She has largely been airbrushed from history, but a new novel seeks to make Claire Clairmont visible by imagining her life after Byron.
Asking if computers will be more intelligent than humans distracts us from grasping the underlying ethical problem with the humans who create and use them.
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The possibilities of ‘more human than human’ artificial intelligence and the dangers of playing God and are not new – they’re the subjects of one of the world’s first science-fiction novels.
Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë, by their brother Branwell (c. 1834).
National Portrait Gallery, London
‘Dark Souls’ draws on the literary theme of the ‘last man’ that emerged from the work of French author Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville and those inspired by him.
What would happen if plague destroyed all of humanity? Mary Shelley’s 1826 book suggests Earth would be better off.
A military guard of honour wear face masks against the spread of the coronavirus by the Unknown Soldier’s Tomb in Warsaw, Poland.
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From cholera outbreaks to public health actions, war metaphors have long been used to describe diseases, to show what we fear and to explain our world to ourselves.
‘Frankenstein’ is traditionally read as a critique of science — but also portrays many forms of imprisonment.
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In the project Erasing Frankenstein, students, educators and incarcerated women collaborated to created an erasure poem of Mary Shelley’s classic text, and publicly showcase their work.
By showing us a world from which mothers are largely absent, Mary Shelley reminds us that the genius of motherhood lies less in biological reproduction than in the capacity to love.
If Mary Shelley wrote the book today, Victor would surely be a synthetic biologist. But those fiddling with living things in 2018 have hopefully learned from her cautionary tale.
The frontispiece to the 1831 Frankenstein by Theodor von Holst, one of the first two illustrations for the novel.
Tate Britain. Private collection, Bath.