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In 1816, Mary Shelley wrote her own cautionary tale about the destructive potential of technology.

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She created the most famous zombie in history, the monster of Dr. Frankenstein.

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The book's subtitle was The Modern Prometheus, another story about what happens when humans

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try to play God.

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Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at a time of great scientific innovation.

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It was challenging the way that people related to God and to knowledge and to what was possible

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and what was not possible.

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People were afraid that we were tinkering with nature in a way that was more bad than

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good.

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Shelley drew on the Prometheus story of a mortal making humans from clay.

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But in her story, Dr. Frankenstein brings life to the dead.

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He builds his monster by stitching together segments of corpses.

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Dr. Frankenstein jolts the monster to life using the electric shock of lightning called

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galvanization.

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Galvanization is a theory that came out in the late 1700s that if you applied an electrical

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charge to a corpse, that it would reanimate it.

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In Frankenstein, I think that Mary Shelley was making a large commentary on technology

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getting ahead of us, that as we discover these new technologies, we shouldn't be playing

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God.

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We should be accepting of death as death.

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When Shelley wrote Frankenstein, people feared how science and new technology might destroy

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an old way of life.