Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson

Remember when I said (in my last post) that I don’t usually like novels with multiple viewpoints? Frankisstein not only tells the story from different characters’ views (primarily Ry, a trans doctor in contemporary England and Mary Shelley) but also fictionalizes real people (besides Shelley and her friends and family, Ada Lovelace, I.J. Good) and even a fictional character (Victor Frankenstein, imagined as an inmate of Bedlam, and later a guest at a party where he approaches Mary Shelley).  Jeanette Winterson even plays with Shelley’s characters’ names, naming her modern characters Dr. Mary Shelley (Ry) and Victor Stein, an AI researcher.

The book weaves (veers?) between the 1800s, starting around the time Mary Shelley is writing Frankenstein while staying in Switzerland with her husband Percy Blythe Shelley, Lord Byron, her stepsister Claire and a doctor, Polidori, and the present, when Victor Stein is predicting (and working towards) a future when brains can be scanned, and “Once you are pure data you can download yourself in a variety of forms.” Ron Lord, a Welsh man who sees his Sexbot business as a public service, and Claire, an evangelical American who convinces him that a line of Christian companions is just what his business needs, join Ry in helping Victor bring his plans to fruition, even as they have no real understanding of what those plans will entail, while a dogged reporter, Polly D, tries to uncover whatever he’s up to.

The name play alone would ordinarily be enough to make me give up, but this book was pure fun, clever without being cute, and full of interesting ideas about how humans have viewed each other’s natural gifts, physical and intellectual, over the last two centuries, and how we use our own gifts to get what we need. The book also explores perceptions of gender, class, beauty, intelligence, sanity, and sex appeal. Its really hard to explain, but as Mary Shelley creates her story, and her countercultural life, and Ry, Victor, and Ron create their stories and countercultural lives, the ideas converge: that who we are is our hearts and minds, our spirits, not our frail physical shells. Or as Victor tells Ry, Ron, Claire and Polly: “And from here follows the story that we all recognise in some form or another. The story told by every religion in some form or another; the earth is fallen, reality is an illusion, our souls will live forever. Our bodies are a front — or perhaps more accurately, an affront — to the beauty of our nature as beings of light.”  Or as he said earlier, “pure data.”

Frankissstein defies easy description. Literary and yet full of shtick, cerebral but sexy, brimming with poetry and yet rooted in the notion that everything is 0s and 1s. It’s a story, on the one hand, of two Mary’s two centuries apart, both defying their roles as women, both loving men who respect their brains but also long for their bodies, both sure that in the end these men will leave them. On the other hand it’s the story of human hubris, of our certainty that we can manage whatever we create, and that we are capable of thinking our way out of anything.

In short, it’s a hoot.

 

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Report to Megalopolis by Tod Davies

I’ve written before about my admiration for Exterminating Angel Press, including Snotty Saves the Day, the first book in the History of Arcadia series. Report to Megalopolis is the fourth. Tod Davies runs the press and wrote this series, and full disclosure: I really enjoy her work and she knows it, and sent me a copy of this book.

You can read Report to Megalopolis without having read the other books in the History of Arcadia (although why wouldn’t you?). It’s meant to be the writings of Aspern Grayling, a sort of combination mad scientist politician. Aspern is reporting to Livia, a witch who rules Megalopolis behind the scenes, via a council. Aspern grew up in Arcadia and had a love hate relationship with his brilliant colleague Devindra Vale. When he hatches a plan to take over Arcadia, he uses cloning and genetic engineering to impregnate Devindra’s daughter Merope with triplets, but only one survives — Pavo, Aspern’s “son” and creation, his “god,” “made through the chemical manipulation of the human genome.”

Aspern’s story reflects back on this history and tells also of Pavo’s attempted conquest of Arcadia and his desire to rule the whole world. But his report is also the story of Aspern’s reckoning with all that he has done. It’s not a pleasant tale — there is incest, rape, war, maiming and killing, and a great deal of misogyny. The people of Arcadia, ruled by queens who value scholarship and fairy tales, art and nature, peace and justice, offer some hope that the kind of lust for power Pavo represents cannot dominate goodness. But some Arcadians are swayed by Aspern’s calculated campaign to “cultivate the seeds of vanity and ego, of putting the ‘I’ before all else, and of fascination with godly risk rather than the puling weakness of self-preservation.” Men swayed by this and by Aspern’s efforts to foster “unrest” through “desire for growth beyond the limits of what Arcadia could provide” join Pavo’s band of power thirsty followers.

Sound familiar? Aspern reminisces that he and Livia discussed the danger of “independent thought,” recalling that they agreed that “Even one moment of independent thought can overturn years of centralized power.” Ah, the hope. Aspern knows, “Independent thought, independent life, independent story — this was the complete teaching of Devindra Vale.” Will these survive?

I won’t give away how it all turns out, but I’ll tell you I stayed up late trying to find out what happened. Just as I’ve said before, this series is for readers who like their fantasy injected with a good dose of ethics and philosophy. There’s plenty to discuss about the parallels between this story and other great tales of the struggle between political systems, value systems, and world views, from Frankenstein to Star Wars, not to mention the world we live in.

I’ll leave you this thought: reading a book from a small press like Exterminating Angel, supporting independent publishing, local bookstores, your library, all of this is a strike against the Megalopoleis (I declare that the plural of Megalopolis) of our own world, and a source of strength for our own Arcadias. And I’ll leave with you with this image, found in the a note from of Isabel the Scholar, friend of Shanti Vale (Devindra’s granddaughter) , and founder of the “Evolutionary Movement” at the end of this book:

 

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