Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds (The MIT Press)

It may be difficult for some readers, especially those accustomed to living the relatively privileged life of the white male, to recognize how hard it was for Mary to write and publish this book as a young woman without money or the support of her family (with the exception of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was just as much an outc

The target of Mary’s literary insight is not so much the content of Victor’s science as the way he pursues it. This target is the same in much of science fiction—a genre that Mary certainly helped to invent—especially the kind that takes a dystopian turn.4 We can choose to focus on the cautionary nature of the tale or on the part that continues to

But in Clerval I saw the image of my former self; he was inquisitive, and anxious to gain experience and instruction. The difference of manners which he observed was to him an inexhaustible source of instruction and amusement. He was for ever busy; and the only check to his enjoyments was my sorrowful and dejected mien.

“What do you mean? What do you demand of your captain? Are you then so easily turned from your design? Did you not call this a glorious expedition? and wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror; because, at every new incident, your fortitude was to be called

Chapter IV.

Frankenstein is the literary offspring of an eighteen-year-old girl ensconced in a romantic yet fraught summer getaway on the shores of Lake Geneva in response to a “dare” to come up with a ghost story.

In his initial conversation with the scientific explorer Robert Walton, the narrator of this frame-tale novel,14 he refuses to share his secret knowledge: “I will not lead you on, unguarded and ardent as I then was, to your destruction and infallible misery.” Victor continues: “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dange

Chapter II.

Most people do not realize that T-2 is an homage to Mary and her novel, but the viewer is reminded of Frankenstein by the opening electric flashes as the nonhuman android Arnold Schwarzenegger materializes, comes back from the future, and reveals that he has apparently developed the equivalent of a heart that can feel for humanity. Even more allusi