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Mary Shelley: Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus 1816.
In 1816, the 17 year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin is travelling in Switzerland with her husband-to- be: the poet Percy Byshe Shelley and their friends Lord Byron and John Polidari, (the writer of the first vampire story: The Vampyre 1819). They invent a competition as to who can write the best gothic horror story. Mary, inspired by the ideas and experiments of Luigi Galvani (who in the 1780s had conducted experiments on animal electricity, demonstrating how a dead frog’s legs could be made to twitch by applying an electric current), dreams about a scientist who creates a living creature and is horrified by his success. With this story, published in 1818, Mary creates the abiding myth of the ‘modern prometheus’ which has resonated through the popular media of the last 200 years, inspiring dozens of books, films, television series and comics. Considered by many to be evidence of a reaction to the progress of science and technology in the Industrial Revolution, Shelley’s idea of a man-made being has echoes in our own century, as we enter into an age characterised by AI, cyborgs and robots.
Wollstonecraft Shelley is one of the great ‘content creators’ of the 19th century. Her inspired invention of Frankenstein and his creature ranks alongside Conan Doyle’s invention of Sherlock Holmes, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and Long John Silver, Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Kipling’s Mowgli - and so on. Mary Shelley is the first to grapple with vitalism and the idea of surgically experimenting with the creation of life - a notion further explored by H.G. Wells in his terrifying The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) - and a topic we are currently scientifically exploring since Crick and Watson’s analytic study of DNA in the 1950s. The ideas of cloning, of splicing genes, of the creation of hybrid creatures emerges during the same period (1950s) that Turing is suggesting the idea of intelligent machines or ‘artificial intelligence’. And since then, the idea of mankind developing an ultra-intelligent, self-replicating and self-modifying machine has fuelled both philosophical and science-fictional speculation, from Kurzweil and Vinge’s Technological Singularity to James Cameron’s Terminator, and from Hans Moravec (Mind Children 1988) to the Wachowsky’s Matrix, and has grown hand-in-hand with the tools for creating what Steven Levy calls Artificial Life - it’s getting interesting...