Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus

"Finally, a book that reminds us of the power of illustration to re-animate old texts. MinaLima’s edition of Frankenstein adds to the gothic horror of the novel a visual, even tactile richness: hand-lettered pages, design flourishes, and a feeling that every turn of the page is a revelation. In 2025, when many of us read on screens, this volume is a reminder that books continue to matter as physical, carefully designed objects. Which books of 2025 stayed with you for their artistic, visual or design appeal?"

"I think it’s a revolutionary book, but not for the usual reason, that it started the Gothic horror novel. We never give credit to the fact that women have started whole genres of fiction, but a very interesting literary criticism once written on Frankenstein pointed out that Mary Shelley had many, many babies who died. Like so many women in the 18th century, she was always grieving the loss of another child. When you read the letters of these women, it just breaks your heart. They say things like, ‘I hope this one will live. He’s such a dear.’ They lost baby after baby in the days before Pasteur, before they understood the diseases of women and childbirth. Exactly. It’s changed our lives completely. Anyway, Mary Shelley lost many babies and then at a very young age lost Percy Bysshe Shelley, who drowned and whose body was burned on the beach at Lerici. The critic Ellen Moore suggested that this attempt to reanimate the dead was Shelley’s deep fantasy of wanting to restore life to all these lost loved ones. “This attempt to reanimate the dead was Shelley’s deep fantasy of wanting to restore life to all these lost loved ones” I think we have that in Frankenstein – buried, of course, under all the Gothic stuff. If we think of Frankenstein in terms of reanimating the dead – finding a scientific, a magical way to bring back the dead – we can understand it in terms of Mary Shelley’s life. It reminds us, as women, of how new it is to be able to count on our children surviving."

"I love this book. Mary Shelley wrote it when she was 21. I hope I was stipulating the first edition. She changed it several times and it’s watered down [in later editions]. One thing I like about the book is the preface by Percy Shelley. He says fiction is about things that are impossible, but “affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions, more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.” I love that statement. As a psychologist, when I want to learn about people, I study “reality.” What Shelley is reminding us is that what’s great about literature is that you see things larger than life. A lot of people forget the subtitle to the book, which is ‘The Modern Prometheus.’ Prometheus is, of course, the god who created man. Also, in the US, it’s common to think that Frankenstein is the monster. In fact, Victor Frankenstein is the scientist who creates the so-called monster. The event that instigates his quest to do that is the unexpected death of his mother, which he declares an unconscionable evil. His mother dies from a fever the she catches taking care of his future wife, Elizabeth. She dies completely at peace: The book states that. She calls them together, says everything is fine and that she hopes they’ll marry. The book goes on to say that, even when she’s dead, she has the same complaisant look on her face. It’s Frankenstein who calls her death an unacceptable evil and turns what is a natural event into something that becomes psychologically unbearable. He proceeds to go to extraordinary lengths to create life. He’s so preoccupied with that, that he makes the ‘monster’ hideous. He makes him large, because it’s easier to work with large body parts. The monster wakes up and the first thing he does is to smile and extend his hand and to murmur. Is that not what a human child would do at birth? That’s not hideous and monstrous! That’s a prototype of what any social creature would be expected to do. Frankenstein responds as if it’s an incredible affront and completely repudiates the creature. What a lot of commentators have said, and I believe it’s on the right track, is that Frankenstein’s own fear of death is fueling his revulsion to the creature. The creature is an ambulatory representation of death that we are denying by casting it out. Exactly. In his pursuit of death denial, what Frankenstein ends up doing is not taking care of himself: He’s so preoccupied with death that he becomes