The Loneliness of a…
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is usually introduced as the birth of science fiction or the first modern horror story. But if you sit with it quietly — the way you’d listen to a lonely person rather than hunt for scares — it becomes something else entirely. It becomes a story about a mind built for connection, condemned to permanent silence. A tragedy about feedback loops, not lightning bolts. A portrait of a being who tries every strategy evolution ever taught us — approach, help, imitate, communicate — and receives nothing in return. Shelley understood something we’re still grappling with: a social organism with no tribe is not a monster; it is a malfunctioning survival algorithm in pain. The Creature learns language by watching a family through a crack in a wall. He gathers wood for them. He practices speeches in the forest like someone rehearsing a confession. His instincts say reach out; the world replies with screams and gunshots. Functionally speaking, he’s trapped in an…