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    Frankissstein: A Novel
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    Frankissstein: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Frankissstein: A Novel
    Ebook295 pages4 hours

    Frankissstein: A Novel

    By Jeanette Winterson

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    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.

    Editor's Note

    Explorative sexbots…

    Fall head over heels for a science fiction love story that dares to reimagine Frankenstein. Written by one of today’s most explorative authors, this bold, funny tale follows the adventures of characters like a sexbot entrepreneur, a transgender doctor, and even Mary Shelley herself. It’ll have you rethinking what really makes a monster.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGrove Press
    Release dateOct 1, 2019
    ISBN9780802129505
    Unavailable
    Frankissstein: A Novel
    Author

    Jeanette Winterson

    Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester in 1959. She read English at Oxford University before writing her first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, which was published in 1985.

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    Reviews for Frankissstein

    4/5

    174 ratings14 reviews

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    • 4/5
      What a strange and interesting remix on Frankenstein. Jeannette Winterson has spent her career questioning ideas of sex, gender, and identity and she does so now through the frame of Mary Shelley's classic, Frankenstein. We follow Shelley as she dreams up Frankenstein and we move to a speculative period where a trans doctor named Ry falls in love with Victor Stein, and we also meet Victor Frankenstein as a character in Shelley's story. It's a weird book, but it (mostly) works. It has certainly made me wish to revisit the original tale.
    • 3/5
      There are two dominant story lines in this book. The first one was magical, full of mood and atmosphere and written in velvety prose. The second one was something quite different. I much preferred the first over the second although I'm sure there will be those that feel the opposite. The book has merit, that's for sure, but I feel it was written to make a statement as opposed to making art. Nothing wrong with that but I wanted the art. If the whole book was like the first story line it would have been a 5 star book for me.
    • 4/5
      I remember this feeling of being stunned after reading "The Handmaid's Tale". Once again, as a reader who has been presented with what feels like an all too possible vision of the future, I must shift my thinking. What role will Artificial Intelligence play? Will human bodies be replaced with bot parts and an "uploaded" version of a human mind? What role will the gender and ego creators play in the outcome? Winterson, in her ever so creative writing and thinking, tells parallel stories of Frankenstein and the contemporary Victor. Too fantastical? That is for the reader and the future to judge.
    • 2/5
      A book bubbling over in ideas, until all the water boils away and we're just left with a giant mess on the stovetop. At least it smelled good for a while . . .I really need to stop reading books that forego quotation marks. It is a very big red flag.
    • 4/5
      My heart sank a bit when I read the first few pages of this: the story of the Byron/Shelley party on Lake Geneva and the writing of Frankenstein has featured in so many historical novels, films, TV documentaries, etc., that there surely can't be anything new to say about it, can there...? Fortunately, Winterson soon switches to her parallel, present-day story, in which different incarnations of the same characters confront, two hundred years on, updated versions of the same philosophical problems of death, revival, artificial life, body vs. consciousness, and so on, in a world of sexbots, cryonics and AI. And the damp and drizzly shores of Lac Léman become the damp and drizzly banks of the Irwell. Very entertaining, with some good jokes, some nicely mind-bending philosophical acrobatics, some telling social critique, and plenty of sharp dialogue, just as you would expect. But maybe just a bit too much historical box-ticking.
    • 5/5
      It's difficult to write a "review" that does this novel justice. Shifting back and forth in time, between the voice of Mary Shelley and that of Ry, our modern-day transgender hero who escorts us through his love affair with Victor, a scientist set on extending human life indefinitely, it explores themes of existentialism, artificial intelligence, identity, and the filmy cloth separating reality from fantasy, possibility from outrageousness.... Ultimately, it challenges all we know about what is, and what might be. It reconsiders Shelley's horror story and notes how close we are to that incomprehensible possibility. Humorous and mind-bending, it's a worthy Booker nominee for 2019. I loved it.
    • 3/5
      The strengths of this novel are its musings about the mind-body duality. Multiple fascinating questions are introduced with two plot lines: Mary Shelly's decision to write Frankenstein, and a futuristic tale about robots and trans persons. Despite her use of similar names for her characters in both plots, Winterson fails to meld the two into one coherent story. Instead, one is left with the impression that the stories might have worked better as two separate novellas rather than as alternating chapters in one work. Some of the characters are nuanced and leap off the page, especially Mary Shelly and Dr. Shelly. But most are a little too sketchy to work well. Victor Frankenstein is particularly problematic. Winterson tries to bring this fictional character to life in both stories with mixed results. He seems to just come and go with little development of backstory or fate.Read this novel for the philosophy, not the story.
    • 5/5
      “Night has come with her starry sky. Sleep and the silent hours of dreams. The others dream and sleep.The house itself breathes in and out like a phantom. I lie awake with the stars as my cold companions. I think of my monster, lying thus, outside and alone.”“We destroy out of hatred. We destroy out of love.”“How strange is life; this span that is our daily reality, yet daily countermanded by the stories we tell.”In modern day Britain, a young transgender doctor, named Ry, meets and falls in love with Victor Stein, a famous professor, as they attend an AI expo. The narrative then shifts to the maker of advanced sex dolls and then explores the mysterious process called cryogenics. The reader then, is propelled back to1816, where a young woman, named Mary Shelley, is creating her horror classic, Frankenstein, in the company of her poet husband, with Lord Byron, in attendance. How these threads are seamlessly woven together, is the magic behind this smart and inventive novel. I have only read Winterson's wonderful memoir, but her latest, reminded me, that I need to go back and read more of her fiction. This is terrific stuff!
    • 5/5
      I never leave reviews and I read a lot. This is an excellent book. On so many levels. It touches on sexuality without a lot of boring scenes. It questions religion and philosophy in a positive way. It offers historical information about the poets and writers and social structures of the 1800’s. I am a 68 year old retired teacher and I think many people, young and old should read this book.
    • 5/5
      A young transgender doctor, Ry Shelly, is in the middle of the debate of artificial intelligence. What is possible, what is desirable? What makes a human being a human being and could bots be the better versions of us? AI will surely solve a lot of problems, but won’t it create new ones at the same time? Ron Lord is one of the people who will invest in the new technology and hopes to make a lot of money with it; his aim is the creation of the next generation of sex dolls which fulfil all wishes. At the same time, we travel back to the year 1816 when a young woman turned the idea of creating a human being into a highly praised novel: Frankenstein.With “The Gap of Time”, Jeanette Winterson already showed for me that she is a highly gifted author who can use an old plot and turn it into something completely new that is not only highly entertaining but also beautifully and intelligently written at the same time. In her latest novel, she turns to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein and takes the idea if man as the creator of human being on a higher and contemporary level.I love the idea of taking and old plot and transferring it to our time, the Hogarth Shakespeare series has clearly proven that this can be something really worth undertaking. The novel skilfully woves the time of Mary Shelly’s stay at Lake Geneva, when she wrote her story of the famous monster, and Ry Shelley’s journey through the world of AI. At times, the dialogues are simply hilarious – I especially liked the one about the sex dolls – at others, the is a serious and in-depth discussion about the chances but also the ethics of AI. And she also raises the big questions of life and death and what comes after the later.I read an electronic version of the book and marked so many sentences that I now have a large list of quotes that I would eagerly share but that goes far beyond a review. Apart from the wonderful language, there are so many allusions and cross-references that it is a great joy to decipher the novel, beginning with the names of the characters and ending at films such as Blade Runner and the Greek mythology. All in all, a brilliant piece of work that surely is among the more demanding novels and therefore, again, underlines Jeanette Winterson’s place among the highest ranked contemporary authors.
    • 5/5
      Frankisssteinby Jeannette Wintersondue 10-1-2019Grove Press5.0 / 5.0#netgalley #FrankisssteinRemarkable and absorbing, this is a intellectual and philosophical novel and one of the best, and most relevant I've read in s long time.Transgendered Dr. Ry Shelley, living in Britain, falls in love with Victor Stein, a professor of Artificial Intelligence. It made me stop, think and consider so many times about so many things. What is it that makes us human?Are our assigned bodies and gender what make us human or is what we do, think and feel , that seperate us from Artificial Intelligence, or just from each other?Is it our desire for more pleasure that drives, are we all just robots programmed by our ownselves?Beautifully written, we can see the criticisms and beliefs Mary Shelley encountered while writing this in 1816. It reflects the same beliefs and criticisms we are still encountering today.Ron Lord and his SexxBots and XXBots were one of the best parts, with its Teledildonics, the intelligent vibrator. There is much wit, humor and whimsy in this amazing novel of gender, gender equality and humanity. We are, indeed, much more than the sum of our parts. Thanks to netgalley for this e-book ARC for review.
    • 2/5
      It's my own fault, I should have known better than to try a Booker Prize novel; nothing good ever comes of that recommendation. I'm sure Jeanette Winterson's story is super clever and ticks a lot of populist boxes, but I just prefer characterisation over concepts. The only part I enjoyed was the opening quote taken from 'Take It Easy' by The Eagles.Half of the narrative belongs to Mary Shelley, penning Frankenstein in competition with her husband and Lord Byron while travelling through Geneva. I didn't mind reading about her, although I think those chapters were only there to remind the reader about the original novel (which I have read, but years ago). Then we get the 'modern' narrative, told in overblown dialogue - 'Love's not ones and zeros, I said. Oh, but it is, said Victor. We are one. The world is naught/nought. I am alone. You are nothing. One love. An infinity of zeros.' - from the perspective of (Ma)Ry Shelley, a trans doctor, who is helping a professor, Vic Stein, achieve his mad scientist goal of transhumanism. Do you see why I would have given up, if the typeface wasn't so large and the chapters so short? I'm interested in artificial intelligence, without coming close to understanding the science, but can't stand the egotistical desire for eternal life, which is essentially what uploading your consciousness to a hard drive is about. And that's all Vic Stein bangs on about. (While Ry reminds the reader that 'they' are trans, every other line, usually just before shagging the professor.) Add to that the 'humour' of Ron Lord the sexbot maker and Claire the American evangelist, I was glad to get it over with!
    • 4/5
      Superb interfacing of storylines - Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” with today’s ideas on consciousness, who are we as humans, can the mind be uploaded into a computer.

      Interspersed with written gems “I was never bored except in the company of others,” Mary says.

      A fantastic read that will keep me contemplating for quite some time.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Finished Frankisstein - I really liked this one. Will come back and add a review.I thought this was such a clever book, I never quite knew what to expect with her playing with modern AI plans, Mary Shelley's story and ideas of what it means to be human. What would happen if everyone never died? How are the ideas of Shelley and the fears of Frankenstein's monster linked to our worries today? I can't say I am knowledgeable about AI, but I loved the way she brought together Turing's Manchester with high tech advances in the US. Maybe some of the advances she mentions are not here yet, but how far off?We are lucky, even the worst of us, because daylight comes.

      1 person found this helpful