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Summary
Summary
Since her astonishing debut at twenty-five with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit , Jeanette Winterson has achieved worldwide critical and commercial success as "one of the most daring and inventive writers of our time" ( Elle ). Her new novel, Frankissstein , is an audacious love story that weaves together disparate lives into an exploration of transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and queer love.
Lake Geneva, 1816. Nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley is inspired to write a story about a scientist who creates a new life-form. In Brexit Britain, a young transgender doctor called Ry is falling in love with Victor Stein, a celebrated professor leading the public debate around AI and carrying out some experiments of his own in a vast underground network of tunnels. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his mom again, is set to make his fortune launching a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere. Across the Atlantic, in Phoenix, Arizona, a cryogenics facility houses dozens of bodies of men and women who are medically and legally dead... but waiting to return to life.
What will happen when homo sapiens is no longer the smartest being on the planet? In fiercely intelligent prose, Jeanette Winterson shows us how much closer we are to that future than we realize. Funny and furious, bold and clear-sighted, Frankissstein is a love story about life itself.
Author Notes
Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959 and graduated from St. Catherine's College, Oxford.
Her book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, is a semi-autobiographical account of her life as a child preacher (she wrote and gave sermons by the time she was eight years old). The book was the winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction and was made into an award-winning TV movie. The Passion won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize for best writer under thirty-five, and Sexing the Cherry won the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Winterson (The Gap of Time) reimagines literary classic Frankenstein--both the story and the genesis of it--in her magnificent latest. The book shuttles back and forth between 1816, when a challenge leads Mary Shelley to write her indelible character and the monster he creates, and the present day, when a transgender man named Ry Shelley delves deeper into the burgeoning world and industry surrounding robotics and AI. A medical doctor, Ry supplies body parts to the professor Victor Stein, a brilliant if elusive man whose vision of the future is one in which human intelligence can transcend the limitations of needing a physical body. Victor's interest in Ry is multifold: there is what Ry can procure for him through hospitals, and there is attraction--both romantic and platonic interest in the physical manifestation of Ry's gender identity, which Victor calls "future-early" and Ry calls "doubleness." Winterson's recreation of the story of Mary Shelley's creative process and later life and work is splendid, but it's the modern analogue of the famous Lake Geneva party that is truly inspired. There is the hilariously crass sexbot entrepreneur Ron Lord, the evangelical capitalist Claire, and the nosy nuisance of Vanity Fair reporter Polly D, who's constantly convinced she's on to something. This vividly imagined and gorgeously constructed novel will have readers laughing out loud--and then pondering their personhood and mortality on the next page. Agent: Caroline Michel; Peters, Fraser & Dunlop. (Oct.)
Booklist Review
Winterson's agile imagination prompts her to bridge distant times and improvise on oft-told tales with impish and serious intent. In her eleventh novel, she keeps readers off-kilter in a complex, two-track homage to Mary Shelley and the ever-relevant questions raised by her masterpiece, Frankenstein. In gracefully brooding, rain-drenched scenes set along Lake Geneva two centuries ago, courageous radical Shelley ponders the implications of the unnerving story that has taken hold of her. In the present, a transgender doctor, Ry Shelley, gets caught up in hubristic schemes concocted by his celebrity professor lover, Victor Stein, who is secretly at work on a macabre union of body parts and AI, and a curiously innocent purveyor of ego-boosting sexbots. Ultimately, their adventures involve cryogenics, the singularity, and a vast underground Cold War laboratory. Winterson shimmers and sparks in this at once sensitive and caustic, philosophical and funny inquiry into the body-mind conundrum, what we consider monstrous and what we think makes us human, the rainbow spectrum of gender and sexuality, and how our technologically enhanced fears and desires might impact the planet's future.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2010 Booklist
Guardian Review
