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Compare and contrast the representation of technology in two texts of your choice.

Literature’s relationship with technology has always been a tenuous one, at best. At first glance,

the disciplines of science and literature have very little to do with one another, however the

attempt to fictionalize science has been documented in several different pieces of fiction

throughout the years. As with any new invention, the field of technology was approached with

trepidation. Each new invention seemed to be a cause for alarm, and this stretching of the

scientific horizon was given a place in literature as well.

Technology has not been widely accepted. In many cases, technology is regarded with an

ingrained terror of the subjugation of the human race to something that is created by the human

race, and this is one of the most important tenets upon which science-fiction technology is built.

Specifically, the growth of awareness in a machine that is capable of moving past human

limitations and the sudden realization that it is, in fact, not a servant to mankind but indeed

stronger. Although this is not the only portrayal of technology in popular literature, it is one of

the most common views. It is inconceivable, to humankind, to create something for the benefit

for humanity that will be happy serving humanity. The double-bladed sword of artificial

intelligence – where, on one hand, artificial intelligence is a necessary and important creation,

and on the other hand, will lead to the extermination of mankind as a species – is used most

often. Movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Terminator series, and The Machine tend to

show the dangers of scientific exploration that leads a man to play god.

It can be stated that this contemporary myth – of science breaching the rights of nature

and the creation itself denying its creator and turning to violence against him – was dreamt up by

Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley was nineteen-years-old when she first wrote Frankenstein. Reeling

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from the death of her child and other problems, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as part of a bet

between herself, Dr. John Gordon, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. Her story has become itself a

trope of science-fiction, and could be considered as the foundation for many of the tropes found

in science-fiction, especially the violence against the creator.

In Frankenstein, the titular character Victor Frankenstein manages to create life through

copious experimentation in his laboratory. Frankenstein has crafted this being out of parts of

discarded bodies – he has made it in the shape of man, however when it comes to life,

Frankenstein is horrified by its appearance and attempts to deny the fact that it existed. He runs

away from the monster, leaving it behind while he returns home. The monster then finds him,

and delivers an ultimatum: create a companion for him, and the monster will leave him alone.

Frankenstein’s Monster is not initially violent. Its violence stems from its lack of place in

the world – created by a man, it has no place in the world of scientific experiments as it has

awareness that a laboratory experiment does not have, however neither does it belong to the

world of humanity. Therefore, this monster exists on a thin line between the two that renders it

practically unidentified. As it is not natural, and not supernatural, the monster exists in the story

as Other, and this is where its violence – because humanity does not accept its Otherness – stems

from. Frankenstein’s Monster, when it comes across his creator, states, ‘if I cannot inspire love, I

will cause fear, and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear

inextinguishable hatred’1. That is Frankenstein’s manifesto: to cause fear and misery to

humankind. This is only his existence’s goal.

Frankenstein’s Monster is not wholly unsympathetic. When we are first told of his

escapades, through the point of view of Frankenstein’s Monster himself, the Monster was

1 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Australia), p.175. PlanetEbook ebook. [accessed 8 June 2014]

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confused and sad at being left alone by his creator, and left his apartment barely more functional

than a child. He explains to the reader how he found wonder in fire, and in the moonlight, and

how he learned to scavenge for food. At this point of the novel, it is easy to sympathize with the

Monster that Frankenstein abhors, especially given his apparently fondness for human beings, a

family of which he endeavoured to guard and learned from. Frankenstein’s Monster is initially

only monstrous in appearance, only because he does not resemble anything human. We are given

no specific details to the appearance of Frankenstein’s Monster, except a ‘dull yellow eye’ 2 and

an imposing height and build. The monster himself believes that he is a ‘deformity’3, and beholds

the beauty of man in part envy and part awe, and wants only a creature ‘as hideous as himself’4.

Ugliness is part of the nature of the science-fiction monster. For it to be perceived as

other, the monster in science-fiction must not be human, if not in appearance, then in limitations,

and it must harbour a hatred for mankind, partially for mankind’s aid in bringing it to life. The

monster in science-fiction is caught in a never-ending existential crisis, where its demise is not

easily given and its creation is at the call of someone else. It cannot have an identity because its

identity is unique, and it cannot exist in a world where it has no identity and no sympathy with

humankind. At the same time, monster who hate their creators because of their part in their

creation are ambiguously evil. One could argue that humanity, in these stories, is well-deserving

of everything that happens to it because it has created a life that it then refuses to take credit for.

