Such a chap, recognizable by his round glasses and chin-length mane, sat to my left during a screening of Guillermo del Toro’s new flick Frankenstein. To cut a two-and-a-half-hour story short, I’ll race to the denouement: for all his apparent sophistication and despite being old enough to know better (he and his mortified wife were in their 60s) this guy was not content to sit through an even slightly hokey rehashing of Mary Shelley’s unkillable novel, but had to announce, loudly, “this is awful!” and periodically burst into bitter laughter every few minutes just to let us know that this film was beneath him. Apparently this famous tale of an immortal being fashioned from strangers’ body parts was simply too improbable. About half an hour before the Creature hobbled off into an uncertain dawn, this cantankerous Boomer hobbled into the strip-lit atrium having been told about four times to “shut up or leave!” — but not before turning to the civic-minded Millennial men behind me and showing them his stubby middle finger. Humiliatingly, he left his leather messenger bag on his seat when he stropped off, and returned shortly after to retrieve it. Having contributed a couple of neighborly shushes myself, I felt vindicated. Who says the young have no grasp of cinema etiquette?

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For me, this sordid sideshow animated Del Toro’s new production as much as the great coiled dynamos the scientist uses to fry a somehow still smokin’ hot Jacob Elordi. It was the perfect encapsulation of what the modern director is up against: peevish, cynical and stupid audiences who’ve as much patience and insight as a Cocomelon baby. As a filmmaker whose output lies somewhere between critically acclaimed (The Shape of Water) and cult favorite (Pan’s Labyrinth), Del Toro is a perfect target for film wankers everywhere. His budgets are enormous (Frankenstein cost $120 million courtesy of Netflix); he uses shocking gore and sentimental metaphor, things which impress normal people and therefore put Tarkovsky bores on high alert. He has also fallen victim to a recent Hollywood fever for sexy gothic remakes (think Nosferatu, Wuthering Heights): the A-list seem to spend all their billable hours in frilly shirts and breath-snatching bodices nowadays. Again, this makes snobs suspicious: it wouldn’t do to enjoy a trend — and anyway, do these primitives even know the visual references being attempted here? The scarlet veil of gauze which shrouds Victor’s mother is a symbol of sex and blood, you goons. And when the Creature examines a skull he’s actually doing a Hamlet. But you wouldn’t get that.

To be fair to the insufferable, there is lots to decry about contemporary cinema — but it is not the fault of directors. Filmmakers, like journalists, musicians and politicians, have reluctantly found themselves in the attention economy. As a way of luring viewers away from their phones, many seem to have opted for brighter and breathier versions of the key texts, refreshing the familiar so as not to “challenge” their way to bankruptcy. What results is a kind of creative cannibalism: more and more, the industry is raiding its own archives to lend projects “prestige”.

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Del Toro himself described the process of reanimating Frankenstein as “marrying a widow”, which is also an excellent metaphor for the way audiences feel about these films. They are seductive and storied yet can seem gloomy and shop-worn; they are exhaustingly self-referential, borrowing from their black-and-white forbearers almost down to the frame. These films are hard to take on their own merit, and any slips — lame dialog, lapsing English accents — become evidence of disrespect. A period setting only heightens the perfectionism of audiences, who are always suspicious about the fidelity of costumes or scripts and are rightly perturbed by actors with a mouth full of distractingly modern veneers (Emily Blunt in Oppenheimer, you’ve been told). And the greatest crime of all — one which got a big chuckle out of Mr Criterion himself during my screening — is lousy, lazy writing of the kind which produces lines like “you are the monster!” (yes, really).

The story of Frankenstein is by now so familiar that it can only be looked at through tinted glass; dealt with head on, as Del Toro did, and the pilfery will elicit a guaranteed snort from the worst people in the room. The alternative, of course, is to do an Emerald Fennell and produce something so monstrously unfaithful to the text, as next year’s Wuthering Heights threatens to be, that you’ll horrify audiences in an entirely different way.

