It’s not the strangeness of new technologies that frightens us but the way technology threatens to make us strangers to ourselves. In a semi-Freudian spirit, then, I’d like to propose that where Frankenstein and its spawn are concerned, our fear of the unknown may really be about our discomfort with knowing.
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In Shelley’s vision, Frankenstein was the modern Prometheus. The hip, up to date, learned, vital god who chose to create human life and paid the dire consequences. To Shelley, gods create and for humans to do that is bad. Bad for others but especially bad for one’s creator.