Her new novel reimagines Frankenstein for the AI era. The Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit author talks immortality, anger and why she's still an evangelist Researching Frankissstein , her 11th novel, led Jeanette Winterson down some unlikely digital paths. "I did worry about that. Watching guys have sex with bots," she announces cheerfully, attacking dessert in a smart London restaurant. Female sex dolls start at "around $2,000 for a really crap one", she says, and it was no surprise to learn that they are "entirely fantasy. They've got huge tits and small waists and long legs". A mother and daughter are celebrating a birthday with afternoon tea at the next table. "But of course what they haven't got, and never will have, is a clitoris. They don't have to worry about that!" The novel looks back 200 years to Mary Shelley and the industrial revolution and takes us into the present day revolution of artificial intelligence, sexbots and cryogenics. Declaring its literary genesis in neon pink on the cover, Frankissstein is subtitled "a love story", because all Winterson's novels are love stories. She is a romantic, with capitals and without: "Love comes in and out of fashion and I'm sticking to it," she says. "Because everything is relational, everything is about our interaction with something else." Here, that something else is the non-biological lifeforms of the future, coincidentally also the subject of Ian McEwan's new novel Machines Like Me , published just last month. But while McEwan chose alternative history, launching his prototype robot Adam into the 1980s, Winterson wanted to show "what is going on now and where that might lead". As she points out, "we are further down the line than a lot of people realise": success stories of pigs' brains being "revived" after death were in the news the day we met. ("Is Donald Trump getting his brain frozen?" one of the characters in Frankissstein asks. "The brain has to be fully functioning at clinical death," is the reply.) This robotic future, "could be lovely", she says, with characteristic mischievousness. "But it's not going to be, because we are human so we will fuck it up! A super intelligence - why would something smarter than us keep anything as vain, ugly, reckless, self-destructive and stupid as we are?" Winterson fizzes with her own Frankensteinian energy, her hair an electric halo from her constantly raking her hands through it. While she no longer rides her own motorbike (on the insistence of her wife, the writer and psychoanalyst Susie Orbach), she still travels across town by limo-bike. Celebrating her 60th birthday this year, the one-time enfant terrible from Accrington has been part of the literary establishment for more than 30 years. "People are still buying my books - that's a great thing." Today, she compares herself to a terrier: "I won't give up, I won't go away," but back in 2003 Ruth Rendell, who was "like a mother" to her, fondly dedicated her thriller The Rottweiler to her. Winterson's story is well known - she has told it twice herself, after all. If her 1985 debut Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit fictionalised growing up as the adopted daughter in a fervently Pentecostal household "in a way that got me through", her 2011 bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is her painful reckoning with this loveless childhood and subsequent breakdown in middle age. The memoir's title is taken from her adoptive mother's response to discovering the teenage Jeanette's sexuality: "She was a monster, but she was my monster," the author says of the embittered, evangelical Mrs Winterson, surely one of contemporary literature's wicked stepmothers. "There was too much from my past that needed dealing with," Winterson says now. "I don't know why it hadn't caught up with me, but it did." I was just facing this blank wall and I couldn't get past it. That utter sense of lostness and deep loneliness She is enjoying what she describes as a sort of second life, after her "spectacular failure" to kill herself, the shocking revelation of Why Be Happy?. The end of her relationship with the theatre director Deborah Warner, "precipitated the crash, but it wasn't her fault. It triggered all those earlier losses. But I lived on to have a relationship with Susie. I emerged into another life. I'm so glad that I did," she says. "I was just facing this blank wall and I couldn't get past it. That utter sense of lostness and deep loneliness. I love life and I knew that the way I was was not living." Despite its novelty, robotics allowed her to return to the thorny issues that have shaped her fiction since Oranges : religion and gender. "I suddenly thought, hold on, this is all coming together," she says, alluding to her fundamentalist upbringing. "Didn't we always say that the bodies will fall away, the spirit continues, there's an eternity out there? This is now what science is promising, that we will just upload the contents of our brains or extend ourselves by smart implant longevity genes? It's taken all this time for humankind: slowly progressing to this point, where we could become immortal, as we always wanted to be, and always thought we were." Today's silky-voiced cyber PAs and macho emergency announcements betray our compulsion to gender everything, and Frankissstein is most interested in how our relationships with these human-made creations will affect notions of gender. Winterson's fiction, full of androgynous, time-travelling characters, has always been gleefully fluid, forever flirting with "boundaries and desire": The Passion 's web-toed Villanelle (an inspiration for Killing Eve , she muses) in 1987; Written on the Body , "quite a provocative book in 1992", in which the narrator is known only by the pronoun "they" (the only one of her novels not adapted for audio, because of the challenge of a gender-neutral voice); or The Power Book , in 2000 one of the first novels to explore the protean possibilities of the internet. "Then it was all optimism, that you'd be able to be anything on the internet. But it was too early. There was this sort of bafflement around it." One of the narrators of Frankissstein is trans - Ry, short for Mary. "Transgender is interesting because gender is so annoying and so boring and has caused so much trouble," Winterson says. "I don't really think of myself as female or male, I just think of myself as me. I'm not even sure I see myself as human. I don't feel particularly human. My closest friends will say to you: 'Yeah, maybe, she's more like some