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The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of Frankenstein and the Discourse of Technology by Mark A. McCutcheon

2019; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sfs.2019.0001

2327-6207

Nicholas Ruddick,

Digital Games and Media

193 BOOKS IN REVIEW authorial, editorial, and thematic progression might suggest. Advanced students who already know a basic history of sf will find what this book offers enlightening while uninitiated students might find it staggering. In addition to these pedagogical uses, it should be carried in libraries as an illuminating history of literary sf and a potent research tool.—Jason W. Ellis, New York City College of Technology, CUNY The Monster and the Maple Leaf. Mark A. McCutcheon. The Medium Is the Monster: Canadian Adaptations of FRANKENSTEIN and the Discourse of Technology. Edmonton, AB: Athabasca UP, 2018. xi+234. CAD$29.99 pbk. Canadian adaptations of Frankenstein? I confess that before beginning McCutcheon’s study, I could not think of a single example. Was this going to be an extremely parochial study of some obscure plays and films making much of polar landscapes? By the time I had finished the book, however, it was clear that the material covered is very much of general, international interest and particularly so to readers of science fiction. McCutcheon deals interestingly and intelligently with such Canadian (or adoptive or expatriate Canadian) figures as David Cronenberg, William Gibson, Margaret Atwood, Phyllis Gotlieb, James Cameron, and Peter Watts, as well as with the Canadian adaptation theorist Linda Hutcheon, the Canadian electronic music producer Joel Thomas Zimmerman (aka Deadmau5), and even with the Canadian oil extraction megaproject known as the Alberta Tar Sands. The media theories of the late Marshall McLuhan of the University of Toronto tie everything together. McCutcheon’s thesis is not easy to summarize briefly, but it goes something like this. One of McLuhan’s achievements was to advance the understanding that media and technology were inseparable, even “synonymous” (91). In spite of his neutral stance in public, McLuhan was a technophobe who, as early as The Mechanical Bride (1951), associated the media/technology nexus with Frankenstein’s Monster as animated by Mary Shelley, namely, with a creature that would quickly escape the control of its creator and threaten to destroy him. So influential have been McLuhan’s ideas on Canadian popular culture that the theme of technology run amuck has become central. And contemporary Canadian popular culture, as represented in particular by the sf or sf-inflected works of the artists mentioned above, has helped spread this Frankensteinian association around the globe. McCutcheon’s first chapter deals with definitions and theories of technology, noting the three main premises, often unspoken, associated with the term: instrumentalist (tech as a set of value-neutral tools), determinist (tech as a toolset operating according to its own logic), and substantivist (tech as anti-human monster). It then looks at the way that Canadian identity is a product of “technological nationalism,” namely, one rooted not in individual cultural practice but in technological/media resistance to dominant American “media imperialism” (24-25). His second chapter is an attempt to redefine “adaptations” by broadening the term and refocusing it. That is to say, for McCutcheon “adaptations” of Frankenstein embrace not only extensive works that frankly admit to being reformulations of previously existing ones (e.g., 194 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) James Whale’s 1931 film of Mary Shelley’s novel), but also lesser, though often more intensive traces within works. It is exclusively these traces that he pursues in his study. In so doing he borrows the neologism “Frankenpheme” from Timothy Morton and uses it to identify “allusions, quotations, piecemeal or fragmentary adaptations, and other miscellaneous ephemera that abound in popular culture” (38-39). Chapter 3 deals with Shelley’s novel, arguing that it reinvented technology in the modern sense of the word or, to put it more precisely, that it was “a textual battery that charged the epistème of Romantic science and culture to generate the modern discourse of technology” (59-60). Chapter 4 turns to Marshall McLuhan and argues that his writings, beginning with The Mechanical Bride and consistently if not always overtly thereafter, highlight the “Frankenpheme of Technology” (85). McCutcheon provides good evidence that though McLuhan sometimes came across as an “‘anti-book’ technofetishist ” (92), he actually had a “deep but disavowed hostility to technological change,” seeing new technologies as generating “pain, confusion and...