Techno-Prosthetic Romantic Futurism

Our Frankenfuture

It was Mary Shelley's startling insight that the future belongs to monstrosities. [1]   Not the future her novel depicts (Walton's return to the bosom of his, uh, sister), but the one it invokes in its cliffhanger ending. The monster disappears over the ice to breed sequels. Inevitably he will return, a form of life incommensurable with the human. Eight feet tall and stitched together from dead parts. A monstrosity beyond description and endurance. Shelley's novel only defers our encounter with abjection. No amount of historical scholarship will prevent it. I say we turn and face the coming of monstrosities. [2]   They may be our only hope.

Notes

1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. M. K. Joseph (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969).

2. Check out Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003).

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