Episode Details

Awakening To The New Real

The stench of lightning and charred flesh fills the air. You open your eyes to agony in a body stitched together, organs, ribs and limbs, from the bodies of the dead.

You stagger to life with one question burning in your mind.

A question that will launch you into the world on a journey of crime, murder, and destruction in a desperate quest for your creator.

You are not a human born. You are not a child of God. You are a creature. You are Frankenstein’s creature.

But who are you?

Watch the full video essay on the Science Fiction channel

The iconic image from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), has echoed across two centuries of literature, theatre, film, and philosophy. 

Written as a gothic horror tale, Frankenstein is perhaps the first true myth of the scientific age. The first novel to capture the new reality being revealed by science. The first complete work of science fiction.

The reality that Frankenstein’s creation awakens to on that mortuary slab was the new reality all humanity was awakening to.

Humans had believed we were eternal souls. Creations of God, made in God’s image.

Now science was showing us that we were biological organisms. Products of blind evolution. Machines of flesh and blood.

The horror of Frankenstein is the horror of that awakening.

We’re All Going On A Goth Summer Holiday

The year is 1816—the so-called “year without a summer,” when volcanic ash from Mount Tambora plunged Europe into a strange gothic summe