Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

But there is beauty in the way Winterson ties those concepts to notions of gender and identity and emotional intelligence.

Others, like artificially intelligent sexbots, have been explored everywhere from Her to Lars and the Real Girl. Some of the ideas-if AI learns from us, it could end up as sexist as society itself-are ripped straight from the headlines. But, as with so much of Winterson's work, the most brilliant parts are in the connective tissue, the joints between themes and characters. To avoid giving away too much- Frankissstein is, at its heart, a good read, and one best enjoyed cold-I'll refrain from dissecting the plot further. They're all very nice to me at the coffee machine and I'm pretty sure none of them would use the phrase 'trans is hot right now.')įrankissstein by Jeanette Winterson | Buy on Amazon Courtesy of Grove Atlantic (I feel the need, here, to defend my Condé Nast floormates. Ron is the maker of said sexbots (and probably the avatar of Byron) and Polidori is Polly D, an ambitious writer for Vanity Fair with some questionable journalistic practices. (Ry's deadname is Mary-creative, no?) Their Claire is also named Claire (you get the point), but she's now an Evangelical Christian slowly coming around to the idea that building AIs and sexbots isn't somehow playing God. Stein's occasional muse is Ry Shelley, a transgender transhumanist who also serves as the voice of reason. 'Jack' Good, the British mathematician who worked with Alan Turing at Bletchley Park. In Winterson's world, the spirit of reanimation Shelley infused into her novel after losing a child gets reimagined in the person of Victor Stein (creative, no?), a 21st-century TED talker on the subject of artificial intelligence who is obsessed with re-creating the brain of I. (If that Shelley story sounds familiar, it might be because it was the topic of a recent Manual Cinema production.) It straddles both worlds, and a few in between, and in so doing illustrates how human ideas of existence, identity, and emotional intelligence have changed radically-and not at all. Written as a fictionalized twist on Mary Shelley's classic Frankenstein, her latest novel time-jumps from the early 1800s-when Shelley was writing her book on a trip with her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as the poet Lord Byron, physician John William Polidori, and Mary's stepsister, Claire-to a near-future where artificial intelligence and sexbots threaten to make Frankenstein's vision of invented life almost real. Nowhere is Winterson's temporal fluidity more evident than in Frankissstein.

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson