Mad Scientist / Literature

Mad Scientists in Literature.

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• Ahriman Trilogy: The Surgeon really goes for the "mad" part. It's hard to blame him, considering he's in the grips of an Eldritch Abomination, though.
• In All Men of Genius, the numerous scientists of the cast aren't necessarily mad, but their output isn't necessarily much different than if they were, so a lot of the associated tropes apply. Some of them are certainly eccentric.
• Amphibian Man: The titular character's adoptive father, Dr. Salvator gives him shark gills, extensive knowledge about Oceanology and other sciences... and none whatsoever about such pesky details like days of week. Salvator also gives a rather passionate speech toward the end of the book criticizing Science Is Bad.
• Isaac Asimov:
  • The Naked Sun: The Solarian roboticist, Jothan Leebig, is revealed to have been working on bypassing the First Law of robotics which prevents robots from harming humans by exploiting a flaw in the wording of the law. Leebig uses this to successfully plan and execute the murder of his colleague Rikaine Delmarre, who strongly disagreed with his vision, and attempt to poison both the newly assigned Solarian police investigator and Elijah Baley — the Earth detective. When he's forced into confessing, he also admits to have been planning on developing and building new war spaceships using this same exploitation of the positron brain in order to turn them into very dangerous and effective weapons.
  • The Rest of the Robots: During the introduction, Dr Asimov discusses the creation of this trope, tying it to Frankenstein and World War I. Building life was blasphemous because mankind cannot build souls, but the war had shown that it could destroy life very easily. Thus, the "Evil Scientist or, at best, the Foolishly Sacrilegious Scientist", became a common archetype.
• Blood Angels: In Red Fury, Caecus persists in his efforts to make replicae of Space Marines over his Chapter Master's overt disapproval. (His servant Fenn falls more under Old Retainer than The Igor, because he vocally disapproves of it all.)
• The main villains in Caliphate are surprisingly not Islamic fanatics, but a trio of American scientists that defected to the titular Islamic state to destroy America using a biological weapon they developed. This alone makes them qualify by default, but the one who truly fits the trope best than the others is Dr. O'Meara, a sadistic, sexual predator with a taste for children.
• In Castle Hangnail, of the former masters of Castle Hangnail was one, complete with the electrodes and the screams of "It's alive!"
• Creator/Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Willy Wonka may be a cheery candymaker, but his amazing sweets and otherwise largely stem from mad science (his favorite room in the enormous factory is The Inventing Room where he works on new creations). Over the course of the original novel and its sequel, it's revealed that he's created such things as a meal contained in a stick of chewing gum, a teleporter, a glass elevator that works as a functional spacecraft, a youth serum in pill form and an aging serum counterpart, and so forth. Of course, not all of these things have been perfected yet, and some very interesting things have happened to both his test subjects and visitors to the factory who didn't heed his warnings...
• The main character of The Chronicles of Professor Jack Baling is one of these. He doesn't start off as one, but by the end of the first episode, he resides firmly in this territory. There seem to be some other characters who are also Mad Scientists, but we haven't seen them in any great detail yet.
• The Corsay Books have a wide variety, from Frankenstein-style reanimationists, to those dabbling in Alien Geometries, to specialists in disciplines that seem closer to magic. They are the main antagonists of the work, but generally portrayed as misguided and dangerous rather than evil.
• In Count to a Trillion, Menelaus tries a very hypothetical and dangerous experiment on himself the first chance he can get.
• Garfield Reeves-Stevens' novel Dark Matter features a mad scientist Serial Killer who actually manages to endow himself with metahuman powers similar to Captain Atom, Firestorm, and Doctor Manhattan (in imitation of the latter, he even visits Mars).
• Deeplight: Dr. Vyne built the Screaming Sea Butterfly, a god-glass submarine that lives up to its name, and thinks replicating an Eldritch Abomination (and transplanting the actual heart of a god into it) is a good idea.
• The Destroyer: Remo Williams has encountered mad scientists, for example Dr. Judith White, who mutated herself into a tiger/homo sapien Half-Human Hybrid.
• Discworld:
  • The Alchemists' Guild are Magitek mad scientists. When they're not trying to turn lead into gold, they're repairing their guild hall due to their other experiments causing "unforeseen exothermic reactions" (i.e. massive explosions).
  • Inverted with the character of Jeremy Clockson from Thief of Time, who has the detachment from reality and dangerous obsession of the typical Mad Scientist because (most of the time, and in a very specialized way) he's saner than normal people. Not that it makes much difference to the end result.
