Frankenstein reborn: The monster that launched science fiction is more relevant than ever in the age of AI

We’ll probably see them tonight, roaming the streets on Halloween: heads with large plastic bolts, masks in shades of gray and greenish hues, oversized shoes with grotesque soles, and stick-on scars. Maybe we’ll also admire a few with two-tone wigs — styled in a bit pin-up look — black dresses, and long eyelashes and nails. These are costumes inspired by the immortal creature and his bride, created by Dr. Frankenstein — figures that have haunted the popular imagination of horror ever since Mary Shelley’s novel first made its way to the big screen.

The latest movie adaptation is by Guillermo del Toro, starring Jacob Elordi as the monster and Oscar Isaac as the mad doctor, which arrives on Netflix November 7. And in March comes The Bride!, directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, with Jessie Buckley as the bride of the “horrid being,” played by Christian Bale, in a cast that also includes Penélope Cruz, Peter Sarsgaard, and Annette Bening.

But a movie is not a book. And if, as cultural critic George Steiner writes in Errata, every attempt at “understanding, at ‘reading well,’ at responsive reception are, at all times, historical, social, and ideological” then the Frankenstein of the 21st century shines a light on new fears — from the rise of artificial intelligence and humanoid robots to the scientific quests to extend human life. Pure technological terror.

Aggression and scientific violence

This year, Shelley’s visionary novel is joined by new editions of her other works, including Mathilda and The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844. But it is with Frankenstein that Shelley (London, 1797–1851) inaugurates the genre of science fiction by creating the first artificial man. And it remains a strikingly contemporary book, because, as writer Esther Cross — author of La mujer que escribió Frankenstein (The Woman Who Wrote Frankenstein) — points out, “the anxiety over the fate of each character powerfully intertwines with the question of humanity’s fate. That concern, so deeply rooted in her time, is more relevant than ever. Scientific progress without any kind of regulation leads to horror stories.”

Since its publication in 1818, Frankenstein has served as “a projection screen for the dangers and limits of science,” says Fernando Vidal, a historian of science at Harvard University. “Once it was genetic manipulation, then nuclear energy, and now artificial intelligence.”

For Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, the key to Frankenstein’s dystopia is that it is not a condemnation of science and technology themselves, but of their selfish and irresponsible use. The problem, he argues, is scientific and technological violence — the aggressive rollout of innovations that can ultimately prove harmful. “A story about a careless founder who recklessly unleashes a dangerous new technology without considering who might suffer as a result? You could just as easily be describing Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg,” Merchant says in an email.

In Shelley’s novel, Victor Frankenstein’s egocentric madness lies in his boundless ambition. “It’s important to remember that Frankenstein is the scientist’s name, not that of his creation, which, in truth, has no name,” Vidal emphasizes.

Some scholars also interpret the way Shelley depicts the monster as a metaphor for how industrial-era entrepreneurs treated their workers: as test subjects in experiments meant to maximize production and profit, says Merchant. They were innovators who disregarded human life, blinded by their pursuit of glory, money, and power — a situation, adds Merchant, “not so different from today.”

Three of the most powerful men in the world — Elon Musk, who is experimenting with primates for his Neuralink project; Mark Zuckerberg, who has just launched a secret “superintelligence” lab aimed at surpassing human capabilities; and Jeff Bezos, whose Amazon empire relies on near-total surveillance of workers’ productivity while seeking to replace them with robots — embody that same modern strain of techno-ambition.

A gloomy London

“The old world is dying. The new one is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters,” wrote Antonio Gramsci. Few figures embody that collision between the old and the new as powerfully as the creator of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley — daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneer of feminist thought who died shortly after giving birth to her, and of the libertarian philosopher William Godwin — grew up surrounded by ideas and books. She learned to read by deciphering the names on tombstones in Saint Pancras Cemetery, where she sometimes came across watchmen guarding corpses until they decomposed enough to be useless to body snatchers who sold them to hospitals, scientists, and anatomy professors.

That little girl, described by the poet Samuel Coleridge — a friend of her father’s — as having a “cadaverous silence,” spent her childhood and adolescence in London, then a dark city transformed by industrial brutality and misery, capable of conjuring nightmares in sensitive souls like hers. In those streets, as writer Esther Cross recounts, one could even stumble upon the embalmed corpse of the wife of Martin van Butchell, a surgeon specializing in fissures and fistulas, displayed in a shop window.

As a teenager, Mary had her first romantic encounters with the poet Percy Shelley — who was married at the time — in that same Saint Pancras cemetery. They shared a fascination with the beauty of darkness and the strange. Mary Shelley perfectly embodies the Romantic spirit: torn between a dream of total political, cultural, social, and personal freedom and an attraction to the supernatural. She lived a restless, rebellious life. She was vegetarian and abstained from sugar in protest against U.S. plantations — a kind of politicized, avant-garde punk before her time.

When writing Frankenstein, she drew on her fascination with electricity — then a brand-new discovery — and its supposed power to create life. As a teenager, she had followed with interest the experiments in galvanism conducted by eccentric figures such as Giovanni Aldini, who claimed to revive people in a “melancholic” state by applying electric currents

So this Halloween night, by lamplight — or candlelight — it’s not a bad idea to revisit Mary Shelley’s masterpiece. And, thinking of today’s technocratic visionaries, it might not hurt to play a certain song by The Cramps called How Far Can Too Far Go?

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