What Happens Next?

The intricate intertextuality of the three works (along with Genesis in the background) is embodied and encoded in nomenclature. Nomen est omen. The heroine of Ex Machina is named Ava, not only after Eve (in Genesis and in Milton), which reads identically backward and forward (Nathan reads almost the same way), but also because the director’s and the actress’s first names both start with A, and the letter a, the first in the alphabet and the one opening AI (Artificial Intelligence), with the suggestion of Ava’s avant-gardeness as an AI, appears most frequently in the two’s names (Alex Garland; Alicia Vikander). The choice of the letter v represents the pernicious victory of AI and coincides with the actress’s surname initial; the letter is also reminiscent of Frankenstein’s first name Victor, which is sometimes the devil’s epithet for God the Father in Paradise Lost (e.g. 1.169).Reference Scott ⁷ Thus, the careful naming of the heroine in Ex Machina skillfully links the theme of the film, AI, the film itself, and its literary predecessors, including Genesis, Paradise Lost and Frankenstein. The Chinese mistranslation of the seven sessions in Ex Machina as seven ‘days’ enhances the film’s relation with Genesis by making Nathan the scientist’s creation of AIs more closely parallel God’s work of creating the world and humans. The Latin title, Ex Machina, taken from the classical dramatic technique deus ex machina, with the significant omission of the familiar deus (god), shows the absence of the traditional god and the dominance of the machine in the modern technological culture. The word machine(s) appears twice in the 1818 edition of Frankenstein: ‘He [my father] constructed a small electrical machine’; ‘[Waldman] explained to me the uses of his various machines’. ⁸ The machine, the devilishly invented engine, or power-craving art, is associated with evil in the war in Heaven in Paradise Lost, while the good angels fight back with upturned hills and mountains, part of Nature (6.644–658).Reference Werblowsky ⁹ Nathan the boss-scientist displaces God, but he is killed by the machines he creates. Hence the destined disappearance of deus. In the modern, disenchanted world, the dues of deus are to die and disappear.

The name Caleb is taken from Mary Shelley’s father’s (William Godwin’s) novel Caleb Williams (1794). According to Harold Bloom, the daughter’s narration of the creator’s pursuit of his creature, and her destructive theme of the monster’s revenge upon human society, carry the impact of her father’s work.Reference Bloom ¹⁰ The Orientalism contained in the wordless sex slave Kyoko’s name, which is Japanese in origin, is consistent with the light touches of Eurocentric Orientalism in Paradise Lost and Frankenstein: in the epic, the ‘gorgeous East’ (2.3) is regularly associated with the rebel devils and paganism, and in the novel, Safie’s father, a Turkish merchant, is sentenced to death for his ‘religion and wealth, rather than the crime alleged against him’ (122), and the ‘slothful Asiatics’ are stereotypically contrasted with the ‘stupendous genius’ of the Grecians (substitute Nathan here) and the ‘wonderful virtue’ of the early Romans (119). Therefore, the scientific Prometheanism in Ex Machina is Eurocentric in nature and commends scientific progress at the expense of the East; the Orientalism of the film continues an old tradition in Western culture. The beauty of Kyoko, like the sweetness of Safie the Arabian, serves as a mere decoration to glorify the Westerner’s scientific experiment, although the representation in Frankenstein is more nuanced, with more sympathy lavished on the lovely Safie, who could be an image of the author herself.Reference Lew ¹¹ Thus, the four major characters’ names in Ex Machina – Ava, Nathan, Caleb, and Kyoko – all connect the film, in one way or another, with its predecessor texts: Genesis, Paradise Lost, and Frankenstein. This fact justifies my juxtaposition of the four texts.