How to navigate this moviemaking minefield? Film buffs are ready to hate you, Zoomers can barely pay attention and fans of the novel lick their lips whenever you trip up on the source text. Audiences have never been so miserable, so quick to voice their disdain. The more Hollywood reheats the same old gristle, the more critical they are when it’s hard to digest. It all makes a day at the movies a terribly tense affair.

But I am here to offer a solution. Now, I am no buff of anything, and the most moviemaking I’ve done is filming my classmate dressed as Mother Mary getting covered in paint for an edgy school project, the evidence of which I’m sure is out there somewhere. But I do know one thing: it may be a hard time to be a director, but you can guarantee that at least half your audience will leave your film happy if you just cast Jacob Elordi.

I jest. But am I wrong? Fennell seems to have discovered that cheat code, casting him as her Heathcliff after his star turn in Saltburn. There’s a logic at work: as Frankenstein shows, most moviegoers will suffer through hours of twitching spinal cords, bleak shots of Georgian Edinburgh and exhausting fight sequences if you just show a bit of leg, even if that leg is gray-green and stitched together. It’s been a long time since it was acceptable to go to the movies simply for the purpose of being entertained, but what I wish I could tell Señor Cinema is that just enjoying a film is OK — it may even be the point.

Perhaps it’s not film which is depreciating, it is audiences: we are becoming hypercritical, joyless, cynical and distractible. But I am hopeful that, just as happened before my very eyes, vigilantes will send film buffs packing. If you must snort, do it in your own living room. And to those of us still clinging to the right to watch a slightly silly movie and be thrilled by an explosion, or something ghoulish or, yes, Jacob Elordi, remember the best weapon at your disposal as an Englishman: you can always, always tut.

And while many in Webster came specifically to see Jamison, they also used his post office to visit each other. So, as their postmaster, he installed benches, a community bulletin board, and a library. I ask him to explain himself; Jamison aw-shucked. “I figure if folks are talking to each other, it is hard to hate each other.” In truth, though, the Webster postmaster was merely fulfilling Title 39 of the US Code: “The United States Postal Service’s (USPS) purpose is to bind the nation together”. Lord knows that, in the aftermath of a brutal election, America needs some neighbourly ties. And Lord knows that few organisations do that as well as the Post Office, even if its triumphs hint at state failure elsewhere.

By sheer numbers alone, USPS is an American giant. With 33,904 post offices, it’s burrowed into every nook and cranny of the nation, from Kaktovik in Alaska to Ochopee in the Florida swamps. The country’s single biggest non-military institution, every day its army of 525,469 employees delivers mail to 167 million unique addresses. That’s even as USPS retains the so-called “Postal Principle” — meaning users pay the same fee no matter how far their package travels. No wonder Americans love the Post Office, with an eye-popping 91% of us viewing it favourably. By comparison, 29% of Americans support public schools, which is about equal to the 32% of citizens who have a positive opinion of God. “The Post Office is the last bastion,” says Erica Etelson, co-founder of the Rural-Urban Bridge Initiative. “It is still something everyone loves”.

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For Professor Richard John, this isn’t incidental. As the Columbia professor and post office expert has written, the Founders always “intended the Postal Service to be a pillar of the republic, squeezing together millions of Americans, urban and rural, for the common good”. Created by Ben Franklin and the Continental Congress, the US Constitution explicitly calls for “Post Offices and Post Roads”. But, more than that, John says it’s the Post Office Act of 1792 that matters most. Because Congress deemed access to newspapers central to an informed public, the legislation kept postal rates low. This, John explains, ensured political parties wouldn’t dominate the news — while, as an apolitical institution, the Post Office could “follow the nation and stay close to the people”.

The Postal Service most certainly stayed close to the expanding republic. Between 1790 and 1840, the number of post offices exploded from just 75 to over 13,000. A few years after the Civil War, the service was operating over 76,000 offices. That, says Cameron Blevins, made it the largest “communication network” on earth. As the associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver explains, this was basically a function of 19th century expansionism. As the pioneers forced their way west, and Manifest Destiny rushed Americans from sea to shining sea, post connected the “whole nation together”. And so it proved in practice too. Consider Arizona’s Supai post office as an example. Established in 1896, it connected the Grand Canyon’s miners and the Havasupai nation of Native Americans to the wider world. 128 years later, mules still haul the outgoing mail three hours up steep, sandy passes to the next post at Peach Springs. Ten years after Supai’s founding, in 1906, free rural delivery integrated even more Americans. Just before the outbreak of the First World War, the Post Office started delivering parcels, further connecting people to the bounties of American life.