fatigued and chronically stressed. He ignores all of the people around him that matter, to the point where they’re all killed. His brother, his friend, his wife all end up getting killed and nature itself becomes despicable to him. And he ends up, at the end of the book, chasing the monster to the proverbial end of the world. I chose this book because it stands on its own merit, but also as a literary depiction of what Becker, in The Denial of Death , calls defiant Prometheanism. One of the many ways we deny death is by literally trying to obliterate it. “Frankenstein’s own fear of death is fueling his revulsion to the creature. The creature is an ambulatory representation of death that we are denying by casting it out.” Here’s Mary Shelley, in the 1800s, seeing what we now have in the 21st century, in the form of frenetic efforts to extend life in perpetuity. You have the Ray Kurzweils of the world, gobbling 250 different vitamins a day, we’ve got cryogenics, we’ve got Ted Williams’s head frozen someplace in Arizona. There’s the Immortality Institute , where people are saying it won’t be long before you won’t need your body anymore, we’ll just upload your essence onto a computer cloud…even Google now have a project to enable us to live forever. Where I take issue is in this view of death as an unnatural and evil outcome, just like Victor Frankenstein did. With no disrespect to the fine scientists involved, I am sympathetic to their efforts, but… I do, but only glibly. I’m grateful for vaccines and for the fact I am likely to live twice as long as anyone born a few hundred years ago. I have no objection to forestalling illness and extending life. But this idea that the end state would be immortality, I find a blatant effort to deny death in an unfortunate way. I think that’s one thing Shelley is trying to make us aware of. It’s a Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment… “Love does conquer death. Not literally, but at least psychologically.” Psychologists of our ilk tend to be frighteningly acultural and ahistorical. An Oxford student made the same point to me just an hour ago, saying surely things now are different? My immediate reaction is that they sure are, and probably not for the better. We spend billions of dollars on cosmetics to keep us looking young — more than we spend on social services in the US. We segregate people: You don’t really ever see old people because they’re all in Florida. Many of us have never seen a dead person. In some ways, we have gone to greater lengths to obscure reality. Yes, and the claim would be, based on all of these ideas, that the more that we’re denying it, the more that those anxieties which still persist will be manifested in a variety of indirect ways — many of them not necessarily good."

"Frankenstein was published in 1818 and for me it is the piece of British literature that best reflects the anxieties and concerns of the time, the fascination with and fear about science and technological advance. I think more than a science-fiction novel it is a book about morality. As someone who is concerned with feeling I suppose I would be more likely to interpret it in that way. At the beginning of the novel, Doctor Frankenstein creates a monster who lives like a human being and has the heart of a human being too. But the monster is unloved and unlovable and he becomes what we would call nowadays a sociopath. That is a very modern way of describing someone who has been utterly neglected and unloved and therefore has no moral feeling. But he has the understanding that he wishes to be given affection and when he is not given it he sets out to destroy the world that made him. For me the book is therefore about the immoral forces that science might unleash in the world. I think there was a lot of excitement, as well as fear. People were particularly excited about chemistry and there were lots of people doing experiments. For example there was Jane Marcet’s book, Conversations on Chemistry , and Humphrey Davy at the Royal Institution. So I think that, just as with the Internet today, there was excitement over the advancement of science but also a certain amount of trepidation. The great advances were in industrial processes, in chemical experiments and in geology. Biology was gathering its forces for the 1820s and the era of Darwin. But before that it was chemistry’s turn, with a huge craze for doing experiments at home and going to demonstrations of, say, the eruptions of volcanoes in theatres."