  • The Igors of the Discworld are typically the assistants to Mad Scientists, but are known to conduct their own experiments, such as growing noses with feet, and have their own special version of "self improvement". Though to be fair, Igors in general are remarkably Genre Savvy — they know their place in the chain, and how to react when that chain is shaken. In fact, at one point, the clan foists off their most "modern" variant (Mr. "Noses with Feet") on the Night Watch in an attempt to end the corruption they feel he brings. Similarly, in Carpe Jugulum, an Igor working for vampires revolts at their innovations and revives the old master — not so much reviving the Good Old Ways as the Moderately Less Odious Old Ways.
  • Making Money gives us Hubert Turvy, a mad economist. He's an otherwise good and reasonable lad with a really impressive Evil Laugh.
  • Bergholt Stuttley "Bloody Stupid" Johnson may qualify; aside from his architectural and landscaping mishaps, he made a mail-sorter with a wheel that had pi as exactly 3. It started churning out mail from the future and alternate universes until the then-postmaster smashed it.
  • Leonard of Quirm, an exceedingly gentle, patient genius, isn't so much mad as unable to foresee the consequences of his inventions.
• Most of Doc Savage's foes are mad enough to the point that their death machines could not have been a large scale threat after retrieval and close examination by Doc. At least, that's what he says...
• In Justina Ireland's Dread Nation duology, the 2nd book Deathless Divide reveals that the tinkerer Gideon Carr turns out to be one and the Big Bad. In a world where "shamblers" have devastated much of the US, Gideon's so obsessed with creating a cure to the zombie plague that he keeps traveling to various towns and cities, convincing their leaders to try his experimental vaccines. Problem is his vaccines only have a minuscule chance of working, but a high possibility of starting new outbreaks so many settlements and cities have been wiped out by his actions. Too bad he's so obsessed with a zombie cure, as he's truly a brilliant inventor and made things that really benefited places he's lived at such as wind turbines, electrical systems, gas heaters and a rail gun in the 1860s!
• From Storm Front (Dresden Files), the main antagonist has a whole factory producing a magically-laced drug. It's catalyzed by a ritual, fueled by sex.
• In the Erebus Sequence, this is revealed to be what the always-absent king has been getting up to. Among other things, it's the origin of the Orfani.
• Evolution: Mother is essentially a Paleolithic version of this. She understands the concept of cause and effect, and is capable of abstract thought. This enables her to invent the spear thrower, a crucial invention because her people are starving. However, Mother's enhanced mental powers come at a cost; many of her ideas come to her when she is having crippling migraines, and she begins to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia following the death of her son.
• Extreme Monsters: The titular group of extreme sports-playing monsters had a mad scientist named Doc as their coach.
• Feliks, Net & Nika: Professor Butler is a biology teacher, but an... unusual one. For one, he keeps a herd of small tarantulas and a python named Tape (because he was so thin when he was little. Now they should change his name to Hawser). Also, he's conducting his own freaky breeding and genetic experiments on plants. Among nice things like beautiful flowers that can grow only in human hair, there are plants that seem to be sentient and one giant sundew that is definitely sentient and wishes to befriend humans. Actually his creations are rather benevolent... but try to believe it when a man-sized plant with More Teeth than the Osmond Family is smiling at you.
• Fifty Feet of Trouble features mad scientists as a form of monster. The "scientist" part means they can make wonders. The "mad" part means they don't always make any sense. Like the giant glowing pigeons.
• While the Mad Scientist might seem quintessentially modern, he's probably Older Than Steam. The inspiration for both Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein and the adaptations which distorted Frankenstein himself into a Mad Scientist came from a much older literary and popular tradition about Mad Alchemists, and their blasphemous, yet entertaining, obsessions with the creation of homunculi and the secrets of eternal life. The most well-known remnant of the old "Mad Alchemist" trope today is the Faust myth, and its literary adaptations in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Goethe's Faust.
  • An interesting fact is that the 1910 silent film Frankenstein features a scene of the monster's creation that is highly relevant to an alchemical procedure of palingenesis (re-formation of a once-living organism from its ashes or from its severed parts by heating). No other film adaptation involves this trace.
  • Victor Frankenstein, as originally conceived in Mary Shelley's novel, was not quite a Mad Scientist. Although he sees himself as a spiritual descendant of Mad Alchemists, Shelley makes his character more rounded and his mental instability is more subtly portrayed. However, within decades wildly popular nineteenth-century melodrama theatre adaptations recast him as a cackling Mad Alchemist.
  • While he's not a Mad Scientist throughout the novel, he certainly is one when he's actually working on bringing his creature to life:
    My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated with confinement. Sometimes, on the very brink of certainty, I failed; yet still I clung to the hope which the next day or the next hour might realize. One secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I had dedicated myself; and the moon gazed on my midnight labors, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I sabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless, and almost frantic impulse, urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit. It was indeed but a passing trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as, the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits. I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation: my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion.
• The children's book series Franny K. Stein was about a seven-year-old girl who was a mad scientist and the misadventures she got into when her experiments went wrong.
• The Golden Hamster Saga: Professor Fleischkopf, the villain of the second book, is an Evilutionary Biologist who dissects living hamsters' brains.
• The Golgotha Series has Clay and Professor Zenith. Clay wishes to reanimate the dead, while Zenith wants to use humans as living batteries for his diabolical machines.
• Sadistic Pavlovian Ned Pointsman, one of the main villains in Gravity's Rainbow.
• Dr. Skiner, from Hell's Children is a very fine example of this.
• A Hero's War: "Mad Alchemist", in this case, where alchemy is essentially making magical items. Landar is undeniably brilliant, and Cato's ideas inspire her to previously undreamed heights of magitek, but her inventions have a tendency to explode, and she can often become lost in her work, forgetting to sleep or eat. Since Cato can't use magic himself, and since she has the vision to actually grasp some of what he describes from Earth, he relies on her heavily for the magical side of the revolution.
  Cato: Landar? Why did you feel the need to turn the engagement bracelet into a weapon?
  Landar: ...It felt like a good idea at the time?
• In one Hoka story by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson, reenacting the Space Patrol, the ship has a Mad Scientist because all Patrol ships do.
• John Carter of Mars tends to run into his share of crazy scientists:
  • In The Master Mind of Mars, Ras Thavas makes his living selling his skills and doesn't care about the rest of the world. Although he later tries to give up his evil ways, Ras Thavas has trouble understanding the "rules".
  • In A Fighting Man of Mars, Phor Tak. Originally sane while making his inventions, but losing it after being maltreated and exiled by his jeddak. At first it appears to be Revenge, but in the end, he reveals he wants to Take Over the World.
• Journey to Chaos:
  • Captain Hasina is perpetually experimenting on people to test homemade cures, and when she learns Eric is an otherworlder, she becomes obsessed with cutting him open For Science!. Because these cures have innocuous side effects, and her Morality Chain prevents her from dissecting Eric, she's played for Comedic Sociopathy.
  • Nunnal Enaz is the Director of Hariana Inquires in the Hidden Elf Village of Dnnac Ledo. This means her day job is bending the laws of physics until they break in her laboratory. When Nolien mana mutates into a unicorn, she gleefully experiments upon him to learn about the new breed.
• In Kiln People, this is diagnosed as Smersh-Foxleitner Syndrome. Arrogance, sociopathy, mood-swings, and self-delusion are among its many symptoms.
• Mad Crossbones in the Kingdom's Disdain series is a medieval version of this trope.
• Knight and Rogue Series: The villain of The Last Knight is a rare example of a mad scientist in a fantasy setting, performing dubiously ethical experiments in order to give magical powers to humans (as, in the story's universe, only plants and animals have magic).
• H. P. Lovecraft:
  • Crawford Tillinghast in "From Beyond", who messes with the nature of reality and doesn't seem bothered when it leads to his servants being eaten by an Eldritch Abomination.
  • Herbert West, of Herbert West–Reanimator, whose quest to hold back death takes him down dark paths.
• Arthur Machen:
  • The Inmost Light, written in 1894, contains a rather horrific version of this trope.
  • There's another one in The Great God Pan. While the novel seems desperate to make him slightly sympathetic, at least to a modern reader he comes off as a monster. Yeah, practice some experimental brain surgery with a teenaged girl completely infatuated with you, and clearly incapable of truly informed consent. What could go wrong?
• Most of the villains in the Maximum Ride series. Often hilariously overdone, as with ter Borcht, who is a thinly disguised Expy of Josef Mengele in personality, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in voice/outrageous accent.
