Mary Shelley - Frankenstein

Frankenstein

Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds

Mary Shelley

Edited by

David H. Guston, Ed Finn, and Jason Scott Robert

Managing Editors

Joey Eschrich and Mary Drago

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2017 David H. Guston, Ed Finn, and Jason Scott Robert Corrected 1818 text of Mary Shelleys Frankenstein Charles E. Robinson

Title Page of the First Edition of Frankenstein, 1818 (litho), English School (19th century)/ New York Public Library, U S A /Bridgeman Images

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797 1851 , author. | Guston, David H., 1965 - editor. | Finn, Ed, 1980 - editor. | Robert, Jason Scott, 1972- editor.

Title: Frankenstein : annotated for scientists, engineers, and creators of

all kinds / Mary Shelley ; edited by David H. Guston, Ed Finn, and Jason Scott Robert.

Description: Cambridge, MA : The M IT Press, 2017 . | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016041014 | ISBN 9780262533287 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH : Frankenstein, Victor (Fictitious character)--Fiction. |

Frankensteins Monster (Fictitious character)--Fiction. |

Scientists--Fiction. | Monsters--Fiction. | Horror fiction. | Science

fiction. | Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851. Frankenstein. |

Science in literature.

Classification: LCC PR5397 . F7 2017 | DDC 823/.7 --dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041014

EPUB Version 1.0

For Sam and his enthusiasm and patienceDave Guston

For Anna and our beloved monsters, Nora and DeclanEd Finn

For three very well-parented creatures: Annika, Astrid, and AlexandraJason Robert

And to the memory of our friend and colleague Charles E. Robinson.

Charlies scholarship and generosity were crucial to this volume,

as to so much of the prior study of Frankenstein. We hope through his work

presented here, among the last of his completed before his death, that his knowledge, wisdom, and gentility will reach a new generation of readers.

Contents

Frankenstein

Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds

Essays

by Josephine Johnston

by Cory Doctorow

by Jane Maienschein and Kate MacCord

by Alfred Nordmann

by Elizabeth Bear

by Anne K. Mellor

by Heather E. Douglas

Appendixes

Editors Preface

David H. Guston , Ed Finn , and Jason Scott Robert

No work of literature has done more to shape the way humans imagine science and its moral consequences than Frankenstein; or The Modern Pro metheus , Mary Shelleys remarkably enduring tale of creation and responsibility. Frankenstein is the literary offspring of an eighteen-year-old girl ensconced in a romantic yet fraught summer getaway on the shores of Lake Geneva in response to a dare to come up with a ghost story. That dare was issued a little more than two hundred years ago. In writing Frankenstein, Mary produced both in the creature and in its creator tropes that continue to resonate deeply with contemporary audiences. Moreover, these tropes and the imaginations they engender actually influence the way we confront emerging science and technology, conceptualize the process of scientific research, imagine the motivations and ethical struggles of scientists, and weigh the benefits of scientific research against its anticipated and unforeseen pitfalls.

The world will celebrate the bicentennial of Frankensteins publication on 1 January 2018. Arizona State University ( ASU ) will be the epicenter of this celebration of the power of literature, science, art, imagination, and ingenuity. ASU s Frankenstein Bicentennial Project is a constructive, intellectual, and public endeavor meant to celebrate Frankensteins pervasive influence on contemporary culture and scientific research. With funding from the US National Science Foundation ( NSF Award no. 1516684), we are producing a citizen-curated, digital narrative experience of Frankenstein and Frankensteiniana in collaboration with dozens of museums and other partners. Our goal is to understand the galvanizing power of Frankenstein to stoke the public imagination and to harness that energy to ignite new conversations about creativity and responsibility among science and technology researchers, students, and the public. We hope these conversations will inspire a deeper understanding of how to govern science and technology responsibly. We believe Frankenstein is a book that can encourage us to be both thoughtful and hopeful: having these conversations can help all of us make better decisions about how to shape and understand scientific research and technical innovation in ways that support our well-considered values and ambitions.

Mary Shelleys landmark fusion of science, ethics, and literary expression provides an opportunity both to reflect on how science is framed and understood by the public and to contextualize new scientific and technological innovations, especially in an era of synthetic biology, genome editing,robotics, machine learning, and regenerative medicine. Although Frankenstein is infused with the exhilaration of seemingly unbounded human creativity, it also prompts serious reflection about our individual and collective responsibility for nurturing the products of our creativity and imposing constraints on our capacities to change the world around us. Engaging with Frankenstein allows a broad public and especially future scientists and engineers to consider the history of our scientific progress together with our expanding abilities in the future and to reflect on evolving understandings of the responsibilities such abilities entail.

This critical edition of Frankenstein for scientists and engineers islike the creature himselfthe first of its kind and just as monstrous in its composition and development. Originally proposed by our colleague Cajsa Baldini in ASU s Department of English, the skeleton of the critical edition was fleshed out at a workshop at ASU in the spring of 2014, hosted by two of us (Guston and Finn) and funded by the NSF ( NSF Award no. 1354287 ) to explore science-and-society projects that might be built around Frankenstein). Robert served as scribe in breakout sessions dedicated to fleshing out the critical edition, which also included Baldini, historian Catherine ODonnell, and representatives from the ASU Libraries, a local high school, and the larger community. We then sent copies of Frankenstein to professors and students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics ( STEM ) fields and asked them to identify key terms and passages requiring elucidation and elaboration for STEM students from high school to graduate school. We received almost one thousand suggestions! And so the editorial work began in earnest.

In the spring of 2015, still working with NSF funding, we brought together a small group of advisers to discuss both a print version and an immersive digital version of an annotated Frankenstein. One key contributor was Charles E. Robinson, emeritus professor at the University of Delaware and one of the worlds leading scholars of