Frankenstein in Around the World in 80 Books

Feb 10, 2018 Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: the-classics-club, must-read, the-great-american-read

There is so much to admire about this book...the dynamic vocabulary...the structure of a story within a story within a story...the sadness of the disappointment and eventual horror of creating a disappointed and eventually desperately sad being...the resonating depth of the implications of creation...a brilliant work.

The story is of a man on a boat, Walton, in the cold regions of the world who comes upon a man by the name of Frankenstein who is almost frozen. Walton rescues Frankenstein, and th ...more

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Oct 29, 2019 marianne rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: ebooks

One of my favorite authors, Jeanette Winterson, just released a book called Frankissstein: A Love Story, which both follows a newly wed Mary Shelley on her honeymoon across Europe and re-imagines Frankenstein as a story of the future, where the monster brought to life is none other than Artificial Intelligence. I figured I’d better acquaint myself with Shelley’s Frankenstein before I dove into Winterson’s book.

There’s so much packed into this short novel, and the first thought I kept coming back One of my favorite authors, Jeanette Winterson, just released a book called Frankissstein: A Love Story, which both follows a newly wed Mary Shelley on her honeymoon across Europe and re-imagines Frankenstein as a story of the future, where the monster brought to life is none other than Artificial Intelligence. I figured I’d better acquaint myself with Shelley’s Frankenstein before I dove into Winterson’s book.

There’s so much packed into this short novel, and the first thought I kept coming back to over and over again is that Mary Shelley was all of 18 years old - an actual teenager! - when she penned this novel. And so I read this with two things in mind; how did Frankenstien and his monster translate to the future we will share with our own much anticipated new-life “monster” (AI), and what was going through this young woman’s heart and mind at the time she wrote the novel?

No one has an answer to the first question, but I believe it’s highly probable that AI, when it becomes sentient and experiences some form of feeling, will react like Frankenstein’s monster. It may feel the excitement of discovery, pure fear, indignity at being less than a human, anger at its creator, love for another, desire, happiness and grief. And surely more, even if at this stage we don’t really know since AI is in its infancy. But I think there is a parallel to draw for the simple reason that both Frankenstien’s monster and AI are human-built things and as such have human experience and bias built into the system at every step. Both are created in their creator’s image. Shelley gave her book the subtitle of “The Modern Prometheus”, and the monster refers to himself as Adam at one point. So in addition to being a gothic-romantic novel, and a seminal work in the genre of science fiction, this is also a reinvented, 19th-century origin-of-man story.

The other side of the phenomenon of a sentient AI and other future “life” tech is how we humans - the Frankensteins of the future - will react to the various new lifeforms we invent. That is also an unknown. Frankenstein acted with horror, cruelty and occasional pangs of compassion. Is this our fate too?

He is a confusing character. Brilliant, singularly focused on his ambition to create life and then destroy it, and rash in his emotions, he often vacillates between being kind and compassionate, and then unfair and cruel.

The other specific interest I had in this story - Mary Shelley’s young age - baffled and impressed me. She was clearly really bright and at 18 had somehow already lived enough to understand so much about human nature…. And to express it in the form of a creative story in a genre that hardly existed, and eloquently so, no less. But on the other hand, Frankenstein and his monster both experience fear, anger and cruelty in an absolute manner that we usually stereotype and recognize in younger people. Both creator and monster are unreasonably immature and hurtful in those moments and I couldn’t help but wonder if this was an artifact of her young age. By the end of the book, I was unsure who was the villain.

There are plenty more interesting things to take away from the book. For example, it’s partly a travelogue of Europe in the early 19th century. It opens in the Arctic Ocean, spends a great deal of time in Switzerland and Chamonix, and moves into Britain before moving back into the Alps. Shelley was vacationing along the shores of Lake Geneva at the time she wrote the novel. I could tell these Alpine experiences were fresh in her mind, as the descriptions are vivid and full. No doubt early 19th century readers, for whom traveling was more rare than it is today, reveled in these descriptions.

Shelley also employs several narrative techniques. It starts in epistolary form, with a series of captivating letters a certain Captain Walton has written his sister, as he is traveling across the Arctic Ocean and his encounter with a lost traveler a certain Victor Frankenstein. This is the outer shell of the story, which then switches to Frankentstein’s narrative. There are two more layers of stories built in.

And then there is the interesting fact that she never gives her monster a name. Was this because he was ultimately no different than his maker?

Frankenstein is also a snapshot of the general spirit of scientific discovery in the early 19th century. Electricity was just rearing its head, and there were reports of dead bodies responding to current and momentarily “coming to life” when shocked. It probably felt like the resurrection of dead people - or the creation of new life forms - was just around the corner, maybe even in the next generation’s lifetime. Two hundred years later, we are in a very similar state of science, as advances in cloning, gene-editing tech such as CRISPR, and AI are all becoming realities.

If this story is truly a mirror to our own Prometheus-like experiences with AI and other human-engineered lifeforms, then we, the Victor Frankenstein’s of the 21st century, have some large ethical issues at stake that we better start addressing. I think Jeanette Winterson was incredibly lucid to find the parallel between past and future. I’m thrilled I didn’t read this until I had this perspective. ...more

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Nov 17, 2016 Antonio Gallo rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: narrativa, saggistica, psycho, letteratura, in-inglese

Celebrando la nascita di Mary Shelley e il suo capolavoro "Frankenstein"! Segue una nota anche sulla Madre.

Festeggiamo un evento letterario epocale: la nascita di Mary Shelley, avvenuta il 30 agosto 1797. In questa data speciale, vogliamo rendere omaggio a una delle autrici più influenti della storia e al suo indimenticabile romanzo, "Frankenstein".

Mary Shelley, una donna straordinaria e visionaria, ci ha regalato un'opera che ha sfidato i confini dell'immaginazione e ha posto domande fondamenta ...more

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