Crap from Facebook: May 10, 2020

There are other posts, more substantial, which I plan on making. However, it just so happens that I saw a Facebook post dealing with a subject that has been bugging me for a while now: the bizarre, cultish lionization of Mary Shelley's 1818 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. This has been a pet peeve of mine ever since I read the book in, um, 2008. There's a confederation of celebrities, literary critics, schoolteachers, and their followers, all hyping up this one book.

I read Frankenstein as one of the options in a "Novels" course at Green River Community College. The instructor was too fatigued to avoid subverting the usual hyperbolic accolades for what turned out to be a lousy read. The book just isn't good. It's the opposite. It's bad. It's poorly written. At one point in the class, we were going of Graham Greene's The Quiet American. And the instructor brought up the character of Helen, someone who doesn't actually appear in the novel, being mentioned only as the wife of the narrator. The only glimpses the reader gets of this character are in brief telegrams she sends to the narrator character. And my professor, pondering those telegrams, asked us which character was more developed and interesting: Helen in The Quiet American or Elizabeth in Frankenstein. At first, I thought he was messing with us! Elizabeth is the love of Victor Frankenstein's life and gets brought up repeatedly. She appears in his narrative and is involved in the plot. Helen isn't even a real character in The Quiet American. She exists only in brief correspondence with a main character, and that correspondence is only indirectly tied to the main focus of the story. It seemed like such an unfair comparison. And then, it caught up to me. My professor was asking this rhetorical question because he was disgusted with just how tedious Frankenstein had been for him to slog through. And in fact, although Elizabeth should have been an enormously important character, the reader got no real information about her. She has virtually no character traits other than "Victor Frankenstein loves her." And that's just one example. For all of its words, the actual story that Frankenstein presents is severely lacking in substance.

My issue isn't that one 19th century book turns out to be lackluster even though other people venerate it. That happens. My issue is that this mediocre book is frequently touted as the foundation of science fiction. As far as I know, this claim was first put forth by Isaac Asimov. And numerous famous people have followed suit. I could list some, but I don't feel like it right now and this has taken quite a tangent from the hilarious exchange I saw posted on Facebook. So, let's have it. I'll post the whole image, then comment on every post in the image, because apparently that's something I am choosing to subject myself to. Actually, I think it'll be fun...









Original post:

Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl.
There are only fake geek boys.
Science fiction was invented by a woman.

Science fiction wasn't invented by any one person. But for the sake of the argument, what if it were? What if that person had been Mary Shelley? Would it really then be fair to say that because Mary Shelley, a woman, invented science fiction, it follows that girls cannot be fake geeks, but boys can? Seems like an absurd leap leap to me. Is being a geek connected specifically to science fiction? Does having the same gender as the inventor of science fiction give you more geek cred than someone who isn't of that gender? Honestly, the assumption that Mary Shelley invented science fiction, while annoying to me because it happens to be an old pet peeve of mine, seems far less egregious than these other assumptions. I would think that even other members of the cult of Mary Shelley (not a real thing, as far as I know) would be critical of these statements.

First response:

[An image, the relevance of which to the context here escapes me. But it seems to have been ignored by subsequent commenters, so whatever]

I don't know what that picture is supposed to mean here. It's of a woman drinking out of a water bottle with a straw. Seriously, I have no idea what was meant here. Let's move on.

Second response:

Specifically a  teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.

Is it too pedantic of me to point out that Frankenstein was published when Mary Shelley was 20? Oops, too late; I just did. Anyway, the notion that teenage geek boys have a particular proclivity for rejecting girls is surreal. The sort of thing that elicits a "What planet have you been living on?" reaction. Also, I'd been meaning to write a blog post about how people who haven't experienced violence and have no reference frame for what violence is like will pick some non-violent thing that they don't like and refer to it as "violence."

Third response:

Isaac Asimov.

That's right, commenter. Isaac Asimov is the person who seems to have convinced most of the world that Mary Shelley invented science fiction. Well done. I'm not hating on Asimov, by the way. He's possibly my favorite author of all time. But he did make some mistakes. And pushing this Mary-Shelley-invented-science-fiction narrative was one of them.

Fourth response:

yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point

In case it isn't clear from the grammar, this "you kinda get my point" person isn't the same person as the original poster. In fact, judging by the handles used here, all of these comments are by different people. No one bothers to post twice in the thread. Anyway, Mary Shelley did write Frankenstein in 1818. Without bothering to look up publication dates, I don't think it was until some time in the 1960's that Isaac Asimov started espousing the narrative that Frankenstein marked the foundation of science fiction.

Fifth response:

If you want to push it even further Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673) wrote The Blazing World in 1666, about a young woman who discovers a Utopian world that can only be accessed via the North Pole – oft credited as one of the first scifi novels

Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms) was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai's the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide "Isaac Asimov" reblogs and stick it

even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could even have cited Poe or Jonathan Swift as a case but Asimov?

