"If the time should ever come when,
what is now called science, thus familiarized to men,
shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood,
the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration,
and will welcome the Being thus produced,
as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man."
*Intro Music*
Those are the words of William Wordsworth,
and they are essential to understanding Frankenstein
and to understanding science fiction,
because to understand Frankenstein, and thus to understand the origins of sci-fi,
we must first understand the movement and the period they came from.
We have to understand the Romantics.
We'll return to Wordsworth's words in a moment, but first,
let's set the scene.
It's the beginning of the 19th century.
The enlightenment and the age of reason
have ushered in a time of rapid industrialization and true modern science.
The pace of world is speeding up.
Every day sees new innovations and new discoveries about the very nature of our existence.
For the first time, humanity feels as though it can discover truth,
really discover truth,
not simply inherit it from divine revelation
or take esoteric stabs at it through the realm of philosophy
The possibilities seem endless,
and yet, those advances come with a price.
Haze hangs over London.
The Thames reeks with fetid sewage
and the pollution of the new Industrial age
Cities cram together millions,
and the workhouses and the factories leave many living short, miserable, unfulfilling lives.
Cold reason and calculation have replaced compassion and empathy as the virtues of the day.
It was in this milieu that Romanticism grew.
Romanticism was a response from artists scattered across Europe
to what they saw as the dehumanising effects
of an era of mass-production, rigid logic and the reduction of lives to economic worth.
They wanted to rebel against this,
to restore the value of emotion, and reignite us with passion,
to tear down the rules and the formal order that constrained art,
and find, once again, the majesty in nature,
and it is from this point in Western civilization
that Frankenstein emerges.
Time and again in the book,
we encounter great and breathtaking scenes of nature.
We find ourselves reading about strange and exciting places,
ranging from the Alps, to the Arctic ice.
Check this out:
"It was nearly noon when I arrived at the top of the ascent.
For some time, I sat upon the rock that overlooks the sea of ice.
A mist covered both that and the surrounding mountains.
Presently, a breeze dissipated the cloud, and I descended upon the glacier.
The surface is very uneven,
rising high like the waves of a troubled sea, descending low,
and interspersed by rifts that sink deep."
It is in places like these
that we find the sublime,
that concept most essential to both Romanticism and Science Fiction.
It is in these places that we are over-awed by nature.
And with that awe comes realisation,
about the self,
about our place in the universe.
It's what science fiction will continue to do with swirling galaxies,
alien landscapes, and gleaming pulsars.
The sublime transports us
and provides to us the moment of overwhelming realisation that
no matter how capable, no matter how technologically advanced we become,
the universe will always remain infinitely more vast and infinitely more complex.
No matter how much we come to understand,
it will serve as a reminder
that there is always more to explore.
Frankenstein also overturns all the rules.
It uses a wild framing device.
It uses science to tell a horror story.
That had never happened before.
Heck, even the fact that the story was written by a woman and,
eventually, published under her own name,
bucks the rules of the age.
But the book also embraces passion,
with characters like the scientist, Victor.
Where the typical scientist character is often portrayed as logical and unemotional,
Victor is awash in feeling.
From the death of his mother, to his ascent up the Alps,
we see Victor being open to expressing his sorrow and his regret,
his anger and his fear, all of it without hesitation.
In fact, the characters of Victor and the monster also embody another aspect of the Romantic idea.
They embody the idea of the Heroic Individual.
Not heroic in the way we think of it today but rather,
heroic in the sense of the individual being able to do great, earth-shaking things,
if they commit their entire will, their entire being and their entire passion to it.
In his monomania,
Victor does something that no man should be able to do.
He overturns death.
Today we would think of this as the project of some shadowy government organisation
or a secretive lab employing hundreds of scientists.
But Victor Frankenstein overturns death by himself,
by sheer force of will and the impossible intensity of his drive.
This idea of the Heroic Individual,
the special person who can change the fate of the galaxy simply by their drive and their passion,
has taken deep roots in this genre,
and has spread out from this inception point to works even being published today.
Victor's scientific hubris too, is a product of the Romantic tradition.
This idea that it's foolhardy to think that you could truly overturn the fundamental laws of nature,
and that it's dangerous to follow a narrow chain of logic to the exclusion of all other considerations,
those ideas are part of that Romantic rebellion against the enlightenment,
and against some of the darker aspects of industrialization,
where the acquisition of wealth was considered more important than its cost.
And here's where I want to get back to Wordsworth,
because today,
it's easy to simply write off the Romantics' objection
to the enlightenment or industrialization as simply being
anti-science or anti-technology.
But that would be a simplistic reduction,
far from the truth.
To the Romantics, science was a fascinating marvel,
and its discoveries bounded on magic made real.
Science was a powerful thing, a joy and a wonder that we should all partake in,
not just as some abstract papers or slow calculations in a lab,
but as something that should ignite our passions.
Let's look at that quote again.
"If the time should ever come when,
what is now called science, thus familiarised to men,
shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood,
the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration,
and will welcome the Being thus produced,
as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man."
Wordsworth is saying that,
if science is ever to shrug off the garb of being academic and remote,
and instead become something that everyone can care about,
that every person can be inspired and excited by?
It will be with the help of the Poet.
Or, in this case, the Writer.
And that is what science fiction does.
The great goal of science fiction is to strip away the technical details
and deliver to us the heart,
the meaning in our science.
Even the hardest, most technical sci-fi you can find
uses the rigor of science and engineering to get us to dream.
To think of where those fields might take us.
This great goal is why Romanticism still holds such a fascination for sci-fi authors.
It's why Blake, Shelley, Coleridge, Byron, Wordsworth and Keats,
are some of the most referenced figures in the science fiction canon.
And, it is this Romantic project,
that Frankenstein set into motion.
Science fiction writers continue that project even today,
and their continued work will inspire the science, and the scientists, of tomorrow.
*Outro Music*