Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives
Lester D. Friedman and Allison B. Kavey
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is its own type of monster mythos that will not die, a corpus whose parts keep getting harvested to animate new artistic creations. What makes this tale so adaptable and so resilient that, nearly 200 years later, it remains vitally relevant in a culture radically different from the one that spawned its birth?
Monstrous Progeny takes readers on a fascinating exploration of the Frankenstein family tree, tracing the literary and intellectual roots of Shelley’s novel from the sixteenth century and analyzing the evolution of the book’s figures and themes into modern productions that range from children’s cartoons to pornography. Along the way, media scholar Lester D. Friedman and historian Allison B. Kavey examine the adaptation and evolution of Victor Frankenstein and his monster across different genres and in different eras. In doing so, they demonstrate how Shelley’s tale and its characters continue to provide crucial reference points for current debates about bioethics, artificial intelligence, cyborg lifeforms, and the limits of scientific progress.
Blending an extensive historical overview with a detailed analysis of key texts, the authors reveal how the Frankenstein legacy arose from a series of fluid intellectual contexts and continues to pulsate through an extraordinary body of media products. Both thought-provoking and entertaining, Monstrous Progeny offers a lively look at an undying and significant cultural phenomenon.
A quotation from the Star Wars franchise character Saw Gerra makes for an interesting reflection related to current events. For those that don’t know about this character, here’s some background from 
A new trailer for War for the Planet of the Apes was recently released, and it promises to wrap up the trilogy with violent conflict as the world’s remaining humans battle the dominant ape population. Just as the original POTA films reflected their social and cultural contexts, so do the current group of Apes films. War is no exception. In the new trailer the character identified at imdb.com as “Colonel,” played by Woody Harrelson, is shown giving an inspirational speech to a large group of troops about to march into battle. In this speech he says, “There are times when it is necessary to abandon our humanity to save humanity.” While it is difficult to interpret this line in the film definitively from the short clip, given that the second entry in the trilogy, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, set the stage for a violent showdown between the apes and humans, and that this plays out in the final film, this seems to be the context in which the remarks should be understood. Dots can be connected to this line from another image in the trailer, a rear shot of a human soldier hunting in the woods with “Monkey Killer” on his helmet. Fans of the original series of films in the late 1960s into the 1970s will recall that the apes considered the term “monkey” derogatory when applied to them, and in Escape from the Planet of the Apes when a human innocently uses this term in reference to a newborn ape, Caesar goes into a rage and accidentally kills him. The derogatory usage seems to carry over into this film, and when combined with the line in the speech from the Colonel it appears that an interesting phenomenon may be at play.
From time to time TheoFantastique looks at the significance of fairy tale in contemporary culture, and with the continued box office success of Disney’s live-action version of Beauty and the Beast, another opportunity presents itself. Readers may enjoy an essay in Jezebel.com titled 
FINAL DAYS!
