Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein | Human and Social Monsters

Victor meets his creation, finding more of himself reflected back than he desires.

In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley offers humans as real monsters. We are the society that offers up the parts to create Victor’s monster. Indeed, the animated monster is merely a reflection of all our worst parts, eyes that covet, one hand to steal, one to kill. Though Victor refuses to animate the female monster he makes as a mate for the monster, the latent threat is that the horror she represents is already fully formed, ready for animation. These monsters merely mirror frightening elements we conceal in our own selves, elements unleashed and at work in the world and elements still in the process of formation.

Ernie Cline's Ready Player One, Cyberspace, and Society

Consider Ernie Cline's Ready Player One (2011) my sci-fi friends. Most of the narrative takes place in the OASIS, the Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation. The OASIS is not all that different from the matrixes and cyberspaces of cyberpunk literature. The OASIS is a virtual reality ready world. People dial in the world over to use infinite, yet, immediate space. And the OASIS provides an escape from bromidic and squalorous reality; yes, dataspace is exciting and pretty! It's got neon colors. It's got design based on origami-like complexity that appears simplistic. It's got badass computer hackers, coders, gamers, and gender-bending, identity swappers.

Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Egalitarian Societies

Robert Heinlein believed that in a democratic society everyone should participate in the protection of the nation's sovereignty. Heinlein's everyone is a universal everyone. Men and women alike, so Heinlein believed, should have a mandatory term of service in the military. Heinlein's Starship Troopers follows this mandate.

Famous Men Who Never Lived by K Chess | Science Fiction Analysis

Books received

Famous Men Who Never Lived (2019). K Chess. Tin House Books.

Famous Men Who Never Lived (2019) by K Chess tells the story of outsiders in America, those with minority and immigrant status. In our own 21st century America, the outsider is made to feel unwelcome. Trumpian chants for a border wall might as well be chants of hate for outsiders. Border wall chants confirm that our democratic government has been co-opted by a bigoted agenda to create lasting edifices of division. All those chanting for a wall would do well to study the result of widespread xenophobia in our country's history or in the history of world nations. Hint: stepping away from international leadership roles usually weakens economies and allows strongmen to rise.

The Island of Dr Moreau: Biopower and the Savage

By Joseph Hurtgen, Ph.D.

H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) is a postcolonial commentary on empire, examining Moreau’s biological construction and rule over a subordinate species. Moreau, mad scientist that he is, fails to civilize his subordinate species, but in his barbaric civilizing attempt demonstrates the savage nature of mankind, civilized or not. The Island of Dr Moreau demonstrates that civilization, created and sustained through war and strife, is savage.