Frankenstein's warning: the too-familiar hubris of today's technoscience

Can we imagine a scenario in which the different anxieties aroused by George Romero's horror film Night of the Living Dead and Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi dystopia 2001: A Space Odyssey merge? How might a monster that combined our fear of becoming something less than human with our fear of increasingly "intelligent" machines appear to us and what might it say? There is one work – of both horror and science fiction – that imagines such a monster. Published almost exactly 150 years before Romero and Kubrick released their movies, it is a book in which physical deformity and technological mutiny coalesce, creating a monster that is both a zombie and AI, or something in between the two. A gothic fiction, it is also described by some literary historians as the first science-fiction novel.