FRANKENSTEIN!!!!!!!! AND SCIENCE FICTION AND ROMANTICISM!!!!!! AHHH!!!!!!!

FRANKENSTEIN!!!! I cannot convey my excitement to you in words, but I’ll try my best. For anyone that doesn’t know me too well (and that’s just about everyone in our class), I’m a science fiction nerd. I’ll avoid explaining how this came to be and instead focus on Frankenstein, science fiction, and romanticism, three topics that I’d like to explore in several blogs over the next couple of weeks. (You might be asking why but as I’m sure you’ll see at this end of this blog, as well as the others I intend to write, science fiction and romanticism share a lot of similarities.)

As Janelle mentioned in class the other day, many people (Brian Aldiss and Isaac Asimov included) acknowledge Frankenstein as the first work of science fiction. This tells me two things:

(1) Frankenstein meets all the credentials required to be a science fiction work.
(2) No other work before Frankenstein met these credentials, whatever they may be.

I haven’t read Aldiss’s Billion Year Spree, where he proposes his argument for Frankenstein as the first work of science fiction, but I believe that I’ve managed to pick up enough from Asimov (I now realize this is the second time that I’ve mentioned this name—for those of you who don’t know him, Isaac Asimov, though dead now, was arguably the greatest science fiction authors of all time) as to why Aldiss thinks this.

According to Asimov (and this is Asimov’s own definition of the genre), science fiction is anything that has the following:

(1). Takes place in a world that is neither our own nor so foreign that it couldn’t be our own (in other words, our world isn’t this but could be this some day—Asimov says this to distinguish science fiction not only from realistic fiction but also from fantasy fiction);
(2). Science fiction deals with some sort of social change.

(2) chiefly interests me because it bears a lot of relation to a subject that we’ve discussed minimally that itself bears a lot of relation to romanticism: the Industrial Revolution. According to Asimov (and possibly Aldiss, too), the Industrial Revolution is what made science fiction possible because it made social change visible to people in their own lifetime, probably for the first time in history. In other words, after the Industrial Revolution came about, people could (and would) see changes in their daily lives (the erection of factories is just one example).

For the most part, these changes stemmed from technological advancements, and technology, as we all know, is generally the offspring of science. Frankenstein’s monster is an example of technology (insofar as the monster being an advancement, that is, in my opinion, debatable—perhaps I can address this in another blog), and this is how we probably arrived at Aldiss’s conclusion about Frankenstein—it deals with a technological change that could be observed in one’s (Victor’s) own lifetime. Moreover (and this is a common staple of science fiction), the technology or creation (i.e. the monster) comes back and bites the creator (Victor Frankenstein) in the ass.

Frankenstein, however, is not the only Romantic work that shares similarities with science fiction: Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us” and “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways” are two other good examples, and I promise that I’ll list several more in the forthcoming blogs. The point is, the Romantic poets were living in a time when rapid social changes were occurring, social changes that they could observe, and there is no doubt that these changes influenced their writing.

I now realize that this blog has carried on far too long, so I’ll wrap it up here. Before ending it, though, I would like to say that if you have any interest in the science fiction/romanticism parallels, please talk with me about it or respond to my blog. I love discussing the two subjects and, as I said earlier, I’m hoping to write more blogs on this topic.