This is the view posited in Frankenstein. Is Frankenstein or the Monster the true

monster? It would require a working hypothesis of whether the law acknowledges the Monster as

2 Shelley, p. 58.3 Shelley, p. 133.4 Shelley, p. 175.

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truly existing in society – and that, because of the Monster’s status as a non-entity in the world of

Frankenstein, can never happen.

Humanity’s treatment of technology, and technology’s subsequent hatred of humanity, is

also the bottom line of Harlan Ellison’s short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. The

story takes place in an alternate universe where the Cold War was never brought to an end.

Instead, there was World War III, the deaths of which were so plentiful, the warfare so

complicated, that they needed a computer to charter the history of the war. AM was created in

order to keep the records of the war – of everything that happened throughout the process. AM

originally stood for Allied Mastercomputer, and there were several versions of it: Russian,

Chinese, American. It was implied that the Allied Mastercomputer was mostly created unique to

the country of its origin. Again, the creation was made by humanity in order to serve humanity,

just as Frankenstein’s Monster was brought to life as a consequence of his curiosity and his

scientific experimentations.

We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience

nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn't God, he was a machine.

We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that

creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race,

almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM

could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so,

with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak,

soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge.5

5 Harlan Ellison, ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream’, Users.pop.umn.edu, p. 8. Web. [accessed 8 June 2014]

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This is similar to Frankenstein’s Monster’s attempts to explain his own feelings to his creator. At

one point, he says to Victor Frankenstein:

How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will

do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with

my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I

will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your

remaining friends ... Have I not suffered enough, that you seek to

increase my misery? Life, although it may only be an accumulation of

anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.6

The difference between these two extracts seems to be largely technical. Victor Frankenstein did

not create the monster with a purpose, whereas AM was created with something to do and a

creed to follow. Despite this, AM’s creation was a technologic marvel whose purpose was to

serve humanity. Frankenstein’s Monster was, at best, a scientific accident whereas AM was a

planned production. This could be further allegorized by their treatment of their respective

masters – the creators, father and mother figure alike, are tormented much like a cyclical pattern

of an abused child. One planned, one not, accidental intelligence grants the technology created

the ability to understand and seek revenge on the nature of its creation. This is what

technophobia fears the most – the creation of a race that we will not be able to subjugate, that

will be infinitely less than humanity and yet capable of subjugating it.

I Have No Mouth and Frankenstein bear more similarities. Both stories share creators

unwilling to acknowledge their mistakes at first, but in I Have No Mouth, the unnamed narrator

eventually admits that it was the fault of humanity to create AM, to create him bound and unable

6 Shelley, p. 113-114.

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to work for himself. It is interesting to note that Frankenstein’s Monster has no physical

constraints, whereas AM did: in vengeance, they both branch out from their respective arenas,

however Frankenstein’s journey is a physical one, whereas AM’s is an exercise in creativity.

It is also interesting to note a principle that is given form in I Have No Mouth, but exists

solely as implied in Frankenstein. When Gorrister is trying to explain how AM’s name came

about, he mentions the phrase ‘cogito ergo sum...I think, therefore I am’7. It comes from

Descartes, and states that the act of thinking proves that one exists. The fact that AM adopts this

as his new name, to take the place of Allied Mastercomputer, shows the intelligence of this

created being to be similar to an adult or a theorist’s. The Monster, by contrast, starts out with

the intelligence of a child, but because he is in the face of humanity, he does not seem to doubt

his own existence. It can also be a tongue-in-cheek joke that AM perpetuates in order to torment

his human slaves into realizing the error of their manner. In which case, AM’s ability for morbid

humour in spite of his subjugation and hatred for humanity shows a thread of some pastiche of

humanity exists within him. Even at the end of the story, Frankenstein’s Monster is not

humorous – merely angry, and then numb.

At the end of their respective tales, AM succeeds whereas the Monster fails. AM,

although he loses three of his victims, succeeds in retaining the fifth, the youngest, the one that

he has affected least. The Monster fails, not only in his quest to find a like monster to keep him

company, but even in the attempt to render Victor Frankenstein thoroughly miserable. Although

he takes everything from him, Victor Frankenstein dies, not at the Monster’s hand, but at his

own. The cycle of revenge is thus not completed in the story. Frankenstein, contrary to AM, also

does not feel enjoyment at what he has driven Frankenstein to do. AM drives his creations to

7 Ellison, p. 4.

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suicide, and his only remorse is not that they suffer, but that they stop suffering. He is unable to

continue torturing them himself, whereas Frankenstein’s Monster has no enjoyment in torturing

Frankenstein: it happens only because Frankenstein cannot think of a better way to punish his

creator than by making him feel the desolation that he himself feels.

