Artificial Life After Frankenstein

Eileen M. Hunt

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780812297720
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Artificial Life After Frankenstein brings the insights born of Mary Shelley's legacy to bear upon the ethics and politics of making artificial life and intelligence in the twenty-first century. What are the obligations of humanity to the artificial creatures we make? And what are the corresponding rights of those creatures, whether they are learning machines or genetically modified organisms? In seeking ways to respond to these questions, so vital for our age of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, we would do well to turn to the capacious mind and imaginative genius of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851). Shelley's novels Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and The Last Man (1826) precipitated a modern political strain of science fiction concerned with the ethical dilemmas that arise when we make artificial life—and make life artificial—through science, technology, and other forms of cultural change.In Artificial Life After Frankenstein, Eileen Hunt Botting puts Shelley and several classics of modern political science fiction into dialogue with contemporary political science and philosophy, in order to challenge some of the apocalyptic fears at the fore of twenty-first-century political thought on AI and genetic engineering. Focusing on the prevailing myths that artificial forms of life will end the world, destroy nature, and extinguish love, Botting shows how Shelley modeled ways to break down and transform the meanings of apocalypse, nature, and love in the face of widespread and deep-seated fear about the power of technology and artifice to undermine the possibility of humanity, community, and life itself.Through their explorations of these themes, Mary Shelley and authors of modern political science fiction from H. G. Wells to Nnedi Okorafor have paved the way for a techno-political philosophy of living with the artifice of humanity in all of its complexity. In Artificial Life After Frankenstein, Botting brings the insights born of Shelley's legacy to bear upon the ethics and politics of making artificial life and intelligence in the twenty-first century.

CHAPTER I

Apocalyptic Fictions

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,

And men forgot their passions in the dread

Of this their desolation; and all hearts

Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:

—George Gordon, Lord Byron, “Darkness” (1816)

The last man! Yes I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions, extinct before me—

—Mary Shelley, Journal, 14 May 1824

O torch that passes from hand to hand, from age to age, world without end.

—Domin, engineer, in Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1921)

i. Her Years Without a Summer

On 10 April 1815, Mount Tambora literally blew its top off. Presumed extinct, the Indonesian volcano that was once nearly three miles high was now about two. The massive eruption wiped out the people of the nearby village of Tambora under a wave of lava. A concatenation of environmental catastrophes ensued. The force of the explosion raised tsunamis that debilitated the region’s shoreline agricultural and fishing communities. The ash cloud turned the sky pitch black within a 300-mile radius of the decapitated mountain.¹ Over the next year, Asia, then Europe, then North America fell under the dark cover of volcanic ash and gas spread by wind and extreme weather. The reflection of sunlight away from the Earth precipitated a global cooling of temperatures. Crops failed and sickness spread due to the atmospheric disturbances. Snow fell in summer from China to New England.² The first modern cholera pandemic hit Bengal, killing 10,000 people in mere weeks.³ A typhus epidemic followed a famine in Ireland, causing up to 100,000 deaths between 1816 and 1819.⁴

The biggest recorded explosion in history, Tambora produced 2.2 million times as much energy as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.⁵ At least 10,000 people died as a direct result of the volcanic eruption. Famine and other epidemiological aftershocks killed up to 90,000 people in Sumbawa and the surrounding Indonesian archipelago.⁶ The global death count rose to unspecified millions if one counts the long-term victims of the cholera pandemic that spread from Bengal.⁷

Reduced by famine, the Swiss stooped to eat grass, nettles, and “the corpses of livestock” off the ground.⁸ Some Swiss mothers resorted to exposure or killing of their children as an exit from the horror of witnessing their starvation.⁹ The dramatic change in climate forced more than 60,000 people to migrate from a hard-hit region of the Rhine country during 1816 and 1817—a time known in the West as “the year without a summer.” Impoverished masses of people from Germany and Switzerland moved northeast toward Russia or northwest toward the Netherlands. Those who reached Dutch seaports and could afford passage across the Atlantic trekked to the Americas.¹⁰

