Techno-Prosthetic Romantic FuturismMonster: the RemixMary Shelley's Frankenstein, they say, is the first science fiction novel. [1] Why not? It has many of the now familiar elements: a mad scientist, his inscrutable technology, the alien organism he unleashes on the world. This alien is a recombinant horror. He's stitched together out of used parts like some living hip-hop remix. What's worse, he's disabled, at least when measured by the norms that make life possible in civil society. An eight foot necrotode will have trouble in almost any social situation. [2] Shelley's future, our present, faces the double corporeal challenge of recombination and disability. Can we, as Romanticists, help build a better body? Notes1. Frederic Jameson says it on the first page of Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005). 2. For an approach to the monster from the perspective of disability, see Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003). Navigation |