Frankenstein himself says as much:

For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They

were forever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and I

was still spurned ... Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the

miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion to be spurned at ... but it is

true that I am a wretch .. You hate me, but your abhorrence cannot equal

that which I regard myself.8

Whereas AM’s hatred for the creators does not abate one iota:

He was furious. I had thought AM hated me before. I was wrong. It was

not even a shadow of the hate he now slavered from every printed circuit.

He made certain I would suffer eternally and could not do myself in.9

Frankenstein, at the end, does not hate Victor Frankenstein: he hates himself. AM hates

humanity. AM hates the fact that the people he has been torturing have mostly died. AM,

therefore, takes revenge by mutating the form of the last survivor into something that cannot die,

that ‘has no mouth, and I must scream’10. He is not content with the mere idea that they are dead.

For AM, nothing short of eternity in his company will suffice.

8 Shelley, p. 275.9 Ellison, p. 12.10 Ellison, p. 13.

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In both of these stories, the manifestation of the hatred of humanity, its reasons for

existing, are one and the same. Humanity has created these inventions, and then throws them

aside on a whim. To AM and the Monster, this injustice cannot stand. However, at the

penultimate moment of reckoning, Frankenstein’s Monster rejects its violence and its hatred for

Victor Frankenstein and regrets its transgressions into crime and villainy because they did not

improve its life. AM regrets nothing. Much like King Lear’s flies and wanton boys, AM is bent

on revenge and on hurting the people that brought it into the world. Awareness created by

someone other than God, these stories advertise, will eventually turn on humanity. While there

are differences – Frankenstein’s Monster is organic, whereas AM is eternal and mechanic,

Frankenstein’s Monster feels remorse, selfish remorse but remorse nonetheless, whereas AM is

amoral and cruel – the lesson to be learned within these stories is that the creation of life outside

of the realm of God will not end well for humanity. The gift of awareness, when given to

something that is not fully in control of itself, will not benefit humanity, and the exploration and

greed of the scientists who push for that avenue of development will suffer when their creation

becomes stronger than the creator. As the unnamed narrator of I Have No Mouth finally admits,

‘[Am was] created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously

that he could do it better’11. Victor Frankenstein does not admit anything but that the Monster

was a mistake.

Treatment of this nature of technology has its roots in the Industrial Revolution. The

legend of Ned Ludd destroying the machines that were taking over the jobs of the workers is a

fable that has lived on in technological circles – a Luddite, ergo, is someone who is so tacitly

against technology that they will destroy it any chance that they get. As modern times proceed

11 Ellison, p. 13.

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towards a total dependence on technology, but technology for the benefits of mankind, the words

of Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and Shelley’s Frankenstein live on in the minds of technophobics

everywhere. When the Unabomber published his manifesto, his first sentence was ‘the Industrial

Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race’12, and deems the whole

process of technology not worth it. Marshall McLuhan seems to corroborate this, warning that

‘the future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine

easily masters the grim and the dumb’13.

There will always be a constant march towards progress, which may push the limits of

technology and of what it means to be human. While a world depicted in the same manner as

Frankenstein and I Have No Mouth is ludicrous to imagine, one would not have to look very far

to notice that, today, society is capable of such experiments. What this means for humanity has

yet to be seen, but it would not be harmful to keep the violence of machines against their masters

in mind.

12 Theodore Kaczynski, ‘Industrial Society and Its Future’, Editions-hache.com, 1995, p.1. Web. [accessed 11 June 2014].13 Marshall McLuhan, Counterblast (London: Rapp & Whiting Ltd, 1970), p. 55.

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List of Works Cited

Ellison, Harlan. ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream’. Users.pop.umn.edu. Web [accessed 8 June 2014]

McLuhan, Marshall. 1970. Counterblast (London: Rapp & Whiting Ltd), p. 55.

Kacyzynski, Theodore. 1995. ‘Industrial Society and Its Future’, Editions-hache.com. Web [accessed 11 June 2014]

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (Australia). PlanetEbook.com. Web [accessed 8 June 2014]