Some central Europeans feared the end of the world was nigh, with the horrific weather figuring as a foretaste of the punishment of a wrathful God.¹¹ No threat of divine judgment, however, prevented the Shelleys from visiting Lord Byron in Switzerland during the nonsummer of 1816. Byron composed his apocalyptic poem “Darkness” under the overcast skies of Lake Geneva, lit only by lightning flashes. Since the “bright sun was extinguish’d,” the artists huddled inside his sublime rental property, the Villa Diodati. With its porch wrapped in a gothic wrought-iron railing, this lake-side mansion was an appropriate host for the ghost story competition that brought the seed of Frankenstein to life on the evening of 16 June—or there-abouts. The precise dating of Mary Shelley’s “waking dream” of the “pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together” seems less relevant than the fact that she dreamed it, unbeknownst to her, amid a worldwide climate disaster.¹²

Literary scholar Gillen D’Arcy Wood has illuminated how the year without a summer immediately shaped Shelley’s composition of her first novel. Although she could not have known that the eruption of Tambora triggered atmospheric gloom, famine, and plague, she certainly observed first- or secondhand some of its starker effects. She may have even conceived the Creature as a kind of environmental refugee, exposed to the elements due to circumstances beyond his control, and forced to migrate and survive on his own on the fringes of society.¹³ Given that Tambora reduced global temperatures by three degrees Celsius, it may also be no coincidence that Shelley endowed the Creature with superhuman tolerance of Arctic weather.

Beyond its contemporaneous impact, the year without a summer steered Shelley’s trajectory as a writer of speculative fiction concerned with the fear of the end of the world.¹⁴ In Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826), she treated this fear both metaphorically and literally. Victor Frankenstein worries that the breeding of his Creature with a female companion would lead to a competitor species capable of destroying the whole “human race.”¹⁵ Lionel Verney envisions life as “the last man” on earth after a massive pandemic.¹⁶ Her protagonists confront the peril of apocalypse both internally as a psychological crisis and externally as a potentially global political event.

In his study of the aftermath of Tambora, Wood commented that there is “no great Victorian novel about cholera,” but “if there is a nineteenth-century cholera novel, it is Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.”¹⁷ In his scholarly edition of this book, Morton D. Paley pointed out that Shelley would have been aware of the Bengal-born cholera plague, which had reached the frontier of eastern Europe by September 1823.¹⁸ Reluctantly acceding to her father William Godwin’s request to return home, the young widow had just come back to London with her sole surviving child, Percy, after five years of exile in Italy.

Perhaps it was this coincidence of the prodigal daughter’s westward return with the seeping of cholera onto the continent that colored her depiction of the plague as feminine or female in her roman à clef.¹⁹ The “plague, slow-footed, but sure in her noiseless advance, destroyed the illusion” of the immunity of the “congregation of the elect,” or the court circle of Lord Raymond, Adrian, and Verney, who represent the artistic trio of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley.²⁰ The capricious plague is a “Juggernaut”; it is an all-toppling Indian “chariot” or unstoppable force of fate: “she proceeds crushing out the being of all who strew the high road of life,” showering “promiscuous death among them.”²¹

Writing in her “Journal of Sorrow” in May 1824, Shelley also feminized Italy as “murdress of those I love & of all my happiness.”²² Ironically, her life in that Mediterranean heaven had robbed her of Percy, stolen five of the children under their care, and spontaneously terminated her last pregnancy while nearly killing her.²³ Returning to her homeland brought little relief. “Confined in my prison-room—friendless,” while “torrents fall from the dark clouds,” the twenty-six-year-old finds “my mind is as gloomy as this odious sky.”²⁴ Though Shelley’s ruminations on the agony of British weather are not unique, the existential darkness of her journal is still arresting. If Italy was a murderess with a string of crimes of passion, then her “English life” was a premature burial.²⁵

It seemed that everyone would drop dead around her. “Attacks” of an unnamed illness had beset her toddler twice since his father’s drowning.²⁶ In January 1824, as her son Percy recovered, she likened herself to a pestilential reaper, moving inexorably through a field with a scythe: “the grass is mown—the sharp graey grey stubble remains—Those I would seek, fly me—I have no power.”²⁷ Fate at once made her the plague and the last person to survive it. This dark paradox gave her a new literary calling. As she worked on her second great work of speculative fiction, she confided a kinship with the novel to her journal in May 1824: “The last man! Yes I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race.”²⁸