• Alfred Bester's "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed", along with its protagonist Professor Henry Hassell of Unknown University, gives Ampere and Boltzman as examples of Real Life "mad professors".
• Monster of the Year: "The doctor" who created Sigmund Fred and whom Igor mentions having previously worked for.
• The King of the Mountain in Enid Blyton's The Mountain of Adventure.
• In The Mouse Watch, Dr. Thornpaw is an Evil Genius rat who was forced to turn himself into a Cyborg after losing several body parts to horrific Animal Testing. Now he wants Revenge on the human race, which he plans to get by inventing a Mind-Control Device that will turn us all into Hypno Fools.
• Professor Drummond from the Nick Carter short story "Nick Carter and the Professor" from 1902. This story appeared in the reprint anthology Nick Carter, Detective published in 1963 by the MacMillan Company, with an introduction by Robert Clurman. Drummond worked out of Malden, MA and had his underlings steal a body from Mount Auburn in Cambridge. Carter also faced Dr. Jack Quartz.
• Crake from Oryx and Crake combines with Evilutionary Biologist.
• The Perfect Run: Blue elixirs sometimes turn people into Geniuses, implanting knowledge and skills for a specific field. Len is focused on underwater tech, Vulcan on weapons, so on and so on. Ryan is not a Genius, but he has so much experience with Genius tech that many people mistake him for one.
• In the Peter Simple newspaper columns, Seth Roentgen is a mad scientist where the science in question is agriculture, inventing devices such as a nuclear-powered potato harvester that can harvest, peel, slice and fry a thousand tons of potatoes in less than five minutes. His daughter Hephzibah thus combines Farmer's Daughter and Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter.
• Subverted by Erik, the titular Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera. He built a Robotic Torture Device/Death Trap and a Deceptively Human Robot in the middle of the 19th century, but his tragedy, as the Narrator says in the epilogue, is that he is so ugly he could never become a scientist, but rather a toyman or stage magician:
  And he had to hide his genius or use it to play tricks with, when, with an ordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind!
• Master Wieran, a major adversary in the fantasy novel Phoenix in Shadow, is a magitek mad scientist.
• Common in Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain. Most super-intellects have difficulty controlling their power, since the human brain isn't designed to hold that kind of knowledge. This results in a number of impractical and downright stupid designs, such as putting a self-destruct on an otherwise perfectly normal smelter. The main character, Penny, is a mad scientist who's a bit better at this than most, and has invented technology strong enough to challenge adult heroes when she's only thirteen - though like many often lapses into a fugue state, waking to find herself holding a new invention of unknown function and cackling madly. Her father, by contrast, is a controlled enough mad scientist and a good enough "real" scientist that he can sometimes translate mad science inventions into things people without superpowers can understand. A different variety has a separate superpower that enables or enhances their creations - her classmate Cassie primarily shoots lightning, but can instinctively create devices she can operate with her powers, while another is primarily a mad scientist and was unaware she had a separate power until examination revealed her invention lacked a motive force without her holding it.
• Both Masego and Wekesa from A Practical Guide to Evil. Not surprising given that they are both Villains with Names strongly associated with magic, in a world where magic is commonly used in place of technology even for things like grenades. Both have stated outright that they are more interested in tearing apart Creation to figure out how it works than in gaining temporal power. Over the course of the series we learn about such inventions of them like Still Waters (a ritual/alchemical compound that kills anyone who drinks it and raises them as undead under caster's control) and reverse-engineered angelic smiting.
• The aeshes of The Quest of the Unaligned have this reputation, and in fact in magickless Tonzimmiel, "aesh" means "certified engineer." Word Of God reveals that their secondary power is Haesh's Trace, a burst of insight that grants them true understanding of something they've been considering. An example of this is seen in Laeshana's sudden insight into the nature of magic while she is finishing her studies at the College of Magic.
• The Radix: Edgar Wurm, a cryptoanalysist who managed to decode the Voynich manuscript, but in the process got mad and obsessed with the Radix.
• Dr. Sacreya of Sacreya's Legacy is certainly mad, creating a zombie virus and all, but his intentions are good.
• The Sandokan series has two. The first is Paddy O'Brien, the self-styled "Demon of War", who appears in The King of the Sea and comes equipped with a Death Ray capable of igniting explosives (including munition magazines on enemy ships) from long distances. The other, appearing in Yanez's Revenge, is Wan Horn, a microbiologist whose contribution to Sandokan and Yanez's cause is destroying an enemy army with a cholera outbreak.
