What do many consider the 1st #scienceFiction?
One of the first works of #horror (certainly #bodyHorror)?
#MaryShelley's "#Frankenstein"
Written as a *teenager*
A teenager who had recently lost a baby
I think that's key
Horror not from taking life
But creating life
She went to Switzerland with her lover Percy Shelley who was fleeing creditors in Britain
The summer was cold and rainy so #LordByron (yes him) proposed a #ghostStory #writingContest
I think she won
1/x
footnote:
that summer, 1816, wasn't just unnaturally cold and rainy in Switzerland, the whole world felt it. It was called "The Year without a Summer." There was famine from crop failures all over the world
this was all due to the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia
so we can say, via the creativity of one bored cold teenager cooped up with nothing better to do except write, that we owe "Frankenstein" partly to massive #climate disruption from a volcano
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora
2/x
an interesting connection:
it was #LordByron who proposed the ghost story writing contest that led to #MaryShelley writing "#Frankenstein", and he was the father of another #womensHistoryMonth notable: #AdaLovelace
her story is well known, but less well known is that she predicted #AI
she rejected it
her rejection was not without teeth, because the first non-#scienceFiction champion of AI, #AlanTuring, spent an inordinate amount of time refuting her critique
3/x
"The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis, but it has no power of anticipating any … relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with."
4/x
https://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf
'A variant of Lady Lovelace's objection states that a machine can "never do anything really new." This may be parried for a moment with the saw, "There is nothing new under the sun." Who can be certain that "original work" that he has done was not simply the growth of the seed planted in him by teaching, or the effect of following well-known general principles. A better variant of the objection says that a machine can never "take us by surprise."'
5/x
i find all of this extraordinary:
#MaryShelley created "#Frankenstein"
the seminal work (arguably the first work of #scienceFiction)-
humanity creating artificial life
in a ghost story writing contest suggested by #LordByron
the father of #AdaLovelace
who predicted #AI (the first person to seriously address the topic)-
humanity creating an artificial mind
something to think about this #womensHistoryMonth:
the artistic and technological mothers of our age
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24565995
6/6
super geek out time! 😆
Ben Royce 🇺🇦
essjax
zl2tod
Coach Pāṇini ®