"It wasn’t published till 1830, but she had the idea and wrote the story when she was nineteen years old, 200 years ago, in 1816. The reason this book is so vitally important to me is that it is a permission-giver. In my formative time as a writer I felt the burden of expectation of the kind of book that a young woman, living in Hackney in the 21st century, should be writing. I thought I should be writing some sort of thoughtful, semi-autobiographical, poignant, sharp, taut book, rigorously realist, about the life of a young woman. And I didn’t want to write that, I didn’t want to write about myself. I wanted to push language to beautiful extremes, I love adjectives and adverbs and descriptive writing. I found myself torn between what I thought I was expected to write, and what I wanted to write. What Frankenstein does is blow all of that out of the water. Any ideas of writing in a modest way, or in a fashionable way, are gone. Frankenstein has a reach of imagination that is almost hysterical. She was able to pluck this idea both from her imagination and her understanding of science. She understood what Erasmus Darwin—Charles Darwin’s grandfather—was doing: experiments with electricity and the re-animation of dead objects. She was fantastically well-read, she was terribly intellectual, she was a political radical. She had no truck with modesty and restraint, or doing what was expected of her. She was going to let her imagination go as far as it possibly could. Then she defended it. In the years afterwards people would say to her, ‘It must have been those guys you were hanging out with that gave you the idea, it must have been something to do with your husband.’ And she said, ‘No, it was me, I had this dream, and I woke up and wrote it down.’ I think it’s so important for women writers and for new writers to have a text that is a talisman, showing what they can do. There’s a bucking the trend, a kicking against the pricks, destroying novel conventions and pushing it as far as it will possibly go. This is a book where she essentially dispensed with God. The creature is made. He isn’t born in original sin, he is an innocent being. It’s an extraordinary work of sci-fi that turns all received wisdom upside-down. I look at this nineteen-year-old girl and I think, ‘We should all be so brave and courageous.’ She shows that Gothic fiction and these kinds of parables can also be deeply profound. Just because you’ve come up with a monster doesn’t mean you’re not also writing about politics and about the way we live now. You can do both. One of the things that’s really striking about Frankenstein is the way she deals with the idea of innocence and transgression. We think of the creature as being this monster, and indeed he is by a certain number of definitions: he looks monstrous, he is evidently terrifying in his aspect, and he strangles a young boy to death and subsequently kills quite a few other people. And yet, this is not shown as being an inevitable consequence of his conception. Traditional theology would say that man is born in sin, the heart of man is deceitful above all things and you must be saved and redeemed and forgiven. Here it’s the other way round. He’s totally innocent. He is a living embodiment of innocence and goodness and he is subsequently degraded by the humans he meets. It’s a really daring thing to do, to say someone could be born in total innocence and when they do wicked things it’s because of what has been done to them and not because they were born in sin. It’s radical. Obviously, her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was an atheist, and she’d been very alert and alive to these radical ideas around her. She took them on board and gave them flesh."

"Frankenstein is called by some (but not by me) the first science fiction novel. In it, that futurity is materialised as Frankenstein’s monster, a weird symbolisation of “the child” filtered through the imaginarium of horror and terror. Shelley had miscarried her first pregnancy a year before writing the novel – the year after it was published, both her babies died of malaria – and her novel understands the relationship between creativity and morbidity, between birth and death. I’m sure I don’t need to summarise the story for you [spoiler alert!]. A scientist called Victor Frankenstein constructs and animates an eight-foot-tall artificial man, but obscurely horrified by what he has done, abandons his creation and temporarily loses his memory. The creature – never named – comes into the world a mental tabula rasa to be written upon by experience – as it transpires, mostly the experience of others’ hostility towards its hideous appearance. It learns not only to speak but, improbably enough, to read and write by eavesdropping unnoticed on a peasant family. Thereafter it becomes murderous, a consequence not only of others’ hostility but also of reading Milton’s Paradise Lost and identifying with the outcast Satan. Lonely, it seeks out its maker demanding that he create a monstrous bride. Frankenstein agrees and builds a second, female creature, but belatedly alarmed at the implication of his two creations breeding and populating