Public respect for the Postal Service reached further heights during the Great Depression, when FDR expanded its footprint still further. In truth, though, its acclaim during the first half of the last century isn’t really about numbers. In the Thirties, three-quarters of all Americans believed the federal government would “do the right thing almost always or most of the time”. Far from being naïve dupes, this civic faith was fired by depression and war, together creating remarkable social solidarity. At the core of this social trust were institutions, like the Post Office, that for Blevins represent the veritable cartilage and guts of the nation. “The US Post,” he says, “is a model of what an effective government could be.”

That, in turn, made Americans have more faith not just in far-off bureaucrats — but also in each other. For Americans born in the first half of the last century, neighbourliness and social trust flourished. Buttressing this sensibility was New Deal liberalism. More than a pastiche of programmes, the New Deal was grounded in a principle that Americans look beyond narrow self-interest and towards the common good. FDR, for his part, understood the Post Office was the one federal entity Americans most used, leveraging it as a tool of social solidarity.

During the Second World War, for instance, the Post Office offered “Victory Mail” to soldiers deployed overseas. Through the so-called V-Mail scheme, the Army Postal Service connected millions of troops to their families and loved ones — all free of charge. At home, the Post Office served as a hub for wartime information. Community boards posted draft posters, air raid instructions, and information about federal schemes. Postal workers added the sale of war bonds and war stamps to their duties.

It’s little surprise that public regard for the Postal Service reached its zenith in the early post-war era. As Richard John notes, the humble post office commanded so much respect that it’s used as a major plot device in the 1947 Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street. “Santa Claus exists because the Post Office says so,” John explains. “It had unassailable credentials”.

In 1970, the Post Office’s golden age came to a screeching halt. A confluence of forces — postal worker strikes; delivery inefficiencies; Richard Nixon — resulted in the Postal Reorganisation Act. This transformed the Post Office Department into the United States Postal Service (USPS). The Postmaster General was moved out of the cabinet and into a boardroom, even though the new “postal corporation” remains a public service. Blevins calls this new creature a Frankenstein monster. “It is expected to provide a universal service,” he says, “but it is not funded to do so”.

In 1975, Americans encountered Frankenstein. A deep recession spurred massive postal deficits. To cover costs, bureaucrats planned to close 12,000 post offices — mostly in rural areas. Popular uproar forced them to scrap the plan. But the situation has hardly remained stable. With the profit motive now king, postage stamp prices have typically been raised three or four times a decade since 1970. From the turn of the millennium, meanwhile, the cost of sending a first-class letter has increased 18 times, even as the number of USPS employees has been cut almost in half. That’s unsurprisingly led to shuttered branches, shortened opening hours, and a delivery window for First Class letters that’s almost doubled.

Not, of course, that post offices have suffered alone here. On the contrary, the squeeze on USPS has been witnessed across the public sector and beyond. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory was merely a symptom of a sharp collapse in social solidarity. While Reagan’s neoliberals cut budgets aimed at the collective good, the proportion of unionised jobs had already fallen from a third in the Fifties to a quarter by 1980. Membership in civic clubs, from the Red Cross to the PTA, collapsed too. Unsurprisingly, time devoted to informal socialising spiralled downward. The ties that bind, from the Post Office to the coffee klatsch, withered.

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This collapse in unifying institutions has affected Americans psychologically. These days, and in a far cry from the halcyon days of the New Deal, just 2% of Americans believe the federal government does the right thing “just about always”. That, of course, begs the question: amid so much cynicism, so much disdain for the powers-that-be, how is it that USPS has retained its place in the hearts of the nation? Ironically, and especially in rural areas, the answer might have something to do with the decline of public institutions generally.

