[hotnfresh]

I’m not really sure how you’d put the parts of Frankenstein that really matter into cyberpunk and come out with anything but a farce, unless you ditch all the awful-but-sympathetic-creature bits somehow. Motherhood (and an intertwined nigh-irresistible drive toward and revulsion of pregnancy and giving birth), responsibility for one’s works in the world, the nature of man, abandonment, revenge, sympathetic villains… it’s great stuff, but I think if you try to do that in cyberpunk and keep anything like the Creature you’re gonna be drawn into parody or some other unfortunate hole.

[kikokikokiko]

Blade Runner is pretty much THE gold standard when it comes to Cyberpunk cinema, and it's themes are pretty much everything you described. Blade Runner ain't no parody.

[hotnfresh]

Good example. Yeah, it’s got most of that going on (plus some other things) and doesn’t obviously (though, a little, kinda, obliquely) feature either the plot or surface-level trappings of Frankenstein—so, it doesn’t look like parody.

My point was that if you want Cyberpunk’s “Frankenstein”, it’s probably not to be found in works that look too much like Frankenstein on the surface—those’ll just be borrowing tropes or tending toward parody, and won’t be Frankenstein-like in ways that matter.

[flir]

I'm unconvinced that motherhood is a theme of Frankenstein? The subtitle ("The Modern Prometheus") suggests "a second, technological Creation" is more the intent. I'm hoping you're going to be able to convince me I'm wrong, though.

Alien/s, now that's SciFi about motherhood.

I guess if I was going to approach "cyberpunk Frankenstein" I'd end up somewhere adjacent to Michael Marshall Smith's Spares ("human clones, the ultimate health insurance").

[hotnfresh]

The simultaneous nigh-unavoidable impulse toward creation (which takes some months, of course) coupled with body horror and more than a little revulsion, and sudden, transformative “birth” at the end (the monster isn’t intolerably, fundamentally, stomach-turningly repulsive until that spark of life enters it) is rather on the nose. It’s a man giving birth, more or less, and parental responsibility (which he whiffs at—he can’t tolerate the monster, especially at first, either) of a sort follows. Given that, and that particularly fatherhood-connected motifs and themes are not strong in the book, I think one would have to justify all that not having having to do with motherhood.

Given the author’s bio and stuff like her mom dying from giving birth to her, yeah, I’d say it’s there. A very particular point of view and concern with it, not exactly “ain’t pregnancy and motherhood beautiful?”, yes, but it’s there. “Death of the author”, sure, but it’s there in the book even if you don’t know Shelley’s bio.

[flir]

Interesting, thanks. You make it sound like it's about postnatal depression ("the monster isn’t intolerably, fundamentally, stomach-turningly repulsive until that spark of life enters it"). Definitely food for thought.

[hotnfresh]

Yeah, the protagonist’s a guy (Shelley was raised by her dad…) and the he-does-it-with-science thing is definitely there (though he’s nothing at all like the mad scientist from the films) but I do think the book leans much more strongly toward motherhood (and especially pregnancy and birth) than fatherhood, themes-wise, though it’s definitely not the only thing going on, either.

[saltcured]

I enjoyed the whole thread that spawned off this comment. Back in the 90s I took a literature course that did the reverse angle. With a gothic theme, we compared Frankenstein and Neuromancer. And in between, I believe we also sampled Sigmund Freud and E.A. Poe.

[hotnfresh]

I think noir when I think about Neuromancer—the kinda-scumbag protagonist down on his luck, drawn not-wholly-willingly into a bigger plot and with various personal goals factoring in and intertwined with it; the prose style; the larger plot ultimately kinda coming to nothing (“forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”), et c.

I’ll have to read it with gothic literature in mind, next time.

[saltcured]

Look more to the environments and secondary characters instead of just the protagonist. The English gothic horror is strong in the Tessier-Ashpool clan and the whole orbital scene.

But as I recall, we also sought goth in other places and characters. The whole metaverse with AI running amok, and the Corto/Armitage character being almost a reverse Frankenstein's monster, for example.