• Saving Max: This is half of Marianne's motive, the other half being Münchausen Syndrome by proxy. She has run all kinds of experiments on her children, both medical and behavioral. She is delighted to discover that she can train Jonas, her only surviving child, to act just like an autistic child even though he isn't.
• In Something More Than Night, the villain has two on his payroll: a mad physician who runs a private medical clinic for rich customers and performs unethical experiments in search of a cure for death itself, and a mad engineer who builds the elaborate devices necessary to the work. (The novel is set in 1930s Hollywood, and it's mentioned that the engineer created the fake mad science machinery in Frankenstein (1931) before finding his vocation as a creator of real mad science.)
• Ex-maester Qyburn of A Song of Ice and Fire is definitely this. He lost both his chain and the title of "Maester" when the Citadel found out about his anatomical experimentation on still-living people. After that, he found employment with the Bloody Mummers — and fitted himself right in. When he got the chance, he switched gears and leapt at the opportunity to work for the Lannisters either as a still-very-excellent surgeon or a Torture Technician — whichever. And, from the chapters in King's Landing, we get a good idea what his earlier experiments involved and were geared towards... Let's just say that his creation of a Frankenstein-like, zombie-like creature mostly made up of Gregor Clegane is just the very tip of the nightmare-inducing, death-defying, beyond-the-bounds-of-medicine iceberg.
• Dr. Impossible, of Soon I Will Be Invincible, suffers from "malign hypercognitive disorder". His mentor, Baron Ether, had the condition as well. Symptoms include not following safety protocols while working with high energy physics experiments, extreme long-term planning, robotic servants, death rays, extreme long-term planning, maniacal laughter, wondering why you just didn't get a normal job while powering up the death ray, and insomnia.
• In The Southern Reach Trilogy, the biologist is an extreme loner who likely had a slight history of ecoterrorism, and she will take absolutely stupid risks to get more research and is almost obsessive with taking samples. The biologist herself realizes this in hindsight, as does her clone when she thinks about those memories. Ghost Bird also notes that if she ever encountered the biologist, the biologist would most likely greet her by trying to take a sample from her.
• The Starchild Trilogy: In Rogue Star, Cliff Hawk wants to know more about rogue stars — living stars which for whatever reason have not joined the intergalactic community of stars — and decides to build one from scratch in his own laboratory. It does not go well.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Qwi Xux, an incredibly brilliant scientist, designed the laser for the Death Star, the World Destroyers, the Sun Crusher and a number of other dangerous creations. Unlike many others fitting this trope, her extremely guarded upbringing (she was raised by Imperials in an oppressive cram school where the price for failure was your hometown being obliterated) has caused her to develop a very naive and innocent view of her creations, having been led to believe they were intended for industrial applications (the Death Star would blow up a massive asteroid which the World Destroyers would then be able to harvest for materials, etc.).
  • Doctor Evazan and his boss, Borborygmus Gog, in Galaxy of Fear. Evazan was tasked with making zombie soldiers, which he took to with gusto, Grave Robbing, killing passing twelve-year-olds so as to have fresher corpses, and injecting himself with the serum. Gog was much, much worse.
• Tavarangian of The Stormlight Archive falls into this on his smart days. As a result of the Old Magic, his intelligence changes randomly from day to day, and his compassion and empathy change in inverse proportion to his intellect. So when he's smart, he becomes a psychopath.
  • Rhythm of War introduces Raboniel, the Lady of Pain. She was and is one of the singers' most formidable scholars, and everyone (including her own allies) react to the revelation that she is returning to Roshar instead of catatonic on Braize with stark terror. In the last Desolation, she created a bioweapon that was supposed to wipe humanity from Roshar, though in practice it only decimated the human population... and killed one in a hundred singers as well. In the current Desolation, she is experimenting with corrupting natural spren into Voidspren and is trying to discover how to create the soul-destroying "anti-Light".
• Dr. Jekyll of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starts out sane, except he thought it was a good idea to create a potion that would silence the superego and allow him to indulge in every vice imaginable without his pesky conscience getting in the way. This Is Your Brain on Evil ensues.
