Steve Berman is a Lambda Literary Award-winning editor of over thirty anthologies of queer and speculative fiction. With Daughters of Frankenstein, Steve hoped to capture some of the weirdness of the old mad scientist films with a sapphic sentiment, the boldness of identity and creation. Steve is the publisher of Lethe Press, one of the oldest LGBT+ publishers still operating today. He resides in Western Massachusetts.

Daughters of Frankenstein edited by Steve Berman

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.

 

REVIEWS

  • ''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.''

    – Lee 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 
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

I like to think that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein's "mother," would have been proud of these "Daughters of Frankenstein," her granddaughters. Their great-grandmother too, pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, would have approved of women portrayed with such limitless inventiveness and descriptive skill. Surely, she would have appreciated the lesbian theme as well, with its flouting of convention and focus on strong female characters. No scientists, mad or otherwise, have yet invented a time machine that would allow our literary foremothers to see how far our imaginations have flown over the centuries. We're lucky enough to appreciate all that has gone before, and to enjoy these new stories of invention, obsession, and wild adventure as well. I've enjoyed them so much that I'm tempted to say too much about each one, but I'll try to restrain myself. Discovery, after all, is a vital part of invention, and readers deserve their chance to discover each story as its author intended,

with no "spoilers" to interfere with the experience.

The prospective reader does, however, deserve some general idea of what to expect. The book begins with Jess Nevins's scholarly overview of both real woman scientists and fictional portrayals of female mad scientists, from Alexander Pope's 1728 faux-goddess of mathematics, Mathésis, to the 2010 film Caprica. (I might have been tempted to include the Egyptian goddess Isis, who reassembled dead Osiris's body parts, with the addition of a golden phallus, and brought him back to life long enough to sire her son Horus but calling that science would be too much of a stretch.) Nevins's list is a fascinating one, with more than its share of villains and/or cinematic fantasies aimed at males, making us all the happier to see this array of stories about wildly inventive lesbian women.

These stories take the theme in a wide variety of directions, set in many different time periods, sometimes in imagined or parallel worlds, but often in the one we think we know. There's humor to be enjoyed when those four mystery-busting kids with their wacky Great Dane get the genuine adventure you always wished they would, and, in a different vein, when two clever women get their way in a society Bertie Wooster would have recognized.

In veins of a biological sort, there are tales of reanimators and experimental anatomists and zombifying drugs that skirt the edge of horror and once or twice ooze over that edge. In contrast, there are thrilling schemes and chases proving that Bonnie should have dumped Clyde and joined a gang of dykes; a future world of robots, weaponized cancer, and love transcending humanity; and steampunk scenarios with Victorian robots common as servants but put to uncommon uses by uncommon women.

Viewpoints are as varied as the Russian revolution seen from inside a Fabergè egg, experimental psychologists running amuk with role-playing Minotaurs and Thebans, and Eva Braun (yes, her) with an infatuation for Rosie the Riveter.

The writing styles range just as widely, from slyly witty to technically precise to prose so beautifully evocative that it makes you shiver with delight or trepidation, whichever fits the story. For all their diversity, many of these stories have one factor in common: the presence of cats. The feline may be a cyborg, or a transdimensional dream cat, or a genetically enhanced creation, or a deceptively everyday tabby—or maybe just a subtle movement in the shadows. Some stories have no apparent cats at all, but really, who can be sure? I think this is a feminist author's answer to Schrödinger's thought experiment.

Enjoy the imaginations of these writers assembled by editor Steve Berman. They are truly the heirs, the daughters of that most infamous of mad scientists: Frankenstein. And their work is alive!

Connie Wilkins

Spring 2015