Published in 1818, Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" imagined the possibility of science re-animating dead matter, and the themes in her masterpiece have been as enduring as the Hollywood images of a block-headed, neck-bolted monster. What are the moral responsibilities of our scientific capabilities? Just because we can, should we?
Like Shelley's novel, Stephen P. Kiernan's intriguing debut, "The Curiosity," begins in the Arctic, where scientist Kate Philo leads an expedition to find the perfect "hard-ice" from which to re-animate single-cell life forms. The funding for the expedition comes from Erastus Carthage, a monomaniacal media-savvy genius who appoints Daniel Dixon, a lecherous mediocre journalist, to document the project. »Read Full Article
Stephen King once toyed with writing a story about traveling inside the pillow on which H.P. Lovecraft laid his head each night, en route to creating the nightmarish tales that King rightly describes as "uniquely terrible in all of American literature."
Daunted and even frightened by such an assignment, King never did it, concluding that the idea of trying to "put all that into a story" would be "ludicrous." »Read Full Article