On a rain-drenched night in June 1816, an odd group of friends helped shape two of the most enduring horror characters of all time.
The gathering on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland, featured a veritable Who’s Who of English literary giants from the Romantic era.
There was the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; his new girlfriend, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who would one day become his wife; George Gordon Byron, who was popularly known as Lord Byron; and John Polidori, an English writer and physician.
The foursome had been drawn together by Claire Clairmont, who was Mary’s stepsister. She happened to be Byron’s mistress back in London and was pregnant with his child. But Byron had grown weary of Claire and was ready to explore new horizons.
What interesting adventures might this group conjure up?
It was, to say the least, a non-traditional setting for Mary. She was only 18 years old.
Imagine your daughter saying, “Hey everybody, I think I’m going to skip high school graduation so I can hang out with three avant-garde writers in Switzerland. You good with that?” If that would stop dinner conversation at your house, imagine what it must have sounded like 200 years ago.
The quartet rented a couple of houses and spent their days exploring the countryside.
One rainy evening, however, they were driven indoors. They amused themselves by sitting around the fireplace reading aloud from a book of German ghost stories.
That’s when Byron threw down a challenge. Each of them should write a horror story. Who could come up with the most creative creepy tale?
The results, to put it mildly, were memorable.
Shelley wrote a short work that he called A Fragment of a Ghost Story. It ultimately evolved into five scary tales that he published back in England.
Byron chose a similar title: Fragment of a Novel. But he quickly gave up trying to develop his storyline. Polidori asked if he could borrow it and transform it into his own work. Byron consented. Three years later Polidori unveiled The Vampyre, the first full-blown vampire tale published in the English language.
And then there was young Mary, from whom no one expected an international bestseller.
During her stay at the lake house she had a disturbing dream about discerning the boundaries between life and death.
She awoke to begin writing about a scientist who assembles human body parts into a complete corpse, and then reanimates the thing into a living being. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus was published in 1818. It has never gone out of print. Some critics consider it the first true work of science fiction.
If you’ve ever thought you probably ought to get something done on a rainy day, consider the fact that both Dracula and Frankenstein owe much of their place in our culture to a single evening in a lakeside cottage.
It’s also noteworthy that “Frankenstein” (which is in reality the name of the scientist, not the monster) became the career-defining horror role for Boris Karloff, as well as the career-defining comedy role for Fred Gwynne (Herman Munster in the TV series The Munsters).
The monster in Mary’s novel is an almost entirely sympathetic creature. Unlike the grunting hulk in Karloff’s films, he is emotionally sensitive and articulate. In the presence of Dr. Frankenstein, his creator, he describes himself as “the Adam of your labors,” and as someone who “would have been your Adam,” but has become instead “your fallen angel.” He yearns to be loved and accepted.
It turns out that Mary Shelley’s novel, in other words, was more than just a garden variety ghost story destined one day for the Syfy Channel. It tackles some serious questions:
What makes someone human? Will people ever be able to create life? If technology could allow us to do what only God is supposed to do, should we do it?
Shelley brilliantly anticipated a cutting-edge issue that seems to come into sharper focus with every passing day. The monster is stronger, wiser, and more compassionate than Dr. Frankenstein. At one point he says, “You are my creator, but I am your master.”
And suddenly we’re transported to the world of artificial intelligence.
Something like half of the world’s scientists and pundits praise AI as a creation of unprecedented nuance and power. The other half wonder if AI, like Frankenstein’s monster, will eventually threaten our very existence.
There’s a difference between whether we can do something and whether we ought to do something.
Prior to a few centuries ago, the world’s intellectuals commonly addressed such questions by beginning with a presupposition: God is God, and we are not.
Therefore wise people must leave the mystery of life in God’s hands, because the only place where the mystery of life can possibly be secure is God’s hands.
But now that starting point has been set aside. For a majority of 21st century academics in Europe and America, God’s very existence has been dismissed with a shrug.
Where will the discussion go from here?
The origins and meaning of life, and the validity of human intelligence vs. the power of AI are among the most important questions for our generation.
And the one thing we know for sure is that the scariest horror stories almost always begin when people decide that life will go better if we decide to play God.
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