Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein: A Love Story (Grove, Oct. 1) is an intricate nervous system of a novel. The afterlife of an author’s fictional character is compared to the imminent domination of humans by artificial intelligence. The bodies of complexly gendered human beings are pitted against the bodies of glaringly gendered sex robots, whose protuberances and indentations herald a horrifying future of nondiversity. In Switzerland in 1816, 18-year-old Mary Shelley is writing Frankenstein on a dare. In the near future, a trans doctor named Ry Shelley falls in love with a mysterious scientist of AI, Victor Stein. Mary writes and loves alongside Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, whose Romantic version of sexual freedom fails to liberate women. Ry and Victor’s love tries to rise above convention but can’t shake the fiction of gender, either literary or robotic. 

Across a narrative arc that electrifies the brain while charging ahead with the energy of a thriller, Winterson ties together the origin stories of feminism, fiction, and science and opens up the question of their future. Whither our creativity? Our freedom? Whither our very bodies? Ultimately Winterson reminds us that our creations, be they stories or robots, have their own capacity for artifice, their own intelligence, their own immortal power. They may well choose our ending for us.  

“I read Frankenstein when I was 21 and frightened myself to death,” Winterson says. “But lately I’ve been obsessed with the wacky world of AI and robotics. Then I reread Frankenstein, and everything came together.”

Ry is transgender—which for them means being both male and female—but their radical selfhood is threatened by the ever-present fembot. Meanwhile, Mary struggles to be an artist in a world that won’t allow women to speak. “I am a woman, and I feel rooted in the lives that we have and the truth of those lives,” says Winterson. “And I am terrified by the way things might go. You know, the future might not be female. A lot of guys really think fembots serve women right. Or they think ‘this is going to help guys. It’s going to help them socialize,’ and it’s rubbish. It is a way of writing women out.” 

Winterson has spent 23 books and counting writing women in. “I’m proud,” she says. “When I wrote Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in the early ’80s, there weren’t women’s voices talking about sexual identity. Since then, it’s been about just saying ‘I’m not going to be silenced.’ I remember reading Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and thinking, ‘This isn’t the angel in the house telling me to be safe. This is an avenging angel, telling me to risk it.’ I also wanted to be that kind of voice, making space and allowing the conversation to build and build.”

Now the chorus has swelled to include trans voices. Frankenstein has long been important to trans self-identification; in the early ’90s, trans scholar Susan Stryker shot down characterizations of the trans body as medically grotesque, reclaiming Frankenstein’s monster as beautiful. Winterson herself is more interested in the scientist than the monster and hopes her trans doctor and their immortal mad-scientist lover express the liberatory possibilities of artificial intelligence. “At the moment, we’re just obsessed with gendering our AI, male, female,” observes Winterson. “Which is really annoying. This should be a moment when we can say ‘If we’re sharing the planet with nonbiological self-created life-forms, why would we gender them?’ The growth of trans voices is happening right at this moment when we are going to have to share the planet with nonbiological life-forms. Between the two this could be a real fuck-the-binary moment. It could be.”

So is Winterson pro- or anti-AI? “We could be so free,” she muses, sounding sad, like her version of Mary Shelley, and also zealous, like her version of Victor Stein. “And that’s why I feel excited about this possible coming world. I mean, look—in the book it’s clear that the human dream is something that always turns into the human nightmare. We’re bad at making the good stay good. But we could try. Little kids right now—maybe they won’t need to define themselves in these worn-out ways. When the most exciting thing in their lives will be that they will be the generation that sees a new creation on this planet, made by us.”

Bethany Schneider is an associate professor of English at Bryn Mawr College.