• Testimony Before an Emergency Session of the Naval Cephalopod Command by Seth Dickinson has a scientist who was kicked out of his job for his drug use and unsettling obsession with squid psychology, explaining to the eponymous Command why a giant squid trained and enhanced to detect Soviet nuclear subs has gone Off the Rails and is trying to start World War III. He points out that the Navy treating a giant squid like Flipper when it's actually a solipsistic psychopath who regards the entire world as something to be manipulated to its benefit is a bad idea, and if they want him to fix things they'd better give him his job back and oodles of research money as well. Not that he is a psychopath manipulating the world to his benefit, of course...
• Time Machine Series: The Rings of Saturn has an old, very much insane scientist, living in the abandoned part of a space pirate base (without their knowledge) who is obsessed with researching other dimensions (and doesn't hesitate to send his lab assistant, or random strangers into them. Without giving them a way back.)
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • Fëanor in The Silmarillion falls somewhere between this and Mad Artist. An extraordinarily gifted craftsman and scholar, he starts out rather paranoid and nasty (because of the death of his mother and remarriage of his father) and ends up completely unhinged after his father is killed and his finest works are stolen.
  • Saruman in The Lord of the Rings can also be viewed as this character type, what with his obsession with industry at the expense of the natural world. He is also something of a would-be Emperor Scientist; he would have become one had his whole Take Over the World plan gotten off the ground.
• The Ultra Violets: The characters owe their superpowers to Absent-Minded Teen Genius Candace and her questionable experiments. And the Fascination Lab and BeauTek seem to hire them by the batch. Though the latter is the "evil" company, FLab isn't afraid of exploring the potential of some freaky, questionable science. (They even have a literal Highly Questionable Tower, for Pete's sake.)
• Jules Verne:
  • Master of the World, in the Jules Verne thriller of the same name, is a brilliant inventor. Pity he's also a monomaniac...
  • Robur the Conqueror, in the novel of the same name.
• H. G. Wells:
  • Dr. Griffin from The Invisible Man. All the evidence suggests that he was not entirely stable to begin with; after he manages to turn himself permanently invisible, he becomes a murdering psychopath bent on domination who refers to himself as "Invisible Man the First".
  • Dr. Moreau from The Island of Doctor Moreau isn't as early as Frankenstein, but he played a major role in shaping the trope. He has Einstein Hair — decades before Einstein. He had the Mad Scientist Laboratory — his island (and he likely brought tropical island laboratories into vogue). Cast out from society, with only one assistant? Oh, yes. He did it all For Science! but used extremely painful methods that would give any PETA representative nightmares. Turned on by his own creations? Yep. Several films adaptations even give him a beautiful daughter of his own creation. He also provided the beginnings of the Reluctant Mad Scientist — he never intended to get revenge on the other scientists who cast him out, and in his own mind he had noble purposes for his work; it's only his (possibly willful) ignorance of how torturous his methods are that makes him less than a sympathetic character.
• Wild Cards: There are Mad Scientists aplenty, on both hero and villain sides. Or at least folks who have been infected with the wild card virus who are now determined to build androids, Humongous Mecha and all manner of mad-sciencey devices. The kicker is that the inventions they create really are just piles of unworkable junk, and the particular power they have developed is the ability to make their crazy inventions work. Any attempt to analyze and reproduce the devices prove to be fruitless and show that there is no way they should function in the first place.
• Wings of Fire: Starflight's father Mastermind is the chief scientist for the NightWings, dabbling in experiments and asking dragonets to help him out for their school projects. Because he had kidnapped RainWings to learn their defenses so his tribe could overpower them, he is arrested and sentenced by their new queen Glory to prison. Starflight finds it hard to trust his father after that.
• Xanadu (Storyverse):
  • One of the main antagonists in "Against Type" is Max, a Fox Folk mad scientist with the ability to create gadgets that can perform any number of effectively magical functions, alongside a maniacal disposition, an obsessive devotion to his dream of replacing the human race with other fox people, and poor impulse control.
  • In "Quest Moments", a government official explains that the US government has been trying to employ Xanadu survivors who became super-scientists to contain the crisis and more generally as potential future assets. He starts to call them mad scientists, before quickly correcting himself and using "genius".
    "We're actually contacting and trying to recruit a number of Xanadu survivors whose talents may be of use in this situation. You're simply the first mad- er, genius scientist to accept the invitation. Most of the others have vanished, or refuse to meet with our agents."
    Skyler smiled. "A certain amount of paranoia is endemic to the profession, Mr. Director. There's always someone out there trying to steal our inventions, or the credit for them, or turn our creations into weapons of mass destruction. Or on the flipside, they might fear being shut down because their research violates local ethical standards or costs too much."

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