Jun 29, 2026
How a teenage girl's waking dream birthed what is (probably)
the first science fiction novel – and in the process gave the world
its most enduring image of technology gone wrong.
This time we're coming for the myth, the curse, the cliche
that is Frankenstein. John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach climb up the
tower, point the lightning conductor to the heart of the storm, and
attach electrical cables to the neck-bolts of that fearful thing on
the slab. Yes, it may be 200-years old but ... it's alive!
They walk through the original 1818 plot — stranger and
bleaker than the films — weigh the long-running argument over
whether it really counts as science fiction, and trace the
monster's afterlife from the 1910 Edison short and James Whale's
1931 classic to Boris Karloff, Mel Brooks, Eddie Van Halen's
"Frankenstrat", Guillermo del Toro ... and beyond.
In this episode:
- What really happened at the Villa Diodati in 1816?
- The radical parents and a childhood shadowed by death that made Mary Shelley
- Born in the age of revolutions: Enlightenment values battles alchemy and the occult
- How two Brits, James Whale and Boris Karloff, created a look for the creature in their famous 1931 film that resonated through a thousand sequels, rip-offs and pisstakes
- Did Mary Shelley predict the death of God?
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Music by Nick Dwyer recording as Flintet. The Tech Imaginarium
is a Learning Hack podcast, produced and hosted by John Helmer and
written by John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach.