Frankissstein (2019)
Jeanette Winterson moves between Mary Shelley in 1816 and a near future of AI and sex robots.
The question the novel asks about making a mind is being asked again by people building artificial intelligence. Put Mary Shelley’s summer and theirs side by side.
You care about this novel because of what it says about building minds and bodies, and you like a literary novel that jokes.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: Mary Shelley at Lake Geneva in 1816, starting her story.
Changes: everything else. In the present, Ry, a young transgender doctor, falls for Victor Stein, a professor leading the public debate on AI.
Whose story is it?
Mary Shelley’s and Ry’s.
How much time does it ask?
384 pages in Grove’s paperback.
Grove paperback, 22 September 2020, 384 pages. First published in hardcover on 1 October 2019.
Where to find it
Buy the paperback — Bookshop.org
Other ways to get it: Paperback — Amazon · Ebook — Kobo · Kindle — Amazon
Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby · Find at your library — WorldCat
More Frankensteins: Frankenstein: The 1818 Text (Penguin Classics) · Frankenstein: The 1818 Text (Oxford World’s Classics) · The Norton Critical Edition, third edition