Science Fiction and Frankenstein
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Science fiction is the art of the possible, of worlds that have not yet occurred, of places that have yet to be lived in. But it is also the art of the second chance, and much of the great work in science fiction - either in literature or in film - addresses worlds that have been essayed (although sometimes only in fiction) and that have failed and that have been tinkered with in an attempt to get them right. In many ways, and not simply because it is historically one of the first works of science fiction, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is one of the fundamental texts of science fiction because it is the story of a scientist who seeks to create something that will address the flaws of the world, and in doing so makes those flaws even more difficult to overcome.Science fiction in its penny-dreadful aspects can appear to be about the celebration of science and technology, a suggestion that science really is here to save us all and that there is no problem that humanity will ever find ourselves in from which technology cannot abstract us. But the more important works of science fiction are about precisely the opposite, are about the ways in which technology and science are likely to lead us into arrogant assumptions about our ability to fix any problem if only we try hard enough. Frankenstein is, again, a useful model for all of science fiction: He creates a new form a life and potentially an entire new era, but when he realizes the flaws within his creature and his vision instea
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This story, and the movie based on it, centers around what it means to be human, and how humanity may be defined by the desire to create and maintain worlds. Such acts of creation are most obviously pursued by scientists and by the totalitarian governments that we see so often in works of science fiction, but this desire to remake the world over in our own image exists in each one of us. This is the fundamental appeal of science fiction: As a genre it argues that we are each capable of creating the world anew. We are each capable of planting a new Eden and rewriting the history of humanity.
And the fundamental moral of science fiction is that if we were actually to do so, that brave new world would be as frightening and as hostile to any truly humanistic impulse as was Huxley's world or the world depicted in Brazil. We have not in fact progressed very far if at all, and if we attempt to create a new world it will simply replicate and possibly exaggerate the flaws of past worlds rather than ameliorate them.
Which is not to say that within specific works of science fiction that characters do not come to a realization of the limits of human endeavor. In Blade Runner, for example, San Francisco Police bounty hunter Rick Deck
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1427
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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