Frankenstein & Bladerunner

Although written in different times, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Bladerunner by Ridley Scott both address similar concerns about the consequences of unrestrained technological abuse, relentless consumerism and their threat to the natural world as man exerts power to alter the natural rhythms of life. Shelley and Scott, projected into the future, what they saw to be trends in their own times that threatened the balance between humanity and the world. Their imagined worlds echo a warning, concerning unchecked technological advancement and ring of an inevitability if man’s power to alter the nature of the world is not controlled.

Written during the 19th century following when Europe was experiencing an industrial revolution, nouveau riche and vast improvements in scientific endeavours, Shelley, a young Romanticist, created this text to satirise the rising current view that nature would be overcome by science, together with mass production and booming technological processes. Shelley’s FR spins a precautionary tale predicting a future where nature has been deprived from man as a result of man’s unrestrained scientific and industrial activity, an exertion of man’s power over nature uncontrolled.

The possibilities of Galvanism and the Industrial Revolution blinds man from nature, greed and power, a new prospect the nouveau riche or the newly rich experience destroys moral values and principles. All these elements are evident in the character of Frankenstein. Having ‘lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit’, Victor Frankenstein ‘pursued nature to her hiding places’, but ignorantly enough Victor ignored nature’s boundaries and in doing so regretfully created a by-product of this ‘pursuit’. The monster, who Victor describes as ‘horrid’ and ‘wretch’, does not turn out to be the creation that he anticipated to be. Rejecting and not naming his invention makes the reader feel a sense of prejudice against the monster as it is given titles such as the...