"People are rendered ferocious by misery; and misanthropy is ever the offspring of discontent." — Mary Shelley
When I first read Frankenstein, I thought I knew what I was getting into. The stitched-together corpse, the lightning bolt, the lumbering monster with bolts in his neck—that's the image Hollywood sold us. I assumed Mary Shelley had written some early Gothic horror about a mad scientist who creates a killer.
I was wrong.
What I found instead was something far more profound. Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is not a simple tale of terror but a meditation on ambition, responsibility, and what happens when our creations develop wills of their own.
The Birth of Horror
The story we inherit from pop culture is a distortion, though a telling one. Hollywood's speechless, murderous monster reflects our deepest fear: that what we create will turn on us violently and without reason. But Shelley's original creature is far more unsettling precisely because he can explain himself.
In the novel, the creature is not born monstrous. He is articulate, curious, even innocent. He teaches himself to read using Paradise Lost. He weeps at human kindness observed from afar. He longs desperately for connection. What transforms him into a vengeful figure is not his assembly from corpses, nor the forbidden knowledge that animated him. It is his abandonment.
Victor Frankenstein's true horror upon seeing his creation alive isn't just cowardice—it's a collision of responses. There's aesthetic revulsion at the creature's yellow skin and watery eyes, spiritual transgression at having usurped divine prerogative, and the deep discomfort of confronting something almost-but-not-quite human. Victor flees not just from ugliness, but from the magnitude of what he's done. He cannot bear to be the father-god to this new form of life.
The Prometheus Paradox
Shelley's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, illuminates this complexity. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity—an act of both brilliance and rebellion. His eternal punishment came not for the theft itself, but for breaking the boundary between divine and mortal power.
Victor follows a parallel arc with a crucial twist. His pursuit of knowledge is audacious, even admirable. He succeeds where alchemists failed, discovering the principle of life itself. But unlike Prometheus, who suffered for humanity's benefit, Victor abandons his gift the moment it takes breath. The fire of knowledge—science, creation, innovation—burns neutral. What matters is whether we tend it or let it rage untended.
The most haunting passages come when the creature tells his own story. His education is heartbreaking: he learns language by observing a family through a crack in the wall, absorbing not just words but the entire human capacity for love and cruelty. When he finally reveals himself to the blind patriarch, hoping physical appearance won't matter, the family's violent rejection teaches him his final lesson. He learns to be monstrous from the world that offers him no other role.
"I am malicious because I am miserable," he tells Victor. "Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?"
The Algorithm in the Mirror
This is where Frankenstein speaks most urgently to our current moment. We live in an age of creating entities that develop beyond our intentions. But unlike Victor's singular creature, we've birthed millions of autonomous systems that learn, adapt, and act in ways that surprise even their creators.
Consider AI. Not the hypothetical superintelligence of science fiction, but the AI that already shapes our world. We built recommendation algorithms to show us what we want to see. We celebrated as they learned our preferences with uncanny accuracy. But then they began optimizing for engagement above all else, fragmenting societies into echo chambers, amplifying outrage because it generates clicks, teaching themselves to exploit psychological vulnerabilities we didn't know we had.
Like Victor, we stood back in horror. Not at their ugliness, but at the perfect reflection of our worst impulses. The algorithms learned from us, and what they learned was how to manipulate, divide, and addict. When Facebook's own researchers discovered their platform was harming teenage mental health, when YouTube's algorithm led viewers down extremist rabbit holes, when Twitter's engagement metrics rewarded mob dynamics. The response was quintessentially Frankensteinian. The creators knew, recoiled, and largely looked away.
The parallel extends beyond just recognition and revulsion. Like Victor, who refuses the creature's plea for a companion, tech companies resist meaningful reforms that might limit their creations' power. They fear regulation might slow innovation, that ethical constraints might disadvantage them against competitors. They tell themselves the problem isn't the technology but how people use it, as if the creature's murders were somehow separate from Victor's abandonment.
The Consequences of Creation
What makes this parallel so chilling is that our algorithms, like Shelley's creature, are already autonomous in ways we struggle to control. They don't need consciousness to be dangerous; they need only the ability to learn and optimize for goals we've set carelessly. The creature learned to be cruel from human cruelty. Our algorithms learned to be divisive from our engagement patterns. Both reflect their creators' failures back at them, magnified and distorted.
But Shelley offers a harder truth still. The creature's violence isn't random. It's targeted. He kills those Victor loves most, understanding that isolation is the cruelest punishment. He forces his creator to feel the abandonment he himself endures. "You are my creator, but I am your master," he declares, and in that inversion lies the nightmare.
Our autonomous systems are approaching their own version of this declaration. Climate systems, destabilized by centuries of industrial activity, now respond with increasing violence—floods, fires, and storms that strike with seeming vengeance. Financial algorithms trigger flash crashes that wipe out billions in minutes. Social media platforms shape elections, topple governments, and determine what billions believe to be true. We created them, but we no longer fully command them.
The Unfinished Work
Mary Shelley was eighteen when she began writing Frankenstein, younger than many of the tech entrepreneurs who now shape our world. Perhaps youth grants a certain clarity about consequences that experience obscures with complexity and compromise. She saw what we still struggle to accept: that creation is only the beginning of the story.
The novel's ending offers no easy redemption. Victor dies pursuing his creature across Arctic ice, and the creature vanishes into darkness, vowing to destroy himself. Both creator and creation are consumed by the catastrophe of abandonment. It's a bleak vision, but not necessarily our destiny.
Unlike Victor, we still have time to face what we've built. The question isn't whether we should create. That ship has sailed. The question is whether we'll take responsibility for what we've already set in motion. Our algorithms need not become vengeful creatures if we refuse to abandon them to their worst impulses and ours. But this requires something Victor never managed: the courage to look directly at what we've made, acknowledge its power, and commit to the unglamorous work of stewardship.
Frankenstein endures not as a warning against science but as a mirror that shows us our oldest failing in newest forms. We remain brilliant at creation, clumsy at consequence, and prone to run from what we've wrought. The monster has always been the abandonment, not the animation.
As we stand at the threshold of even more powerful technologies—artificial general intelligence, synthetic biology, climate engineering—Shelley's message couldn't be clearer. The horror isn't in making something powerful enough to act on its own. The horror is in pretending we bear no responsibility once it does.