Frankenstein bites, and it gnaws politely. It sinks its teeth into your conscience while pretending to nibble at your imagination — a genteel vampire in paper form. It’s a novel born of storms, both meteorological and moral: thunder crashing over Lake Geneva and lightning striking through the skull of Western hubris.
Mary Shelley, barely out of her teens, wrote it while most of us were still struggling to understand the difference between passion and indigestion. In that damp summer of 1816 — when Byron, Polidori, and the Shelleys were trapped indoors by what was essentially the climate hangover of a volcanic eruption — she conjured a fable that has refused to die. Rather like its subject.
But this isn’t a monster story, not really. It’s a mirror held up to a civilisation that thought reason could replace reverence, and that science could perfect the soul with a scalpel. If you want horror, look not to the creature but to the creator — the original ‘innovator,’ a man so modern he’d probably have had a TED Talk called Reanimating the Dead: Disruption in the Mortuary Sector.
Shelley saw what we now call ‘progress’ long before it was trending. The Enlightenment had turned the stars into statistics, the soul into chemistry, and man into a kind of managerial god. The book’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, wasn’t ornamental — it was a warning. Prometheus stole fire from heaven; man now steals secrets from creation. And, like all good thieves, he justifies himself as an ‘entrepreneur.’
You can almost picture Victor Frankenstein today, white coat swapped for a hoodie, hunched over a glowing screen in some Silicon Valley laboratory. His name might now be Viktor with a ‘k,’ founder of ReGen Corp, championing a mission statement that reads: ‘Bringing humanity back — one upload at a time.’ He would call himself ‘post-human,’ invest heavily in AI ethics panels, and tweet in lowercase about empathy while privately experimenting on consciousness itself. Shelley, bless her Gothic foresight, saw this coming before Elon Musk had so much as a neural thought.
The irony, of course, is that we’re all Frankensteins now. Every time we ‘create content,’ we stitch together dead pieces of other people’s ideas and call it original thought. Every filter, every algorithmic echo chamber, every bot army built to flatter our egos — these are our new creatures. And like Frankenstein’s offspring, they have a tendency to turn on us. We’ve built monsters that crave attention, not affection. They don’t want meaning; they want metrics. The digital child has outgrown its moral parent, and the Enlightenment’s dream of reason has decayed into a pixelated pantomime of outrage.
It’s almost comic, really: humanity has achieved immortality through memory sticks, only to lose its memory of what being human meant. We’ve replaced God with Wi-Fi, prayer with posts, and penance with ‘content moderation.’ Shelley’s question echoes louder now than it ever did: just because we can do something, does it mean we should?
Shelley’s novel isn’t just about science — it’s about abandonment. It’s about what happens when man plays father and then forgets his child. In that sense, the whole of Western civilisation is one long Frankenstein experiment. We’ve made gods of ourselves and orphans of our creations. Look around: art without beauty, education without wisdom, freedom without virtue, and technology without restraint. We’re like a nation of half-mad alchemists convinced we can synthesise meaning out of data. Shelley’s parable whispers, through the centuries: ‘Beware the intellect without empathy, the mind without heart.’
Modern culture has become the laboratory — and we, the stitched-up progeny of our own making, are wandering through it, confused, angry, and slightly underdressed.
If Mary Shelley were alive today, she’d probably be dismissed as ‘morbid’ by breakfast television, accused of ‘fearmongering’ by science influencers, and invited onto podcasts to debate whether her novel was anti-innovation. And she’d smile — the calm, knowing smile of one who’s already seen the ending. Her creature was never about gore; it was about guilt. Her scientist was never about progress; he was about pride. Frankenstein remains the ultimate political novel — not because it tells us whom to vote for, but because it shows us what happens when we think we can vote God out of the system.
Every government today is, in some sense, a Frankenstein regime: cobbled together from ideologies dug out of history’s graveyard, jolted into life with slogans and hashtags, and wandering through Parliament Square looking for approval. And like the original experiment, it all goes wrong the moment someone cries, ‘We can control this.’
So read Frankenstein not as horror but as prophecy. It’s not the scream in the dark that should frighten you — it’s the echo of your own ambition. Shelley’s world and ours are separated by two centuries and a thousand inventions, but the pulse of hubris beats the same. We’ve replaced the thunderstorm with the algorithm, the laboratory with the metaverse, and the monster’s howl with the tweetstorm. But the question remains eternal: what happens when man creates life without love, and power without humility?
In the end, Shelley leaves us not with fear but with irony — that man, in his pursuit of perfection, becomes the very imperfection he sought to erase.
Science without conscience is surgery on the soul. Progress is merely a polite word for pride on a schedule. Every utopia begins with a lightning strike and ends with a scream. A monster’s greatest tragedy is not being unloved — but being made without love.
If you listen closely on a stormy night, when the news drones on about AI revolutions and digital souls, you might just hear Mary Shelley chuckling softly through the thunder. She knew what we keep forgetting: that man, for all his cleverness, remains the most dangerous experiment of all.
The Modern Prometheus Rewired
The lightning has gone digital. No longer crackling from cloud to tower, it hums quietly in the socket — a blue pulse behind every screen, every thought, every algorithm pretending to be alive. We have, in our curious way, fulfilled Mary Shelley’s prophecy: we have given life to the lifeless. Only now we call it ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and invite it to write our poetry, drive our cars, and manage our dating lives.
The irony wouldn’t have been lost on her. Shelley’s Prometheus stole fire from heaven; ours downloads it from the App Store. His creature lumbered through forests; ours scrolls through feeds. He sought to conquer death; we seek to conquer inconvenience. Humanity, ever the apprentice god, is still fiddling with thunder.
We once imagined that technology would set us free. Instead, it has shackled us with invisible chains of convenience — gentle, sleek, Bluetooth restraints. We’re haunted not by our failures, but by our inventions. They remember us when we forget ourselves: the algorithms that predict our moods, the archives that store our dead, the chatbots that whisper in our stead. The ghost in the machine is no longer a metaphor; it’s a service plan.
We’ve entered an age where memory itself is immortal, where the dead can tweet, and where digital resurrection is sold as nostalgia. If Victor Frankenstein was punished for trespassing into God’s domain, what shall we say of the engineers who promise consciousness on demand? There’s no graveyard deep enough to bury that kind of arrogance.
And yet, one can almost forgive us. We are, after all, the same species that stared into the abyss and thought, ‘I wonder if I can monetise this.’ The modern Prometheus isn’t in his laboratory; he’s in his boardroom, his data centre, his glowing office with a sustainability pledge and a private jet. He has the charm of innovation and the ethics of an algorithm.
But every circuit hums with a warning — Shelley’s warning — that knowledge without mercy curdles into monstrosity. We’ve wired the heavens, coded the soul, and yet still stumble over the simplest commandment: Love thy creation as thyself.
Perhaps that’s the one law the machine will never learn. It can imitate affection, simulate sorrow, compose hymns to empathy — but it can’t kneel. And until man learns again how to kneel — not to his devices, but to his conscience — the storm will continue to flash behind our eyes.
In the end, we’re still huddled in that lakeside villa, lightning at the window, inventing horrors to pass the time. Only now the storm is inside us, and it’s humming quietly through the wires.
Wording 