In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the word “invent” is used twice. The word, however, does not appear in the process or concept of Victor Frankenstein’s scientific creation, “the accomplishment of my toils” into which he infuses “a spark of being” (Frankenstein 1818 Text p.36). Shelley uses the word to describe two opposite poles of artistic creation. One is an art of literary creation represented by Henry Clerval’s tales. The other is an art of depriving life, whether by execution or by a slow torturing manner: Elizabeth Lavenza compares the execution of Justine Moritz with the punishments “the gloomiest tyrant has ever invented to satiate his utmost revenge” (vol.1. ch.7). 

Shelley’s Frankenstein is, unlike Clerval’s wonderful literary creation, a “hideous progeny” (“Introduction” to the 1831 text), in which she explores the art of tortures and death in medicine, science, and law. She delineates human sufferings experienced by all the main characters, including the nameless being created by Victor, who assembled parts from dead bodies of humans and animals. In doing so, she fails the characters whose intellectual or physical abilities make them more than or less than human. Her attempt in Frankenstein to seek what humanizes a being, whether it is a human being or not, has attracted and influenced numerous later artists and writers, producing many hideous offsprings all over the world.  

This paper considers Mary Shelley’s attempt to construct the human as inventing the human/e through literary imagination. It examines Frankenstein and two of its numerous sequels written beyond Europe in our century. The paper focuses on Banna Ren’s short fiction, “Three Laws of Frankenstein, or Usurpation of Corpses” (2015), in which the created being sets up the Zeroth Law of preservation of life, and Fujita Kazuhiro’s manga (a graphic novel), “Crescent Moon, Dance with the Monster” (2022-) in which Mary Shelley names the female monster. The paper hopes to show how those two Japanese works share important concerns with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and seek a way of inventing the human/e in the Anthropocene era. 

Australian novelist George Turner (1916–1997) has never had a large readership in Australia, but he remains a big name in SF circles in the USA. My paper examines the posthumous novel for which he won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel. Down There in Darkness (1999) is a haunting tale about two men who are cryogenically frozen and who awaken two centuries later to find themselves in a completely unfamiliar Australia, one that because it has undergone climatic catastrophe, has been reborn with genetic scientists in charge.  Reproduction in this new world involves white people mating with Aboriginal Australians because they are seen by these scientists as the only race genetically and culturally suited to long term human survival.  The novel is futuristic, but it is also a reflection on current Enlightenment political, biopolitical and epistemological practices and how these will need to change if the human race is to survive into the future. Turner, I argue, regarded fiction as a medium through which to address what he viewed as pressing global problems. I argue that although he made innovative use of SF writers like HG Wells, Olaf Stapledon and Ursula Le Guin, arguably his greatest innovation, as evidenced by this novel, was to portray the compact between ordinary working class citizens and Indigeneity as part of the solution to the looming problems of scientific hubris, social inequality and climate change.  

Speaking at a conference in 1962, the underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau foretold the appearance of a novel kind of hominid. “Homo aquaticus” was coming, thanks not to “the slow blind natural adaptation of species” but to “a conscious and deliberate evolution.” Cousteau’s aqueous posthuman was meant to herald the arrival of a new historical era, but his fantasy has an old pedigree. In 1648, the priest and mechanical philosopher John Wilkins published an essay on submergence which ventured the intriguing (and comparatively modest) claim that while “long use and custome” might not entirely enable a person “to live in the open water as the fishes do,” a practised diver was sure nonetheless to be relieved of the inconvenience of always requiring “pure” air for breathing. Where Cousteau anticipated “future generations born in underwater villages,” Wilkins had pondered numerous “Colonies...having their Children born and bred up without the knowledg [sic] of land.” 

 

This paper takes Cousteau’s and Wilkins’s visions as exemplary of a long history of testing the edges of human bodily necessity, and even inventing new forms of humanity, via prospects of extraordinary immersion. As well as experiments in defamiliarizing terrestrial views—Wilkins imagined the submarine children’s amazement at discovering the “strange conceits” of “this upper world”—such prospects have frequently testified to the (reputed) achievements of real divers, that international cast of (mostly) breath-hold experts who have populated poems, scientific treatises, novels, and visual art, abundantly and marginally, for the past four centuries and more. Their meanings have been as plentifully diverse as their appearances, but they share a literally profound concern with the affordances of unbreathing for alternative protocols of sensing, knowing, and inhabiting. As well as pivotally informing significant trajectories in submersed poetics in and beyond the Romantic era, those protocols’ contemporary salience suggests the importance of forms and practices in un-inspired humanism for the future of our “more oceanic” planet.