Monsters reveal how societies define and punish deviance. Wintering’s widows make me think about the women I know who are strong and wise in ways neither recognised nor endorsed by the mainstream.
A participant of the ‘Stokerland’ event in Dublin, in front of St Patrick’s Cathedral, goes the extra mile, with an ornate costume and even stilts.
Luisa Golz
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
Leaving our earthly bodies and living forever as a machine isn’t just a thing of modern science fiction. These transhumanist ideas date back to the 18th century.
‘Frankenstein’ is traditionally read as a critique of science — but also portrays many forms of imprisonment.
(Shutterstock)
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.
Frontispiece from the original German version of Fantasmagoriana.
Schnorr von Carolsfeld
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.
Netflix hit, Black Mirror, follows in the footsteps of other forward-thinking sci-fi storytellers.
The frontispiece to the 1831 Frankenstein by Theodor von Holst, one of the first two illustrations for the novel.
Tate Britain. Private collection, Bath.
Leo Braudy, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
All the popular monsters you’ll see out trick-or-treating, from Frankenstein to Dracula, were born out of fear and anxiety about change and technology.