I'm re-reading my favorite series again, The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss. It's the best books ever. But that third book is taking forever for him to finish, but I'll wait patiently, it's just so good!
Im like this with Nightworld by Lj Smith...I'm re-reading my favorite series again, The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss. It's the best books ever. But that third book is taking forever for him to finish, but I'll wait patiently, it's just so good!
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Having never read this before, and having never seen any of the movies, my only understanding of this story was "Big Monster" and "First sci-fi book" and "This is why the West lags behind Asia in the field of robotics". It was very different to what I was expecting.
The whole story is consumed with guilt and injustice. So many innocent people suffer for crimes others have committed and the question of responsibility keeps coming up. Is Frankenstein to blame for abandoning his own creation? Is the creature to blame for making the decision to kill? Is there something immutable in Nature that made the tragedy inevitable?
The creature itself is intelligent and well-spoken, once it learns how to speak. There's a whole section in which the creature narrates it's short life to Frankenstein that is moving and sad and makes you feel sympathy for the thing before reminding you that it is a killer. The creature threatens to murder Frankenstein's loved ones unless Frankenstein creates a woman for the creature, and that whole thing is somethign I found very interesting.
On the one hand, the creature is clearly predisposed to goodness and compassion, but the world at large rejects it and treats it as a threat based on its outward appearance of horror. This denial of empathy and love is what drives the creature to violence and having a woman that is like him would end this suffering as their would be another living creature that understands him, that he can relate to. But on the other, the creature bluntly declaring that the only thing stopping it from wreaking havoc and destruction on those it hates is the promise of a woman whose literal purpose in life is to be his companion. It's hard not to draw a connection there to modern incels who are filled with hate and believe their problems would all be solved with a devoted, subservient, unblemished woman.
The creature deserves pity for the prejudiced rejection it constantly faces, but does its own suffering justify visiting suffering on others? And does the ultimate responsibility for that suffering lie with Frankenstein for daring to unravel the secrets of Nature and steal from God, as the other title "The Modern Prometheus" suggests? That part is where the book's lasting influence on science fiction comes from, the idea that just because we can doesn't mean we should. And once we have, can we control what we've done?
It was pretty good, I have to say.
We were meant to watch that in English in Year 10 but I was off the day we watched the first half and when we were meant to watch the second half we were sat at the back drawing maps of Halo and talking about the best strats to cap flags lmaoYou should watch the Ken Brannagh and Robert DeNiro movie