the world with monsters, he tears it to pieces. In revenge the monster kills Frankenstein’s own wife. Frankenstein pursues his creation to the arctic wastes, where he dies. The novel ends with the creature still alive, but promising to kill itself. Summarised so baldly, this perhaps seems a little clumsily plotted – Shelley was 19 when she wrote it – and the novel does sometimes lapse into a rather melodramatic crudeness. But it also possesses remarkable imaginative power, not least in the embodiment, in both heart-wracked scientist and sublime monster, of two enduringly iconic archetypes of the genre. Brian Aldiss has famously argued that science fiction starts with Mary Shelley’s novel, and many people have agreed with him. For Aldiss, writing in Billion Year Spree , Frankenstein encapsulates “the modern theme, touching not only on science but man’s dual nature, whose inherited ape curiosity has brought him both success and misery”. Indeed, in 1974 Aldiss wrote his own oblique fictional treatment of the same story, Frankenstein Unbound , in which a modern man, propelled by “timeslips” back to the Romantic era, meets not only Mary Shelley but Frankenstein and his monster too – the latter proving an eloquent commentator on man’s capacity for dialectically interconnected creation and destruction. As a description of the novel and an implicit characterisation of SF as a whole, this has persuaded many. I once wrote a History of Science Fiction in which I argued that SF begins much earlier than Frankenstein . I’m not alone in thinking so. Some people suggest that it goes all the way back to Homer’s fantastical voyage or the Epic of Gilgamesh . Fantasy in the broadest sense is of great antiquity in human culture, I agree. But there seems some point to me in separating out science fiction from the broader category of fantasy, and I’d say we can’t really do that until we have “science” as a meaningful category. For me that means the Renaissance. I argue that the first proper SF story is a book by Johannes Kepler, the German astronomer, called Somnium – written in 1600, though not published until the 1630s – in which he imagines what actual lunar life forms might look like. There are a great many voyages to planets in the 17th and 18th centuries. But that said, I’d agree that Frankenstein occupies a special place in the genre. Though a little clumsily put together, it is astonishingly powerful and dream-haunting. One reason for that is the way it realises, in dramatic form, the terror of generation – of what inherits us, what comes after."

"If so, then it’s up against some pretty stiff opposition, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Bram Stoker’s Dracula . All three are global phenomena. This is partly to do with the popularity of their many film adaptations. However, I’d recommend reading all three in book form. For a Gothic novel, Frankenstein is surprisingly non-supernatural: there are no ghosts, demons, or witches. There isn’t really any magic. What there is, is cutting-edge science: Mary Shelley attended lectures by the chemist Humphry Davy; Frankenstein was published in the same year as the first treatise on blood transfusion; and Percy Shelley studied anatomy for a term, after he was sent down from Oxford. Frankenstein can be seen as an experiment—or almost a laboratory—that brings together science and literature. It makes us think seriously about science, but through the medium of literature. This is partly why Frankenstein is very much a novel for the twenty-first century. Mary Shelley was trying to push the boundaries of science and technology. The details of the science have changed, but the big questions remain as important for us today as they were for her. We’re still dealing with similar questions regarding artificial intelligence, transplantation, vivisection, medical ethics, and genetic engineering. “ Frankenstein can be seen as an experiment—or almost a laboratory—that brings together science and literature.” Frankenstein asks us to come to terms with the cost of scientific progress. It asks us to question whether scientific progress is worth experimentation on animals, experimentation on humans, the possible creation of life-forms that haven’t hitherto existed, and how we can develop notions of responsibility towards the unknown and inconceivable. Yes, it does. It gets us to think about the relationship of humans to the environment. In other words: is our environmental thinking to be centered on the human? Is it anthropocentric? Frankenstein is really a novel for the Anthropocene —the idea that humans have fundamentally changed the environment, and that we are now having to live with the consequences. Don’t forget that Frankenstein was inspired by a trip that Mary Shelley took to the shores of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816—the year without a summer. There had been a gigantic volcanic explosion the year before, which had sent ash hundreds of miles into the atmosphere. It blotted out the sunlight, and led to a decade of extreme weather conditions. Going to Switzerland, there were still dark and stormy nights, and Shelley and her companions watched