunderschöne Sammlung

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on December 20, 2018

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Bis auf eine Geschichte eine wunderbare Sammlung zärtlicher SF Geschichten. Traumhaft. Kein Horror, keine Gewalt, aber jede Menge Pfiff und Romantik.

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