Monster Mash (1)

It's October, Halloween is coming, so for the next four weeks I'm going to talk about monsters (not exclusively -- there will still be room for pirates, robots, and robot pirates).

The mighty Io9 science fiction 'blog has an interesting article on "real-life Frankensteins." Frankenstein, of course, is the overreaching student of science in Mary Shelley's novel, who tries to create life but only produces a monster. We use the term "monster" here in its original, technical sense -- an abnormal birth. Frankenstein's monster isn't evil, at least not at first. It turns evil after Dr. F. rejects it, which to me suggests that the creator is the true villain of the story.

Among the "real-life Frankenstein" contenders are some Russian doctors from the middle of the century who monkeyed around transplanting heads and trying to keep them alive. Sounds ghoulish, but the medical applications are pretty obvious. C.S. Lewis was struck by both the ghoulishness and the symbolism, and used a reanimated head as the head (heh) bad guy in his dystopian SF satire That Hideous Strength.  You can read what George Orwell thought about it here. 

Frankenstein has also become the patron saint of people who think genetic engineering is scary and icky. They like to toss around the term "Frankenfoods" to describe genetically modified crops, as if evil scientists are trying to create a nightmarish lumbering beast with the head of a parsnip. Here's Brian Dunning's masterful refutation.

The horror of Frankenstein is the horror of human power unleashed. Dr. Frankenstein literally has the power of God -- but he screws it up because he's a ninny, and the result is a pile of bodies. Mary Shelley was married to Percy Shelley, one of the first big-league atheists of the modern era. The novel may have been her little cautionary tale about what people could get up to without a supernatural nanny to make us behave. History has not proved her wrong.

Brian Aldiss considers Frankenstein to be the first science fiction novel, but I disagree. Most science fiction follows H.G. Wells in taking the opposite position: "Wouldn't that be cool?"