Mad Scientist Journal: Winter 2013

Edited by Dawn Vogel and Jeremy Zimmerman

by David Taub Bancroft, Franz Bidinger III, Andi Blija, Andy Brown, Mark Carpenter, Jeremiah Cheney, Mike Dominguez, Kate Elizabeth, Sean Frost, A.W. Gifford, Eric J. Guignard, Jesse Heindl, Alexis A. Hunter, Pôl Jackson, Nicholas Knight, Antoinette McCormick, Parker McKenzie, Nicholas P. Oakley, Conor Powers-Smith, James Rowland, Cameron Suey, Mark Wardecker, Richard Zwicker

Captured angels, bioterrorism, chimpanzee politics, and tips on staging your own death. These are but some of the strange tales to be found in this book.

Mad Scientist Journal: Winter 2013 collects three months worth of essays from the fictional worlds of mad science. Included are three new pieces of fiction written for the discerning mad scientist readers written by Eric J. Guignard, Richard Zwicker, and Nicholas Knight. Readers will also find other resources for the budding mad scientist, including an advice column and other brief messages from mad scientists.

Authors featured in this volume also include A.W. Gifford, Nicholas P. Oakley, Franz Bidinger III, David Taub Bancroft, Cameron Suey, Mark Wardecker, Mark Carpenter, Antoinette McCormick, Alexis A. Hunter, Kate Elizabeth, James Rowland, Conor Powers-Smith, Sean Frost, Jesse Heindl, Pôl Jackson, Andi Blija, Andy Brown, Jeremiah Cheney, Mike Dominguez, and Parker Mackenzie. Illustrations are provided by Justine McGreevy, Katie Nyborg, Eleanor Leonne Bennett, Cory Caywood, Scarlett O'Hairdye, and Luke Spooner.

About the Authors

David Taub Bancroft

David Taub Bancroft is a writer and blogger based in Vancouver, Canada. He is currently working very, very slowly on his first novel. Writing is hard. You may find his work in The Montreal Review, Zouch Magazine & Miscellany, backofthebook.ca, and rabble.ca.


Franz Bidinger III

Franz Bidinger III is not as foreign as his name might suggest. He enjoys fly-fishing, hockey, and bourbon-laced evenings discussing philosophy and other impractical matters.


Andi Blija

Andi Blija is a designer and advertising jockey by day, frantic roleplayer by nights and weekends. Though not a writer by trade, he has been accused that he does not completely suck at it, and is decently good at making up amusing things. Andi has resided in Seattle for the last 18 years, an escape from the war-torn wastes of Wisconsin.


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.


Mark Carpenter

Mark Carpenter is the pen-name of a student and writer from the far north of England.


Jeremiah Cheney

Like an actor in sleep, Jeremiah Cheney constructs speculative fiction, slipstream, urban fantasy, sci-fi, and beyond. Break the chains with him at creativechains.wordpress.com


Mike Dominguez

Mike Dominguez is an aspiring writer living in New York.  Follow his progress at http://www.mike-dominguez.com.


Kate Elizabeth

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


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.


A.W. Gifford

Many of A. W. Gifford's story ideas come from the nightmares of his wife, Jennifer. Though she too is a writer of dark fiction, she will never write these stories herself, fearing that if she does, they will come true.

He is the editor of the dark fiction magazine Bête Noire and his work has appeared in numerous magazines, webzines and anthologies.

He resides in the northern suburbs of Detroit with his wife and daughter.


Eric J. Guignard

Eric J. Guignard writes dark and speculative fiction from his office in Los Angeles. His most recent writing credits include Stupefying Stories Magazine, +Horror Library+ Vol 5 (Cutting Block Press), A Feast of Frights (Best of The Horror Zine Magazine), and Eulogies II (Horror World Press). He's a member of the Horror Writer's Association, the Greater Los Angeles Writer's Society, and is also the Horror Genre Correspondent for Men's Confidence Magazine. Although his passion is for fiction, he's also a published essayist and editor, including this year's acclaimed collection, Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations, which was nominated for the 2012 Bram Stoker Award. Look for the next anthology, After Death..., to be released in April, 2013, as well as his first novella, Last Case at a Baggage Auction, to be released in September, 2013 (JournalStone Publishing). Visit Eric at: www.ericjguignard.com or at his blog: www.ericjguignard.blogspot.com.


Jesse Heindl

Jesse Heindl defies words.


Alexis A. Hunter

Since she was a child of nine years old, Alexis A. Hunter has reveled in the endless possibilities of speculative fiction.  Short stories are her true passion, despite a few curious forays into the world of novels.  Over thirty of her short stories have been published, appearing most recently in The Future Fire, Kasma SF, Spark: A Creative Anthology, and more.  To learn more about Alexis visit www.idreamagain.wordpress.com.


Pôl Jackson

Pôl Jackson is the spitting image of Mad King Ludwig. He likes tea, cats, temporal paradoxes, and beating imaginary people up.


Nicholas Knight

Nicholas Knight is the bestselling author of the official Supernatural companion guides and The Essential Supernatural coffee table book, as well as a feature writer for the Official Supernatural Magazine. His short fiction has appeared in places such as Forbidden Texts, H.P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror, Trailer Park of Terror, and Weird Tales, and he's received honorable mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.


Antoinette McCormick

Antoinette McCormick always loved to poke fun at things she didn't completely understand, believing the climate in her native Vermont too inhospitable for supernatural entities. She was last seen at a yard sale, purchasing a funny-looking box ...


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.


Nicholas P. Oakley

Nicholas P. Oakley is a science fiction author from the UK.

Nicholas was born in Solihull, England, and now lives with his partner in Inverness, Scotland. His first novel, The Watcher, is due out in 2013 from See Sharp Press. Details of this and his other stories can be found at his website, http://www.nicholaspoakley.com


Conor Powers-Smith

Conor Powers-Smith grew up in New Jersey and Ireland. He currently lives on Cape Cod, where he works as a reporter. His stories have appeared in Abyss and Apex, Fantastic Frontiers, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, and other magazines.


James Rowland

James Rowland is a young, British writer who is just beginning the journey of publication. Since it is just the start of that road, he doesn't have a fancy website or an interesting twitter account. However he hopes 2013 will be an exciting year where he starts to self-publish his novelette series, The Collingwood Report, and also continues hoping to find people mad enough to publish his short stories.


Cameron Suey

Cameron Suey is a California native living in San Francisco with his wife (who can occasionally be convinced to edit his work, as long as it's not too gross) and infant daughter. He works as a writer and producer in the games industry, and along with several other talented writers, won the WGA Award for Videogame Writing in 2009 for "Star Wars: The Force Unleashed." He can be found on the web at thejosefkstories.com, where he writes about writing, horror, and other influences, and on twitter as @josefkstories


Mark Wardecker

Mark Wardecker has been a great admirer (from a safe distance) of mad scientists since his first exposure to Peter Cushing's Victor Frankenstein and his various monsters from hell. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, The Willows, Doctor Who and Philosophy, and the Baker Street Journal. He has also edited an anthology of August Derleth's early Solar Pons stories and is a librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.


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.