With this post, I’m aiming to start a series of book discussions. I didn’t say book reviews; I’ll include old classics, forgotten works, and new books, depending on what I’ve been reading lately. Some of them might not even be in English. My aim is to post one article a week. We’ll see. I’m not going to promise until I’ve turned out a few.

Some of the books I’m thinking of covering are obscure, but I should start a series strongly, so the first book I’m covering is one everyone has heard of: Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. It’s widely considered the first science fiction novel. Most people know the story from the movies rather than the book, but the movies tend to play up the sensational aspects. The heart of Shelley’s tale is responsibility, abandonment, and retribution.

The opening chapters focus on Victor Frankenstein’s growing obsession with science and the secrets of nature. It reminds me very much of Faust. In due course he became “capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.” Shelley doesn’t say how he does it. Unlike the movies, the book has no description of his lab. Her focus is on the fact of creating life. But as soon as his creature opens its eyes and starts breathing,

Victor’s reaction is horror: “How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? … Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, and continued a long time traversing my bedchanber, unable to compose my mind for sleep.” He subsequently has an extended nervous breakdown. The creature is left to fend for himself.

Shelley repeatedly stresses his irresponsibility. He shoves the creature out of his mind and doesn’t tell anyone else. When his younger brother is murdered, Victor knows that the creature did it, but a young woman is accused based on circumstantial evidence, and he won’t tell the truth. She is executed.

Eventually the creature confronts Victor and recounts his experiences in a monologue that runs five chapters. He had educated himself through observation and reading. Because of his appearance, though, he had experienced almost unremitting hostility from the people he met. Shelley is delivering a clear criticism of people here, saying they judge by appearance rather than personal worth. Victor does that, but so does nearly everyone. The only person who offers the creature sympathy is blind.

“Unfeeling, heartless creator!” he tells Victor. “You had endowed me with perceptions and passions and then cast me abroad an object for the scorn and horror of mankind.”

Even after those experiences, he saved a young girl from drowning and got shot as a reward. The wound was minor, but it killed the last of his sympathy for humans and especially for the creator who had never spoken to him. His killing of Victor’s brother was intentional, and he framed the woman who was then accused and executed.

Victor Frankenstein’s creation of a living being provides a framework for commenting on people. His crime isn’t that he did something reserved to God but that he ran away like a coward. The responsibility of scientists for their creations has become a much bigger issue since 1818, but Shelley could see the beginning of it.

The monster doesn’t kill because he lacks a human soul but because of the way he is treated. His creator abandoned him, and almost everyone else was horrified upon seeing him. By the end, he tries to expiate his guilt, and Victor Frankenstein is obsessed with taking revenge upon him.

The novel’s subtitle is “The Modern Prometheus,” but it seems ironic. In Greek mythology, Prometheus created the first humans, but he took good care of them. He even gave them fire, incurring the wrath of Zeus for breaking the gods’ monopoly on it. There may be a closer connection to the legend of the golem. It was said that rabbis could animate a clay figure by using holy words. The best-known story is the one of Rabbi Loew, who supposedly created a powerful golem to protect the Jews of Prague. In some versions of the story, it turned against its creator. Golems, though, were supposed to be servants. There is no indication Frankenstein ever expected his creature to serve him. He really didn’t think beyond the act of creation.

More important to its status as a work of science fiction, Frankenstein presents the creation of the being as scientifically possible. It doesn’t involve any magic words, just sufficiently advanced biology and chemistry.

There is a real-life Frankenstein Castle in Germany. I’ve been there. It’s now a ruin and isn’t very interesting. Johann Conrad Dippel, an alchemist who dissected animals and claimed to have an elixir of life, was born there in 1673. The protagonist’s name and the book’s title may be a reference to him. Shelley passed near the castle in her travels.

Shelley’s preface mentions several works as inspirations: The Iliad, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and “most especially” Paradise Lost. It’s easy to see Shakespeare’s Caliban as an ancestor of the creature. Milton’s Lucifer rebels against his creator, and his portrayal is rather sympathetic.

Does the novel have any connection to the feminist ideas of the author’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft? Not that I can see. The mother died while the daughter was an infant. Elizabeth, Victor’s fiancée, isn’t well delineated. When the creature demands that Victor create a female companion for him, her role would be an adjunct, a source of relief from his loneliness. It’s basically the traditional female role of the time.

But we can see people’s reactions to the creature as a symbol of racial prejudice. He’s described as having yellow skin, black hair, watery eyes, and black lips. That sounds vaguely East Asian. When contemplating the creation of the bride, Victor thinks that “a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.” (Somehow it doesn’t occur to him that making her sterile would be an easy solution.) His concern is that it would be a superior race, able to out-compete us.

If you’ve only seen the movies (including the so-called Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), there’s a lot to discover in Shelley’s original work. We can ask if the creature would gain more acceptance in today’s world. We can talk about whether AI and robots raise similar questions. Most important, we can ask whether scientists are thinking through all the possible consequences of their discoveries. Good science fiction is worth reading even when real-life science makes its literal events impossible.

If you’d like to add some thoughts of your own, please comment. Then it will really be a discussion.

For the 28th, I’m looking at Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason.