<i>Frankenstein</i>’s futurity: replicants and robots

Abstract

If the power of reflecting on the past, and darting the keen eye of contemplation into futurity, be the grand privilege of man, it must be granted that some people enjoy this prerogative in a very limited degree. Every thing new appears to them wrong; and not able to distinguish the possible from the monstrous, they fear where no fear should find a place, running from the light of reason, as if it were a firebrand.(Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792])