Frankisstein by Jeannette Winterson

This book is unsettling and dazzling at the same time. It flexes between the time of Shelley and Byron and the aegis of the Frankenstein story, and a more modern interpretation of what the creation of a non-human would be like. Mary Shelley’s novel has long outgrown her humble aim of writing a frightening story to enliven a rain-soaked Swiss holiday and to fill her pocket book. This deathless artistic afterlife in the modern era is both inspiring and cautionary. It is an AI-enabled vision is of a future unconstrained by physical form, in which both human and automated consciousness transcend the messy complications of fragile, gendered bodies. For the scientist it eliminates all the messy biological constraints that the human body puts on form. The business man has different priorities. For him, technological advancement offers the opportunity to dispense with all the inconvenient moral obstacles that attend men’s innate desire for dominion over women, creating a sex bot that does it all without being anything at all. It is an unsettling look at what the not-too-distant future might hold.