Monsters of the Century part 1

 

Two hundred years ago, 20-year-old Mary Shelley won a bet with her future husband Percy Shelley and his friend Lord Byron to write a horror story: she created Frankenstein, the story of a Genevan scientist who created artificial life – and regretted it for the rest of his days. Shelley created more than she knew: her story is not just considered to be the first science-fiction novel, but has spawned an army of monstrous descendants.

What is it that continues to draw writers, particularly those who don’t usually write science fiction, to create artificial humans? How do writers use these characters to tell us about ourselves? What does the 21st-Century Frankenstein’s monster look like?

It’s worth reminding ourselves first what Frankenstein – slandered by Hollywood into a monster-mania freak show – is actually about. (One definition of a classic, after all, is a book that still has the power to surprise you.) In the novel, inquisitive student Victor Frankenstein gives life to “the creature”, which then absconds and sets about a rampage of murder. “His soul is as hellish as his form,” concludes Victor, rejecting his creation, “full of treachery and fiendlike malice”. But the reader is forced to reshape their view of the creature when he speaks directly of his experiences: his longing for human society, his perpetual rejection, his turning against first himself – “I am solitary and abhorred… I was not made for the enjoyment of pleasure” – and then against Victor’s family, as a surrogate for his despised creator. “If I cannot inspire love I will cause fear.”

The Human Society That Rejected the Monstrous

We learn that the real monster is both of them: Victor for his cruel refusal to make a female companion to assuage his creation’s loneliness, and the creature for the trail of death he leaves before heading for his final solitude on the Arctic seas.

Ever since Shelley set the trend, other writers have enthusiastically explored quasi-human creations, all the better to explore what makes us human. One of the latest is Paul Braddon, whose debut novel The Actuality was published last month and has already been optioned for a TV series by BBC Studios.

The Actuality is set around 150 years from now, and told from the viewpoint of Evie, one of two surviving, highly advanced Artificial Autonomous Beings (AABs), when such creations have been outlawed due to problems with earlier models. She lives in hiding with her human husband, and initially believes herself to be human: “She’d persisted in denying the truth even when the evidence had begun to stack and stack”. (Ironically, a very human trait.) The tension in the story comes both from her own growing discovery of her true nature, and from her pursuit by the authorities and her need to flee or fight to protect her existence.

Braddon tells BBC Culture that he sees parallels between Frankenstein and Evie’s story. “Like the monster, she becomes an outcast; people fear her because they assume the worst. Like Frankenstein’s monster, in theory Evie has the potential to be anything, but is limited by how her maker made her. She has to escape the bonds of her existence.”

Creatures who are not quite like us can enhance our understanding of ourselves

The Actuality offers a rich contemplation of ethical and philosophical questions about artificial life and intelligence. Where does life begin and end? If an AAB like Evie can simulate consciousness, does she have rights? Conversely, if she kills a real human being, can she be held responsible? In the story Evie is modelled after a real woman and, explains Braddon, “she is regulated by her programming to emulate someone she has never met and behave as they would – her ‘unforgiving quest to be second best’ – but even so, she must still choose between right and wrong”. When Evie is on the run, her decisions “have life or death consequences”, says Braddon. “At times it felt that I was making Evie too nice for her own good, but by the end I believe I found enough of her dark side to balance things out!”

This is a narrator that could hold an incredibly complex mixture of sophistication and naivety

And although Klara is less likely to go rogue than the other creations described here, Ishiguro similarly uses his Artificial Friend to represent the full breadth of human life, just as he did with clones in Never Let Me Go. As her story proceeds, Klara undergoes a real-time process of learning about how humans think and feel. “This is a narrator that could hold, I thought, an incredibly complex mixture of sophistication and naivety,” Ishiguro says. “And I thought you could get an entire human lifespan into her approach, just within the few years that this machine existed. She could go from being a toddler to being a teenager to be something like a parent, to empty nest syndrome, where she feels she’s done what she’s supposed to do.”

The modern Frankenstein’s monster, then, is as diverse as the humans who create them: as fictional devices, they are vehicles for satire, thriller, horror or allegory, even if, as Ian McEwan puts it in his android-affair novel Machines Like Me, they ultimately represent “a monstrous act of self-love”. But in all cases, they stand or fall on how real humans treat them, which is something their programming and AI learning can never overcome.

The Turing Test for artificial intelligence says that if we cannot tell the difference between an artificial mind and a human mind, we should treat the artificial mind as a human mind. But the human characters in these novels – driven by very human prejudice – don’t do this, fearful of the creatures’ otherness, or just resentful of their perfection. In Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein’s monster had the potential to be better than most of us – he looked up to the peaceable lawmakers of Plutarch’s Lives as his model – but was driven to the very lowest of human impulses by how others behaved towards him.