POSTHUMAN and LAST MAN—apocalypse/rebirth; sublime turn of history; singularity; forced evolution; transhuman; eco-/anthropocene monsters, including human/animal hybrids; questioning “Am I Human?”
Mary Shelley’s other science fiction work is titled The Last Man (1826). In the work, Lionel Verney, the last man, narrates his story of the end of the human world by plague. In Frankenstein, when Victor confides why he refused to build a mate for the Creature, he reasons that he would raise “a race of devils” to usurp humanity, ending the world. The sublime enlargement of scale—the turn to the global and the possibility of evolutionary extinction—presented in The Last Man’s plague which wipes out humanity, can be teased out as a background possibility in Frankenstein as well. A link can be usefully forged between the beginning of a new species and the end of another, as the alpha and omega meet at the sublime turn of history.
The sublime is the Romantic era term for a confrontation at the limits of human understanding, in which the mind and imagination are challenged by conceptions “too large” for comprehension; often, in what has been called the “natural sublime,” the sublime is figured as an attempt to “grok” (to use a sf term), or to apprehend when we cannot comprehend, nature in totality as an “other.” The “sublime moment” breaks understanding, and then…it either promises a reintegration (and elevation) of the self in some sort of transcendence, or threatens a dissolution of the self, an end. (Note: what it actually is does is unknown, and so might be quite different from what it “promises” or “threatens.”) To complicate things further, the end for humanity might be figured positively, depending on what one thinks of what humans have made of the world. Though critics disagree on the matter, The Last Man (1826) can be read as a critique of humanity that welcomes the end of the world as a relief.
Frankenstein remains an important example of the sublime in sf, and an influence on stories about breaking limits, both evolutionary and ecological, and of the effect of humanity on nature as recorded in a term like “anthropocene.” In both of Shelley’s sf novels, we can note sublime elements: a Byronic Hero (Victor and the Creature; Lord Raymond), a final, nearly-impossible confessional narrative of fantastic events (from a dying Creator and Creature; from the Sibyl’s cave), and a sense of a confrontation with nature and evolutionary change itself (the Creature synthesizing animal and body parts; the all-consuming plague). The Creature itself is sublime, in size and in its startling intellect, and is directly and continually conflated with sublime natural scenery in the Alps and elsewhere. If Victor makes the Creature’s mate, perhaps he will realize a plague that could wipe out humanity…and, judging from how he treats the Creature, perhaps deservedly.
As something new and different emerges in the movement from “last” to “what comes after,” the “Am I Human?” question takes precedence, worrying if humanity is, or ever has been, truly and only human, and whether what comes after might be human, or more so…posthuman. Where the theme of the ANDROID focused on the body, here the emphasis is on the creation of an emergent, self-aware intelligence in a story, whether embodied or disembodied…say, inside a machine…which may raise questions about the nature of existence itself.
In research on Artificial Intelligence, “strong A.I.” describes the moment when computers or other machines become self-aware; it is an ongoing “holy grail,” sometimes deemed impossible, sometimes feared, sometimes seen to be imminent. Long important in sf, it is a key trope of Cyberpunk stories which frequently feature A.I.s awakening in vast matrixes of the net. The central connection to Frankenstein is the creation’s questioning of its own humanity and the limits of the human, threatening at once to be all-too human and to be more than human. The Singularity, the moment when human intelligence is surpassed by a human-built intelligence, is present or threatened. The Creature is not a computer, of course, but a biological creation. However, the famous bolts in the neck of Frankenstein’s Creature from Whale’s preeminent 1931 movie version point to a slippage between terms like A.I. and the trans- or posthuman, mirroring Philip K. Dick’s blurring of Robot and “Andy” or Android.
In writing of the “Posthuman”, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes:
In sf, this term for the successors of present-day humanity does not normally refer to products of “natural” Evolution–like, perhaps, H.G. Wells’ influential vision of evolved future man with bulging brain and partly atrophied body in “The Man of the Year Million” (6 November 1893 Pall Mall Budget)–but to the results of our own or others’ intervention via Technology (including techniques of Biology), Genetic engineering, Nanotechnology, and so on.
The influence of Shelley’s novel also looms large when the question of the Creator’s responsibility is raised. The real power of that question is how it reflects on all of us, not just on some “mad” scientist who might be quarantined as a monster him- or herself.
Works influenced by the space-and-time shattering aspects of Shelley’s novel may also attempt to cross sublime boundaries in order to frame humanity’s effect on the world and our complex relationship to other minds in it; they are working in the wake of the Romantic era’s ecological awareness and its first apprehensions of what we now call the “anthropocene.”
References:
See also the ANDROIDS and BYRONIC HERO entries. Also, for more on the creator’s responsibility, MAD SCIENTISTS and FRANKENSTEIN MONSTERS.
For a fuller treatment of the AI theme in sf generally,
see http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/ai
For the problem of the creation of an artificial intelligence, see Cybernetics:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/cybernetics
On the Singularity, see: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/singularity
and Conceptual Breakthrough: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/conceptual_breakthrough
Also, Novum: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/meme
The Singularity is described in “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era” (1993) by Vernor Vinge:
https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html
Also see, From the Encyclopedia of SF:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/evolution
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/posthuman