thunderstorms across the lake. Byron, with whom they were staying, wrote an ecological catastrophe poem called ‘Darkness’, which is about the death of all things on Earth. In a sense, it’s a forerunner of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road , as an extremely bleak vision of future environmental catastrophe. The ‘being’ in the novel wants to have a mate. Incidentally, I don’t call him a ‘monster’, or even a ‘creature’. I call him a ‘being’ to draw attention to his relationship to the human beings in the novel. Although he’s not quite human, he nearly is: he’s sentient and intelligent; he can speak, read and write. He’s eloquent and erudite: he knows Milton’s Paradise Lost , for example. The being wants to have a she-being. He doesn’t want to be an oddity—a singular monster. He wants to be part of a species—to be accommodated within a taxonomy of natural history. He says that he’s going to go off to live in the Amazon with his mate—a sort of Adam and Eve beginning. Victor starts making a she-being, and then destroys the semi-created figure. The reason he gives is that he doesn’t want to risk propagating what he calls a ‘race of devils’ across the earth. He sees a threat, because the being is an immensely strong, quick-witted humanoid. What would stop his progeny from rebelling against the humans, and competing with them? There’s a sense here of unleashing unknown dangers on the environment. ‘Ecogothic’ is a term that has gained currency in recent criticism. It’s about how the Gothic becomes entwined with ecological thinking. Much of the state-of-the-art thinking that’s happening in ‘Gothic Studies’ at the moment is concerned with what’s called ‘speculative realism’, or ‘object-oriented ontology’. This thinking suggests that Gothic novels can be read in ways that displace the human from the heart of things, and create ways of thinking about the world that are non-anthropocentric. You get this in Frankenstein . When Victor and his family are travelling through the Swiss Alps, there’s an idea that they’re among the ‘habitations of another race of beings’—of a race that has been hitherto overlooked. There’s a strong sense that they’re not alone: that they are part of a vibrant–but also potentially dangerous – ecosystem that is always competing and fighting, and always in danger of collapsing. There’s also a lot of recent ecological thinking that considers human beings as ecosystems themselves. In other words, we don’t have a sole human integrity: we are made up of bacteria in the gut, and of fungi and viruses. We are ourselves walking ecosystems. This is just like the being in Frankenstein . He is a hybrid, not just of human bits and pieces, but also of animal. His body parts have been taken from abattoirs and slaughter-houses as well as from graveyards and charnel houses. In this sense, the being is representative of a much broader conception of life and vitality. He moves as an ecosystem, or as many beings. He’s rather like the man in the Gadarene swine episode in the New Testament, who is composed of devils and whose name is Legion."

"I read Frankenstein years ago in college. You know when you have the vague sense that you need to go back to a book because you know there’s something in it that can give you something? I don’t think it comes into my book all that much — in fact, I don’t think I even mention it — but I did read it a couple of times whilst writing the book. I was surprised to see when I went back to it that Frankenstein’s explicit aim in making the creature is to tackle mortality. The book is subtitled ‘The Modern Prometheus’ and it’s about the Promethean urge and the way that it can lead to really quite insane avenues. Does it speak directly to transhumanism? I think so. I thought about it a lot when I was writing the book, particularly the chapter about the DARPA Robotics Challenge. I was trying to find ways to get to grips with the uncanniness of those creations. I tried to reach out to Boston Dynamics a number of times when I was writing the book, and fairly recently since, but they don’t seem to do a lot of press as far as I can see. I’m convinced that their whole thing is like a viral marketing campaign for some future horror movie based on humanoid robots. There’s no other reason why they would be constantly releasing these terrifying videos . So I was trying to think of ways that I could think through the terror of these robots. What is this feeling that you get when you look at these uncanny human-like but very inhuman creations? Frankenstein was something that helped me think that through. There’s an amazing passage [at the beginning of chapter four] where Shelley talks about Frankenstein’s horror at the creature. He’s looking at his lips and his hair, and there’s a deadness to him, but there’s this weird, uncanny paradoxical combination of living death. Frankenstein talks about how it’s the nearness to life that’s so terrifying about it. It’s just slightly off. So, she defined what the uncanny valley is in this really interesting way, well before it was even a concept. I think there’s something about the monstrosity of the monster that speaks to transhumanism, in a way."