30 October 2021 | New Scientist | 35The 1939 film Son of
Frankenstein starred Boris Karloff
and Basil Rathbone“ You can only push
a novel so far. I don’t
believe in futurism
or futurology –
I’m a novelist”Don’t miss
Read
Super Volcanoes sculpt
the sea, land and sky,
and alter the machinery
of life. Join science writer
Robin George Andrews
on a journey from
Yellowstone, Tanzania
and the ocean floor
on Earth to the moon,
Venus and Mars.Watch
Finch stars Tom Hanks
as a lone survivor on a
post-apocalyptic Earth.
Caleb Landry Jones plays
his robot, built to care for
Finch’s dog if the worst
happens. It is a drama
about love, friendship
and the essence of
being human. On Apple
TV+ from 5 November.Visit
Future Ages Will
Wonder explores how
science and technology
write the history of the
future, including Dust to
Data, a CGI exploration
of what we mean by
civilisation (pictured).
At FACT Liverpool in the
UK until 20 February.
DUST
TODATA
,^ COURTE
SY
OFLARR
Y^ ACHIAMPONGAND^ DAVID^ BLA
NDYvery good at ignoring stuff that
happens elsewhere and saying
‘it can’t happen to me’.”
Stanley Robinson says he sees
opportunity at the COP26 climate
summit in Glasgow, UK, where he
will give a speech. “My hopes are
high COP26 will come up with
something striking. Progress will
be made.” He is also a big fan of
US president Joe Biden. “He has
been surprisingly good on climate.
And I say this as a leftist.”
And what next? More climate
change-themed novels are in
the offing. Stanley Robinson
has already written novels set in
Antarctica, including The Ministry
for the Future, and now he wants
to head to the other pole. “I’m
looking at the Arctic – can we keep
an ice sheet over the Arctic? It’s
so important,” he says. If the idea
grows into a story, it will explore
a melting Arctic’s impact on
governance, ecology and culture,
not to mention the global climate
as the region’s reflectivity changes.Sixteen years ago, Stanley
Robinson told New Scientist he
liked novels with happy endings.
Does he hope for one on climate
change? “We could have a good
21st century, we could have a good
dealing with climate change, we
could have a good Anthropocene,”
he says. “This is what I charge the
young science fiction writers with:
you have to write that story so
people can imagine it in advance –
and then try for it.” ❚The Ministry for the Future is
out now in paperback. Turn to
page 47 for more on climate protestSparks of life
A classic monster was born from a new
view of life and death, finds Simon IngsBook
The Science of Life and
Death in Frankenstein
Sharon Ruston
Bodleian Library PublishingIN 1817, the natural philosopher
Karl August Weinhold removed
the brain from a living kitten and
replaced it with a mix of zinc and
silver, essentially a battery.
According to Weinhold, the
animal “opened its eyes, looked
straight ahead with a glazed
expression... hobbled about, and
then fell down exhausted”.
The following year, Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein was
published to a public hungry for
the author’s take on one of the
most pressing scientific issues of
the day: is electricity the key to
animal life? And if so, can a short
sharp jolt reanimate the dead?
Recent history had blurred the
once a clear divide between life
and death. There were reports of
flickers of what looked like life in
freshly guillotined heads in
revolutionary France, and the
invention of mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation allowed people
who had seemingly drowned
to spring back to life.
Sharon Ruston covers this
historical ground well, and takes
it further, revealing Shelley’s
firm grip on the scientific issues
of her day – in particular, the
growing understanding of
the role of electricity in life.
In the last decades of the
1700s, it was believed that
animal life was driven by
something called animal
electricity, thought to be
distinct from the kind that flows
through metal. The idea came
from the physician Luigi Galvani
to explain why the muscles in
the legs of dead frogs twitchedwhen hit by an electrical spark.
Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni
Aldini, took these experiments
further in theatrical events in
which a current was passed
through corpses. The bodies
then opened their eyes, clenched
their fists, raised their arms,
beat their hands against the
table or moved as though
attempting to stand or sit up.
As Ruston writes, in Shelley’s
book, Victor Frankenstein’s
anguished description of
the moment his Creature
awakes “sounds very like the
description of Aldini’s attempts
to resuscitate 26-year-old
George Forster”, one of the
corpses experimented on after
he was hanged for the murder
of his wife and child in 1803.
The Science of Life and Death
in Frankenstein is both a great
introduction and a serious
contribution to understanding
Frankenstein. Through Ruston’s
eyes, we see how the first sci-fi
novel captured the imagination
of a science-hungry public. ❚Simon Ings is a writer based
in LondonGRAN
GER^ HISTORICAL^ PICTURE^ ARC
HIVE/ALA
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