PbbBFFTTBBBTBTTBBTBTTT so desperate to discredit the idea of Mary Shelley as the mother of modern science fiction that you didn't even do a frickin google search For Shame

I wasn't going to let this silly image draw a "Crap from Facebook" blog entry out of me, but then I got such a kick out of how this person with a two-word post managed to get such a passionate and wrong-headed response that I couldn't pass it up. I especially like how this commenter started off trying to push the foundation of science fiction back a couple of centuries before Frankenstein and then, after having typed that, became incensed at someone else being "desperate to discredit" Mary Shelley as the mother of modern science fiction.

Anyway, since I might need to spell it out, science fiction didn't really start until well after Frankenstein. Trying to tie the genre to Renaissance-era fantastical works about talking animals and stuff would only strip the label of all meaning. It's painting literary categories with too broad a brush. I would strongly argue against Jules Verne's works being categorized as early science fiction. Oh, Verne and Shelley and those others wrote works that were precursors to science fiction. Sure. But it'd be disingenuous to say that Descartes invented calculus or that atomic theory was founded by Democritus. Well, it's the same here. I don't think that it's helpful to cite a single individual as the inventor of science fiction. The genre emerged over time. There isn't a unique point at which stories switched from being "proto-science fiction" or whatever to being just "science fiction." But even if the shift wasn't discrete, it also isn't right to portray it as taking centuries, either. It happened at some point around the time of Hugo Gernsback. Give or take. I think it would be reasonable to argue that science fiction predated the works of Gernsback and that he merely influenced a genre that was already solidified. But 1818? That's almost certainly at least 90 years too early.

Sixth response:

And if you want to go back even further, the first named, identified author in history was Enheduanna of Akkad, a Sumerian high priestess.

This bizarre oneupsmanship Battle of the Sexes thing is amusing, but utimately rather puzzling. Enheduanna, although historically important, certainly wasn't the first person to write something. But what if she was? Or better yet, what if we knew, for a certainty, that writing was first invented by woman? What then? Oh, I'm not saying that it isn't interesting. But what does it have to do with Mary Shelley?

Seventh response:

Kinda funny, considering this Isaac Asimov quote on the subject:

Mary Shelley was the first to make use of a new finding of science which she advanced further to a logical extreme, and it is that which makes Frankenstein the first true science fiction story.

Hey look, someone dug up the quote that Commenter #3 was referring to. Good job? Anyway, I don't know for sure if this was the first instance of Asimov publicly making this sort of claim about Shelley, nor if he was the first person to do so. But he did make similar statements at times ranging from the 1960's to 1980's (apologies if his first published statements on Mary Shelley weren't actually in the 1960's but I just can't be bothered to dig into this for a silly blog post and I'm going by my own hazy recollection), and this seems to have been what kicked off a fad of other famous people making similar statements.

Anyway, Asimov was wrong there. And I don't mean "I disagree with him." I mean that he made an erroneous conflation of Mary Shelley's original text with popular culture portrayals/commentary, and that his claim about what she did in Frankenstein (as seen in the quote) is factually incorrect. Somewhere, probably in Gold, have a similar quote by Asimov with more context (it's probably that exact quote). I can expound on what I mean here and demonstrate that Asimov was mistaken, if anyone is really interested in that. No one will challenge me on this because no on reads my blog, so thankfully I'm off the hook.

And again, I'm really liking how the two-word comment kept getting longer rebuttals until someone finally accidentally gave the context to turn it into a more elaborate, finished statement. No, Isaac Asimov didn't invent science fiction. But Isaac Asimov did invent the idea that Mary Shelley invented science fiction. Or if he wasn't the first person to say it, he was almost certainly the person who popularized it enough for you to have come across it. Also, it's wrong. So there's that.

Eighth response:

 Even Isaac Asimov ain't having none of your shit, not even posthumously.

Let me know when you're all done fist-bumping. Done? Good. Now for the serious part. I don't mean the part I care about. For some reason, that other crap was the part I cared about. It's why I wrote all this. I guess it's an obsession for me. Sorry. But we're done now. Moving on to what really should matter...

If you're chagrined about girls being mischaracterized as "fake geeks" it isn't going to help to mischaracterize boys as "fake geeks." Deep down, you know this. But you went and did it anyway. It's a bad approach. Some would caution you that it's a bad approach because you're getting into a fight that no one wins. They're trying to win you over the nice way. But I'm willing to be blunt. I'll be honest with you. And the truth is: you're getting into a fight that you won't win. This isn't "Mutually Assured Destruction." This isn't "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." I'm not warning you that your attitude is destructive because it will only escalate conflict and cause harm all the way around. I'm warning you that your attitude is destructive because when it comes back around to you, you'll lose. Someone will win. But it won't be you. The reason for you not to get into this fight in the first place isn't because we'll all suffer for it, but because you will lose. And once you do, if I've warned you, I might be able to feel a little bit better about myself, having seen just how badly it went for you.