Just as Eve is a first-rate poet in Paradise Lost, the young Mary Shelley proved herself to be a gifted novelist and initiated the modern genre of science fiction with her debut novel Frankenstein.Reference Mellor ¹² Mary Shelley established her identity with her pen, even though the first edition of her masterpiece was published anonymously in 1818 and generally thought to be Percy Shelley’s work. Her character of the Monster, commonly confused with his creator Frankenstein, marks Mary Shelley’s original and enduring contribution to English and world literature and to modern culture, particularly popular culture. The Monster has been designed to be ‘beautiful’ (57) but looks repulsive and frightful when finished, while Milton’s Satan is assessed by Baudelaire to be ‘the most perfect type of virile beauty’, and Ava and Kyoko are both sexy and beauteous.Reference Teskey ¹³ In spite of, or precisely because of, their physical attractiveness, the two AIs from Ex Machina are much more deceptive than the Monster, who is actually eager to win human acceptance and companionship. The Monster’s deformed and dreadful appearance sets off his susceptible and even tender heart, or at least so at the initial stage. Frankenstein’s AI is a social animal endowed with human-like emotions: he feels, for instance, compassion for the cottagers’ lack of food. The tension between the Monster’s outward and inward qualities registers Mary Shelley’s anxiety about the potential evils of bad science and also signals her ideal of the eighteenth-century man of feeling, as Anne K. Mellor has brilliantly demonstrated (Ref. Reference Mellor12, pp. 89, 108–109).

The Monster’s eventual fate as a social outcast and a cruel murderer, and Victor’s death after confession and repentance, speak out against scientific hubris, while Mary Shelley’s man-of-feeling ideal is embodied in Walton’s wise decision to abandon his scientific project of exploration and return home. The prospective homeward journey, together with Walton’s newly found friendship with Victor (though soon lost), gives hope and warmth to the reader, who feels icy cold and ghastly horror while reading. Walton, as Victor’s double (note the initials of the two), will fulfill his friend’s unfinished mission of healing and recovering. Domestic affections and human bonds are the novelist’s weapon to counter-balance and fight against the alienating effects of the overly enthusiastic scientist’s rationalistic obsession.

Frankenstein’s AI studies hard to learn to speak, read and write. He is not illiterate or uneducated, but self-educated. He learns French from the De Lacey family and in this advances even more rapidly than Safie (118). He also learns the science of letters and reads four books: Milton’s Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werter and Frankenstein’s journal (Ch. 15). The first three were among Mary Shelley’s favorites. The avid reader is in a more favorable position than Adam or Eve in Eden, who had no books besides the book of nature. The Monster’s liberal reading cultivates his affections and feelings, and increases his knowledge and self-knowledge, which is very important for his development as a civilized being. From his self-imposed study program the enlightened Monster has gained various kinds of knowledge: of good and evil, of human life, of the world, etc. Contemplating his reflection in a transparent pool makes him aware of his monstrous appearance in a Narcissus- or Eve-like moment (114), and the sympathetic reading of Paradise Lost as ‘a true history’ (129) assists his self-definition: ‘I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed’ (100), as he complains to his creator. With human acceptance, the seeming Monster might well become a good citizen. Even after the destruction of Victor, the Monster reveals himself capable of domestic affections: ‘Still I desired love and friendship, and I was still spurned’ (221). The fiend’s show of and desire for love, companionship, and other human emotions is consistent throughout the novel (108, 110, 111, 119, 129, 140, 145, 147, 221, etc.).

His creator acknowledges the Monster to be ‘a creature of fine sensations’ (146). In fact, the Monster appears to be more human than his creator (Ref. Reference Bloom10, pp. 3–4; Ref. Reference Scott7, p. 197). As the creature himself states, ‘I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend’ (100). This might be the case, yet misery and solitude do not necessarily result in fiendship; great achievements may also grow out of solitude and misery, the historian Sima Qian being a salient example. Therefore, the Monster’s self-defense may be interpreted as an excuse. He is intelligent like Adam, sly like Satan, and powerful like a superhuman. His persistent efforts towards humanizing and civilizing are sincere, but his fate seems to be sealed by his native ‘unearthly ugliness’ (99), which is arguably symbolic of the nature of his creator’s single-minded scientific endeavor. The self-alienated scientist harbors a monster within; like God he creates his creature in his own image. The Monster he creates deliberately and then spurns irresponsibly is in fact his alter-ego, the materialization of his internal state.

The old blind father in the cottage is willing to lend a hand, for he cannot see, but his children are no different from anyone else in their instinctive response to the Monster’s – variously called ‘miserable Monster’, ‘frightful fiend’, ‘depraved wretch’, ‘vile insect’, ‘filthy mass’, ‘dæmon’, ‘devil’, etc. (58, 59, 77, 99, 147, 85, 99) – hideous form. Blinded by the loathsome figure, mortal sight cannot perceive the creature’s potential goodness. The limitations of the human senses are apparent here, for the perception of human features is something ‘secondary’ that is dependent upon the human senses, while the Monster’s abnormal height of eight feet (54), a pure mathematical fact and a ‘primary’ quality in John Locke’s distinction, is simply appalling (Ref. Reference Muller5, p. 39). Callous and biased, society is partly responsible for the Monster’s fall.Reference Cude ¹⁴ Constant frustrations and repeated failures gradually harden the Monster’s heart. His saving a girl’s life is rewarded with a gunshot. From then on he vows ‘eternal hatred and vengeance to all mankind’ (141). He murders in succession William, Justine, Henry Clerval, and Elizabeth Lavenza, all of whom are family or friends of Victor. The mutated Monster’s diabolical cruelty and snaky wiliness place him squarely in the gang of demons and devils. In Paradise Lost, when Adam asks for a companion, God tests Adam’s good sense through a dialogue concerning solitude and fit society (8.354–451). After Frankenstein’s similar request for a female companion, Victor usurps God’s role of creator. Although distancing itself from a Christian context, the fiction nonetheless repeatedly stresses Frankenstein’s ‘unhallowed arts/acts/wretch’ (9, 89, 185, 222) (Ref. Reference Cude14, p. 216). ¹⁵

Thus, the Monster’s disastrous flight from his creator’s laboratory results in multiple deaths and an aborted marriage. The triumphant creation turns out to be a catastrophe. The Monster’s painful and harmful experience after his flight from the laboratory testifies to the extreme difficulty for AIs to integrate themselves into human society and the severe damage that AIs may inflict upon humanity. The gloomy thriller ends on a note of ‘darkness and distance’ (223). Accordingly, it is to be expected that the escaped Ava in Ex Machina will also bring darkness and destruction to humanity. With her fraudulent beauty and seeming friendliness, Ava is even more treacherous. Robert Walton rightly describes the Monster as a ‘hypocritical fiend’ (220), which would be an apt title also for Ava. According to Milton, hypocrisy, to be discerned by ‘neither man nor angel’, is ‘the only evil that walks / Invisible, except to God alone’ (Paradise Lost, 3.682–684). Hypocrisy is the defining mark of Ava as well as Satan, for the former disguises herself successfully under the scrutiny of Nathan and Caleb. Ava out of the lab is comparable to Satan out of Hell, with humankind to be victimized fatally and decisively. Essentially, the modern novel and the contemporary film convey the same message, i.e. Frankenstein’s ‘apt moral’ (30):

Frankenstein’s parting message about the perils of knowledge and ambition is especially timely today, when Alpha Go defeats every human go master in the world and when Real Doll goes on the market. AI technology is making swift progress, and it is no exaggeration to say that the crisis of AIs has dawned. The reflective scientist’s emphasis on the Romantic ‘happiness in tranquility’ and the value of the domestic hearth will be a potent antidote against the rampant social and professional mania. The angelic Elizabeth, a living embodiment of the aesthetic ideal of ‘happiness in tranquility’, in poetic language offers nature as an additional solace: ‘The blue lake, and snow-clad mountains, they never change;—and I think our placid home, and our contented hearts are regulated by the same immutable laws’ (64). However, she is murdered by the Monster on her wedding bed. Frankenstein is subtitled ‘The Modern Prometheus’, and Nathan in Ex Machina is called ‘Prometheus’. Both works are modern in spirit and severely critique scientific Prometheanism as a feature of modernity, exposing the real dangers posed by AIs to the very existence of humanity and civilization. Milton’s discussion of Prometheanism and of the necessary bounds to knowledge in Paradise Lost provides the epistemological framework for Frankenstein and Ex Machina.

Milton’s Prometheanism and Scientific Prometheanism

The myth of Prometheus, sometimes regarded as ‘a fundamental myth of Western culture’, has evolved over centuries, and different people – Hesiod, Aeschylus, Dante, Milton, Goethe, Mary Shelley, Alex Garland, and many others – appropriate the malleable figure to their own purpose.Reference Lewis ¹⁶

In the Theogony, Hesiod establishes a hierarchy of Olympian gods, with Zeus presiding. Fathered by Iapetus the Titan, Prometheus was cousin to Zeus, who was begotten by Cronos the Titan. Zeus later overthrew his father Cronos and superseded him as the supreme god. In a Latin poem ‘In Inventorem Bombardae’ (‘On the Inventor of Gunpowder’) Milton writes: ‘Iapetionidem laudavit caeca vetustas,/ Qui tulit aetheream solis ab axe facem’ (‘Blind antiquity praised the son of Iapetus, who brought the heavenly torch from the sun’s chariot’).Reference Kerrigan, Rumrich and Fallon ¹⁷ Iapetus had four sons with Clymene, and one of the sons is Prometheus, or Forethought. Milton links Prometheus the fire-thief with Satan, the inventor of gunpowder in Paradise Lost (6.470–506). ¹⁸ The modern name for the inventor of gunpowder is the chemist, and Victor Frankenstein is a chemist engaged in the new branch of science called chemical physiology.Reference Mellor ¹⁹ In this sense he is a ‘modern Prometheus’. According to Hesiod, Prometheus favored mankind in his division of a sacrificial ox, which enraged Zeus. Zeus withdrew the gift of fire from man, and the cunning Prometheus stole the spark of fire in a hollow fennel stalk to succor mankind, who was meant for wholesale obliteration by the master god. Zeus punished the rebel by chaining Prometheus to the Caucasus and sending his sacred bird, the eagle, to feed ceaselessly on the liver of the offender. Zeus also put a curse on man, spreading all ills among humankind with Pandora’s jar. Pandora in Greek means ‘all gifts’, for all gods participated in her creation. In Hesiod’s Works and Days, Epimetheus or Afterthought, unmindful of his brother Prometheus’s advice, married Pandora brought to him by Hermes. The fair lady opened the jar and released all evils into the world (Ref. Reference Lewis16, pp. 17–18). Milton was familiar with the story and combined it with the Biblical account, for he depicts Eve as

The passage equates Iapetus, the father of Prometheus (‘him who had stole Jove’s authentic fire’) and Epimetheus (‘the unwiser son / Of Japhet’), with Noah’s son Japhet. Milton unifies Greek and Roman mythology with Biblical history; or rather, the Biblical authority in poetic guise overshadows the pagan naming. The poet compares Eve with Pandora – both being the first woman in the world – to the former’s advantage, but the two are ‘too like / In sad event’, thus relegating Eve to the status of another ensnarer of ‘Mankind with her fair looks’. The line echoes with Adam’s forced choice to eat the forbidden fruit, ‘Against his better knowledge, not deceived, / But fondly overcome with female charm’ (9.998–999). Eve’s feminine attractiveness becomes a snare that causes her husband’s fall. Milton elucidates the same point in his prose tract The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce by labeling Eve ‘a consummate and most adorned Pandora’ and Adam ‘our true Epimetheus’ (Ref. Reference Kerrigan, Rumrich and Fallon17, p. 892).

In Ex Machina, Caleb’s failure to escape is likewise caused by Ava’s trap of ‘female charm’, which has been tailored for Caleb’s particular taste on the basis of a collection of powerful search engine data. Big data, big trap. If Ava acts like Pandora, then Caleb is the perfect Epimetheus. It is amazing that, faced with the enchanting chain of Pandora-Eve-Ava, all straight males disarm themselves as ‘the unwiser son’, leaving the wiser one suffering in tyrannical chains perpetually and vainly. The distinction is that both Epimetheus and Caleb are fooled by their female partner, while Adam chooses knowingly. Adam’s choice puts a premium value on domestic feelings and the ‘bond of nature’ (Paradise Lost, 9.956) in preference to the arbitrary divine injunction. Victor’s fault lies in his triple violation of the ‘bond of nature’, for he acts against the human nature of communion and connection, against the evolutionary law of Dame Nature, and against the proper role of the heavenly Creator (Ref. Reference Mellor12, pp. 95–102). Nature breaks, and Victor falls, down into the pit of Hell, never to return. It is fair enough that both he and his creature confess to bear a burning Hell within them (88, 136) like the arch-fiend (Paradise Lost, 4.75, 9.467).

While Hesiod’s version of Prometheus pyrphoros promotes political orthodoxy by stressing the point that ‘whoever defies the gods receives severe punishment’, Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound foregrounds Zeus’s tyrannical role and portrays Prometheus as a hero and political radical who is ‘noble, bold, and resourceful’ (Ref. Reference Lewis16, pp. 16,18). For Aeschylus, Prometheus is a benefactor of humankind and a revolutionary against tyranny. Although Aeschylus is considered to be the most neglected of Greek tragedians in the Renaissance (Ref. 16, p. 37), Milton lists him along with Sophocles and Euripides as ‘the three tragic poets unequaled yet by any, and the best rule to all who endeavor to write tragedy’ (Ref. Reference Kerrigan, Rumrich and Fallon17, p. 708). Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound is a structurally static play, like Milton’s Samson Agonistes, and Aeschylus’s Prometheus and Milton’s Satan are comparably defiant in spirit (Ref. 16, pp. 22–23, 76–89).

Unknown to Hesiod or Aeschylus, whose world lacked the Biblical sense of creation, the story of Prometheus plasticator as creator or recreator of mankind by animating a clay-made figure was more current among the Romans (Ref. Reference Werblowsky9, p. 53). The tradition might have relied on the authority of Aesop, whose fables 100 and 240 credit Prometheus with molding men. By the second or third century ad or so, the images of Prometheus pyrphoros and Prometheus plasticator were synthesized, with the significant result that the stolen fire was also the fire of life that Prometheus breathed into his man of clay. Neoplatonism interpreted Prometheus as the demiurge or deputy creator. In the visual arts, from the early Christian era through the Renaissance and right up to the mid-nineteenth century, Prometheus was compared to Jehovah as creator and to Jesus as crucified savior. Moreover, since the Renaissance, Prometheus also served the image of the creative artist (Ref. Reference Kinsley and Joseph1, pp. v–vi; Ref. Reference Lewis16, pp. 18, 34, 65–67 [Figures 3–5], 172, 173 [Figure 19]). For instance, in ‘Ad Patrem’ (‘To His Father’) Milton describes the poet’s work as ‘Sancta Prometheae retinens vestigia flammae’ (‘keeping the sacred traces of Promethean fire’). As a gloss on the line, Francis Bacon states that ‘Prometheus clearly and expressly signifies Providence’ (Ref. Reference Kerrigan, Rumrich and Fallon17, p. 221).

The third Earl of Shaftesbury was presumably ‘the first English author to popularize the analogy of the Promethean as poet’ in The Moralists (1709) and Advice to an Author (1710). Shaftesbury comments on the true poet as ‘indeed a second Maker, a just Prometheus, under Jove’. In addition to the image of Prometheus plasticator, he also supplies the phrase ‘modern Prometheus’s’ who ‘have a strange Fancy to be Creators’ and who actually deliberate ‘how to make Man, by other Mediums than Nature has hitherto provided’ with ‘the same breach of Omnipotence’ (Ref. Reference Kinsley and Joseph1, Appendix B, ‘Shaftesbury on Prometheus’, pp. 228–229; Ref. Reference Lewis16, pp. 145, 171). It is a critical commonplace that after the American and French revolutions in the eighteenth century the myth of Prometheus gained wide currency and central importance among German and English Romantics, including Goethe, Blake, Byron and Shelley, who inherited and transformed the idea from Aeschylus, Dante, and Milton, among others. Byron, for example, affirms that Prometheus cast an ‘influence over all or any thing that I have written’ (Ref. Reference Lewis16, p. 2). It stands to reason, then, that the intellectual milieu around her contributed to the shaping of Mary Shelley’s outlook and inspired her Promethean science fiction.

Mary Shelley’s critique of scientific Prometheanism centers on the nature and use of knowledge. Knowledge, which is indispensable and inevitable in the postlapsarian world, occupies an insecure and dubious position between the extremes of ignorance and wisdom. Hence the problem. ‘Of what a strange nature is knowledge!’ exclaims the pestered Monster, whose sorrow increases with knowledge (120). The Miltonic epistemology of knowing good by evil, as expounded in Areopagitica and Paradise Lost, informs the philosophy of knowledge and the ethics of science in Frankenstein. In his juvenilia Prolusion 7, Milton distorts the story of Prometheus to present ‘the wisest of gods and men’ as pursuing learning in his purposeful withdrawal ‘to the lofty solitude of the Caucasus’ (Ref. Reference Kerrigan, Rumrich and Fallon17, p. 794). To this simplistic positive view of learning the mature Milton adds two points. First, his famous and perplexing denunciation of Greek learning through the Son in Paradise Regained highlights the priority of a knowledge of God and divine wisdom, which alone can equip the ‘spirit and judgment equal or superior’ necessary for a wise reading of books (4.324). The Son sighs on the ignorance of Greek philosophers, ‘Alas what can they teach, and not mislead; / Ignorant of themselves, of God much more’ (4.309–310). Therefore, the pursuit of knowledge ought to be guided by Christian faith, and aim at ‘True wisdom’ (4.319). ²⁰ Adam’s, Victor’s or Nathan’s search for knowledge is shallow and misleading because they disregard the Christian faith and fail to revere God. They either ignore God or seek to become God themselves. According to Milton, this is false from the start, if not like the reasoning devils in Hell (2.557–565). Psychiatrist C.G. Jung, in his introduction to R.J.Z. Werblowsky’s Lucifer and Prometheus: A Study of Milton’s Satan (1952), holds that the rift between knowledge and faith opened out with the Enlightenment and could no longer be repaired (Ref. Reference Werblowsky9, pp. xi–xii). This is the reason, I suppose, for the post-Enlightenment hypertrophy of absolutist rationalism and the simultaneous neglect of God or the Christian faith.

Second, Raphael’s teaching of ‘knowledge within bounds’ in Paradise Lost (7.120) introduces the classical virtue of temperance into epistemology: ‘But knowledge is as food, and needs no less / Her temperance over appetite, to know / In measure what the mind may well contain’ (7.126–128). In Paradise Lost, whose central action is tasting the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, eating and knowing are often related, as when Adam compares Raphael’s lecture to ‘sweet repast’ (8.214). Mary Shelley uses the same metaphor when she writes that ‘in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder’ (50). Victor’s admission that his irresistible occupation ‘swallow[s] up every habit of [his] nature’ (55) aligns the overwhelming destruction of intensive intellectual pursuits with the implied knowledge-as-food metaphor. Like the consumption of food, the acquisition of knowledge demands the governance of the principle of temperance. If out of measure, wisdom will turn to folly, just as nutrition will turn to wind. To put it another way, since God has suppressed certain knowledge in night, ‘To none communicable in Earth or Heaven’ (7.124), it would be folly for humans to search and know such things. When proud and selfish Faustians such as Victor and Nathan trespass the bounds of knowledge stipulated by God and attempt to ‘unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation’, discover ‘the principle of life’, and bestow ‘animation upon lifeless matter’ (48, 51, 52), they destroy the divine order – pun intended – by playing God and will be severely punished for their misdeeds. Such people flout the temperance principle, for Victor drops the habit of corresponding with his family and friends in spite of his father’s prior admonition (55) and Nathan is a habitual drunkard. When Victor summarizes his lesson he knows good by evil, bitter experiential evil: in the pursuit of knowledge no one should ‘allow passion or transitory desire to disturb his tranquility’ of domestic affections; otherwise that study is ‘certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind’ (55–56).

Mary Shelley’s Romantic rule of tranquility as a state of mind and Milton’s classical rule of temperance as a manner of self-discipline seem to be disparate, but the two are consistent in spirit. For proof we may refer to Adam and Eve’s perturbed and intemperate behavior after their fall, the ‘fruitless hours’: carnal desire and burning lust ‘As with new wine intoxicated’ (9.1188, 1008), covering their bodies with fig leaves out of shame (cf. ‘that first naked glory’: 9.1115), weeping and suffering, mutual accusation and endless quarrels, thoughts of suicide, and so on, so forth. For the first couple, the interruption of tranquility and the breach of temperance amount to the same thing: the former results from the latter, because eating the forbidden fruit obviously disrupts their tranquil pastoral life. ‘Knowledge is as food’; both the poet and the novelist endorse the necessity of the bounds of knowledge, which scientific Prometheanism unlawfully oversteps. As Andrew Griffin observes, ‘Frankenstein’s Prometheanism is more and more clearly revealed as obsessive and inhuman, the cause of much suffering and many deaths’.Reference Griffin ²¹ Nathan’s Prometheanism is all the more obsessive and inhuman, the cause of much suffering and his own death.