Like Shelley, Verney and Victor each suffer the devastating psychological loss of their closest friends and family in a rapid succession of tragedies that defy comprehension. Victor and Verney also confront the danger of the destruction of humanity as a whole due to the failures or lacks of human artifice. In Victor’s case, it is his own mistakes as a father-scientist that press him to contemplate the rise of a “race of devils” who might annihilate the human species.²⁹ By contrast, Verney surveys the spectacular failure of his “ante-pestilential race” to stop or simply adapt to the global plague that arose from unknown causes in the midst of a centuries-long war between Greece and Turkey.³⁰

Like the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which crushed thousands of people under the collapse of city slums, the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora laid waste due to the lack of manmade infrastructure to cope with its consequences. Blaming man—not God or nature—for the Portuguese catastrophe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote to Voltaire in 1756 that “la nature n’avoit point rassemblé là vingt mille maisons de six à sept étages” (nature had not assembled there twenty-thousand houses of six or seven stories).³¹ Safer urban architecture or, better yet, the building of villages away from the overpopulated city center would have minimized the death toll. The scale of Tambora’s ruin might have been tempered, likewise, by relocation of villages at a safer distance from the volcano’s vicinity. More to the point: if the poor had better access to a diverse and sustainable array of food, shelter, and medicine, the vicious cycle of poverty, famine, plague, and forced migration might have slowed and scaled down across the Earth.

The Last Man is Shelley’s artistic response to the psychology and politics of total disaster occasioned by the eruption of Tambora. Rising during a war in Constantinople, the mysterious plague serves as a metaphor for the political strata, fissures, and aftershocks of any disaster such as Lisbon or Tambora, even if supposed to be purely “natural” or an act of God.³² By imagining the contagion as the chariot wheels of an indiscriminate goddess, Shelley put Machiavelli’s Fortuna on steroids: she made the whole globe a torturous wheel on which humanity had tied and spun itself into a vortex of destruction.

Shelley initiated a strand of modern political science fiction that conceptualizes apocalypse in new terms. What she identifies is the paradox of humanity’s relationship to its whole environment, which is at once self-seeking and self-destructive. Using a term coined by Paley, we might call her approach “apocapolitical.”³³ In a realist vein, her “apocapolitics” resists the naïveté of three Romantic responses to the possibility of the end of the world, most memorably voiced by the poets William Blake, her husband Percy, and Lord Byron.³⁴

First, Shelley dismisses the notion that apocalypse can be avoided through a revival of a natural or innocent state. Blake had exclaimed this hope, with a poignant mixture of irony and longing, in his poetic introduction to the “Songs of Experience” (1794):

O Earth, O Earth, return!

Arise from out the dewy grass!³⁵

Next, she undercuts the idea that the revelation of justice and peace for the deserving will inevitably follow apocalypse. Percy had proclaimed this political faith in “The Mask of Anarchy” (1819). The poem envisioned the nonviolent revolt of the disenfranchised poor in protest of their massacre by the British military at Peterloo:

Let a great assembly be

of the fearless and the free.³⁶

Byron had painted the reverse image of both Blake’s and Percy’s varieties of utopianism. “Darkness” (1816) depicted apocalypse as the last act of an uncaring universe, evacuating itself of life:

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—

A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.³⁷

The aporetic ending of The Last Man parodies the harsh Byronic assumption that lifelessness and hopelessness must follow apocalypse. Shelley blends the cosmic and tragicomic elements of the fall from Eden, Noah’s Ark, and the Christmas nativity into a modern postapocalyptic pastoral.³⁸ Darko Suvin pointed out that the pastoral was one of the ancient genres closest to science fiction be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface. Learning to Love the Bomb
• Introduction. Mary Shelley and the Genesis of Political Science Fictions
• Interlude. Births and Afterlives
• Chapter I. Apocalyptic Fictions
• Chapter II. Un/natural Fictions
• Chapter III. Loveless Fictions
• Coda. A Vindication of the Rights and Duties of Artificial Creatures
• Acknowledgments
• Postscript. “The Journal of Sorrow”
• Notes
• Index