sort of creature. Not an animal, but a creature thing.' I don't always get the human." But, as she says, she is "aware of the way the world perceives me"; and as an author, she feels "women aren't given the same leeway and indulgence. If you say I want to be a fantastic writer, I think I'm really good at this, I want to change the novel, and you are a boy, it's fine." I'm an evangelist, an enthusiast. I can see why I've annoyed people over the years. But that's who I am Winterson didn't just want to change the novel - she wanted to change the world: you can take the girl out of Accrington, but you can't take her out of the gospel tent. "There's no escape from that. You have to turn it to the good. I'm an evangelist, I'm an enthusiast," she declares. "I can see why I've really annoyed people over the years. But that's who I am, so I have to use it." And she has used it not just to hold her own corner - "There was so much misogyny, homophobia, anti-working-class stuff" - but so that writers such as Ali Smith and Sarah Waters emerging a decade later didn't face the same hostility. As she says, it's so different now and she helped make it different. "It's a privilege. Other women came before me and made things possible for me. Every time a new generation comes along," she says of young writers like Sally Rooney, "we open the space a bit more." In a sign of how far we have come, Oranges has gone on to become an English exam text and looks set to become a musical, with Beeban Kidron, who directed the 1990 TV series. "Lots of young kids have said: 'You have to do this.' So that makes me think that the book is still speaking to people," she says. "The great thing if you are British is that if you just keep on going and you don't go away, eventually people forget those things and they are just fond of you." She is as serious about her writing as ever. "Look, I don't write for people with short attention spans," she says with something of her old swagger. "There are tons of books for people who do have short attention spans and who don't want to read. They are just doing printed television." She may have mellowed (her only recent controversy was a 2014 Twitter outrage over a spot of bunny boiling: "The rabbit ate my parsley," she posted unapologetically), but she's still always "getting into scraps". On the way to our meeting she passed two women on a shopping spree on Bond Street "getting into a HUGE blue and white Rolls Royce with loads of bags". "Leydees!" she reproached them, in her best Lanky accent. "This is not a life!'" (Mrs Winterson would have been proud). I look at these kids and I feel a lot of compassion for them, because the world they've inherited is such a mess And she's still angry - "It's like the Incredible Hulk. You realise you are always angry." ("There are people who could never commit murder", she tells us in Why Be Happy ? "I am not one of those people.") But she feels it is "channelled into things that are now worthwhile". Frankissstein has spawned a collection of essays on AI, titled Jurassic Carpark - "because we are going to be shoved off to some reserve somewhere, some car park where we can drive our crappy polluting automobiles" - out later this year. Her early training preaching on street corners at 12 has paid off: "This is a good moment for me, because rightwing populists take a gospel tent approach and lots of liberals are rubbish at it. I'm happy to go into the tent and put it out the way I see it and not worry about what comes back," she says, laughing. "I'd go into politics, but I can't join the Labour party in the state it's in, can I?" Coming of age in the Thatcher years - "my generation has been profligate," she says, "we put the world on steroids" - she feels a responsibility to do everything possible now "to make amends". She has been teaching creative writing at Manchester University since 2012. "I look at these kids and I feel a lot of compassion, a lot of anxiety, because the world they've inherited from my generation is such a mess." She invites aspiring writers to come and work in a separate apartment in her house in the Cotswolds, just as Rendell gave her the space when she was starting out: "It is really for her, because of what she did for me." Winterson was always adamant that she didn't want children, she was too "driven" as a writer; and because of her own childhood, she "didn't want to be an adult who neglected her children. And I thought that was a real possibility." However, there was a period, once she was established, "when if I'd been with somebody at the time who said, 'Look I'd really like to do this,' I could have done", she says now. Although she and Orbach married in 2015, they don't live together - "Susie is a New York Jew, she needs to be in the buzz, in London" - whereas Winterson is "happiest and most aware of myself when I am on my own". She still has the raggedy Georgian apartment above the organic grocers she owns in Spitalfields, but now spends most of her time in a cottage in the countryside, with her two cats and a labrador for company, writing in a wooden studio in the garden, backing on to the woods. And she has no intention of stopping. "Never! I want to die working. It's not work, is it, when you love what you do?" But she is still "writing from the wound", as she describes it. "Wounds don't heal. They scar over, but they are always the place where you can be hurt. It's not the same as craziness or madness, it is knowing that you've got vulnerabilities," she explains. "You try and work with them. And I think that makes you more receptive to the world and what's going on." Whenever she feels a little gloomy, which isn't often these days, she reminds herself: "Well, you're not dead and you're not in Accrington".