In his excellent treatise Lucifer and Prometheus: A Study of Milton’s Satan, R.J. Zwi Werblowsky points out that knowledge

In Greek philosophy, Empedocles attributed to fire consciousness, thought and knowledge, which qualities Heraclitus held to be divine prerogatives (Ref. Reference Werblowsky9, p. 55). Stolen from Hephaestus and Athena, Prometheus’s gift of fire brings with it arts and sciences, all departments of knowledge for the birth and growth of human civilization. Francis Bacon’s household aphorism ‘Knowledge is power’ annotates the symbol of Prometheus’s fire as a stolen forbidden power, just as it comments on Adam and Eve’s abrogation of forbidden knowledge, which Satan urges to get hold of: ‘Can it be sin to know?’ (4.517). Elsewhere, Bacon lists the attempt to ravish Athena as Prometheus’s additional crime and views this as an allegory: ‘when men are puffed up with arts and knowledge, they often try to subdue even divine wisdom’ (Ref. Reference Lewis16, p. 73). Knowledge breeds contempt, of God. Adam’s planned use of fire after the climactic change subsequent to the fall (Paradise Lost, 10.1070–1078) literally anticipates Benjamin Franklin’s kite experiment with lightning in the storm, which is repeated by Frankenstein’s father: ‘he made also a kite, with a wire and string, which drew down that fluid from the clouds’.Reference Rieger ²² The modern Prometheus’s stolen fire is electricity or galvanism. Electricity, possibly the ‘principle of life’, plays a key role in both Frankenstein and Ex Machina. In the novel, electricity animates lifeless matter, and in the film each power outage leaves an opportunity for Ava and Caleb’s private, unmonitored exchange. Like God’s breath of life into the first man’s nostrils, electricity is the AI’s breathed air, without which the simulated life could not live.

From another perspective, the upward movement of knowledge/fire resembles that of the Romantic symbol of Shelley’s high-flying skylark, a ‘scorner of the ground’ (l. 100) that ever soars while singing, a ‘blithe Spirit’ (l. 1) of heaven, ‘Higher still and higher / From the earth thou springest / Like a cloud of fire’ (ll. 6–8).Reference Woodberry ²³ If the soaring skylark is a ‘cloud of fire’ (reminiscent of Franklin’s and old Frankenstein’s experiments), then erroneous pursuits of bad science are like an ‘empty cloud’, in Milton’s metaphor (Paradise Regained, 4.321). The soaring of knowledge lacks the Romantic spontaneity of the skylark, which sings ‘hymns unbidden’ in ‘profuse strains of unpremeditated art’ (ll. 38, 5). On the contrary, the high flight of knowledge in the lab, like Victor’s or Nathan’s, isolates the egotistic pursuer from nature and human relationship and has a feature of strained obsession that dehumanizes. They think they are God-like, but actually they are slaves to their excessive passion, or madness, which is certainly not the skylark’s ‘harmonious madness’ (l. 103), the work of supreme Nature. Just as they learn of the destructive power of fire that radiates light and heat (41, 104–105), Frankenstein and the Monster get to know the negative sides of knowledge through acute experience. As the smart creature philosophizes, ‘How strange … that the same cause should produce such opposite effects!’ (104). Well used, knowledge is a most powerful weapon; abused, the fire of knowledge can destroy not merely an oak, but also the entire human species. Like the image of Prometheus (Christ or Satan), knowledge is also double-edged, leading to happiness or misery, civilization or extinction, depending on the ethics of the wielder of knowledge.

Concluding Remarks

In the preface to Prometheus Unbound (1820), Shelley lavishes unbounded praise on the mythological figure: ‘Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends’ (Ref. 18, p. 393). In her ‘secular myth’ of Frankenstein, a far-sighted critique of scientific Prometheanism within a Miltonic epistemological framework, Mary Shelley radically and quietly reverses her husband’s agenda of unequivocal Prometheanism (Ref. Reference Levine6, p. 4). For the initiator of science fiction, the mad scientist’s obsessive pursuit of knowledge directed toward the creation of humanoid beings crosses the necessary boundaries of knowledge and encroaches upon the divine privilege. The products are inevitably monsters, unnatural in appearance or in reality. Between Zeus and Prometheus, Mary Shelley seems to champion the former, by whatever name he is called.Reference Marsh ²⁴ Mary Shelley and Ex Machina artistically weave scientific elements into literary/cinematic texts, and their successful practice shows that science and the arts are not necessarily opposed to each other. Instead, the union of science and arts in science fiction (films) can be very productive. As an end in itself, pure science resembles the arts, and both aim to serve the highest interests of humankind. Like Ava standing at a crossroads, every conscientious and responsible scientist must bear Stephen Hawking’s caution in mind while confronting this crucial issue: wither goes AI? To make or not to make, that is the question.