Kirkus Review
An author known for her explorations of gender, desire, and imagination takes us to the past to look into the future.There is probably no novel written in English with a more well-known origin story than Frankenstein. The scene of that work's conceptionLake Geneva, 1816is where Winterson begins her reimagining of science fiction's ur-text. Mary Shelley herself is the narrator. Keenly observant, sensitive without being fragile, and utterly unashamed of her own sexuality, Winterson's (Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere, 2018, etc.) Shelley is a brilliant creation. The contemporary author, being well versed in the gothic tropes that her predecessor deployed, plays with doubles and doppelgngers throughout, and her second narrator, Ry Shelley, is an echo both of Mary Shelley and the monster who is the invention of Mary Shelley's invention. Ry, given the name Mary at birth, identifies as trans and works for a company devoted to cryogenicsto restoring the dead to life. It's in this capacity that he meets Victor Stein, the "high-functioning madman" who will become his lover. Victor is famous as an expert in artificial intelligence. But Ry discovers that Victor has othermessierpursuits as well. As is perhaps apt, this is a novel of many parts, so there are also interludes set in Bedlam, where Victor Frankenstein becomes an inmate and Mary Shelley is his visitor. There are special pleasures here for readers familiar with the science and philosophy of the early 19th century, such as when a 20th-century evangelical Christian goes undercover at the cryogenics lab to investigate where the soul goes when we die and whether or not it returns if the body is reanimated. But no specialist knowledge is needed to appreciate this inquisitive novel, because the questions Winterson is asking are questions that have always been with us. What is love? What is life? What am I, and what do I desire to be? Of course Winterson has no answers; what she offers instead is a passionate plea that we keep asking these questions as we refashion ourselves and our world.Beguiling, disturbing, and full of wonders. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In this bold and humorous narrative, award-winning author Winterson (The Gap of Time) connects the past and the present. In the past, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, considers her expatriate life with her husband, poet Percy Shelley; Lord Byron; and others, revealing the evolution of the story of this famous novel by a female writer amid the patriarchal constrictions of the early 1800s. The present narrative blasts off at a robotics conference with an emphasis on sexual gratification via robot. Here we meet the transgender Dr. Ry Shelly, supplier of severed limbs to Victor Stein, a scientist working to decode and store human consciousness. The depiction of Ry and Victor's sexual relationship explores elements of transgender life and ideas of transhumanism. As the book shifts in time, themes such as mechanical computers and cryogenic preservation are further developed. VERDICT As the subtitle declares, this is a love story, paralleling the relationship between Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley and that between Ry and Victor. The forthright description of nonbinary choice forms a replete example of embracing transgender experience, and both Victor Stein and Victor Frankenstein are finally shown to be illusory characters, adding spookiness. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 3/25/19.]--Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA
Excerpts
Excerpts
Naming is power, I say to Claire. It sure is. Adam's task in the Garden of Eden. Yes, indeed, to name everything after its kind. Sexbot . . . Pardon me, sir? Do you think Adam would have thought of that? Dog, cat, snake, figtree, sexbot? I am thankful he didn't have to, Dr Shelley. Yes, I am sure you are right. So tell me, Claire, why did they call this place Memphis? You mean back in 1819? When it was founded? As she speaks I see in my mind a young woman looking out of a sodden window across the lake. I say to Claire, Yes. 1819. Frankenstein was a year old. She frowns. I am not following you, sir. The novel Frankenstein - it was published in 1818. The guy with the bolt through his neck? More or less . . . I saw the TV show. It's why we are here today. (There was a look of confusion on Claire's face as I said this, so I explained.) I don't mean existentially Why We Are Here Today - I mean why the Tec-X-Po is here. In Memphis. It's the kind of thing organisers like; a tie-in between a city and an idea. Memphis and Frankenstein are both two hundred years old. Your point, Dr Shelley? Tech. AI. Artificial Intelligence. Frankenstein was a vision of how life might be created - the first non-human intelligence. Excerpted from Frankissstein: A Love Story by Jeanette Winterson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.