For while, in 1940, Americans in the hills of Appalachia or the flat lands of Nebraska would have counted on the Rural Electrification Administration for power, or the Farm Home Administration for loans, to say nothing of churches and social clubs — for thousands of isolated communities the post office is all that’s left. It hardly helps, Jacobs says, that rural Americans rely on USPS far more than their urban peers. “There is material dependency,” he says, not least when even Amazon upon the USPS for unprofitable “last mile” deliveries right across rural America.

Certainly all this — the way post offices tie Americans both to their rulers and each other — helps explain the abiding power of folks like Mark Jamison. But so too, surely, does their individual hard work. As postmaster, after all, Jamison lived next door to his office. At night, he sat on the front porch strumming his guitar, his five dogs all there at his side. Neighbours would stop and seek his counsel. “I drew the line at getting packages at 10pm,” Jamison says. But anyone in Webster who needed a neighbour had one in their postmaster.

It’s something that’s becoming rarer every year. Social solidarity begins with civic society and ends with private friendships. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville was gobsmacked by Americans and their unerring sociability. But since 2000, the time Americans devote to socialising has collapsed by 30%. In 1990, nearly half of all Americans reported having five or more close friends. Today, slightly less than a quarter can say the same, even as 12% have no close pals at all.

That reality is surely true in Webster, North Carolina, a place that may yet lose even more. The town still has a building called a post office — but budget cuts mean it no longer has a postmaster. Now that Jamison has retired, there are no plans to replace him. Ultimately, then, the story of the post office speaks to a wider human disconnect. Those ties that bind, from postmasters up, are tattered and frayed. And without common places to meet, and chat, and get their jars opened, Americans have simply quit being neighbours. “I wish more neighbours trusted more,” Jamison says. “But they have good reason not to.”

Another company ship was sent to investigate, but neither vessel could find any pirates, and if this were a cinematic recreation, it’s at this point that someone would say: “That was no cannon”.

Indeed it wasn’t a cannon. Hundreds of miles away a volcanic eruption of earth-shattering proportions had begun on Mount Tambora, an explosion so large as to be rated as “super-colossal” on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. The consequences for those in the vicinity were truly catastrophic. But the impact on the wider world and history would also be enormous.

For obvious reasons, when we think of historical disruptions and their cultural impact we tend to the think of plagues. Everyone now knows that Boccaccio wrote The Decameron following the Black Death and Shakespeare composed Lear during a plague lockdown, while 19-year-old Isaac Newton came up with the theory of gravity on a similar “lost” plague year.

Yet the volcano is a little-appreciated driver of history, and bumper explosions can have truly dramatic effects too. An eruption in AD536 brought about the coldest period in recorded history and sealed the final fate of Rome, while most likely playing a part (along with the Plague) in the rise of Islam; an Indonesian volcano in 1257 led to a famine in England that spurred baronial unrest and the development of Parliament. The explosion of Laki in Iceland in 1783 was followed by the French Revolution. And one of the most influential novels in human history came about from a lost year caused by Mount Tambora.

The Tambora eruption was 1,000 times as big as that of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, and the sound could be heard 2,000 miles away — which is like an explosion in Cyprus or Lebanon being heard in Swindon. It left a crater 4 miles wide, and produced enough ash to cover Britain up to its knees; within 24 hours, the ash cloud covered an area the size of the continental United States.

Some 12,000 people had lived in the province of Tambora; only 26 survived, the rest killed by liquified rock at temperatures reaching 1,000 degrees. One village had simply sunk, and where it once stood was a lake 18ft deep. Almost all animal and plant life was killed, and geologist Charles Lyell wrote that “the darkness occasioned in the daytime by the ashes in Java was so profound, that nothing equal to it was ever witnessed in the darkest night”.

As the ash floated up into the atmosphere, it blocked out the sun, so that when spring arrived in the northern hemisphere the sun’s rays appeared alarmingly feeble. The rains came down in May and June 1816 at twice the normal rate. In Geneva, it was said to be so dark that candles were needed at midday.

Brown snow fell in central Europe; in Italy it was red. In England, the strangely-coloured skies were observed by JMW Turner, and would help to influence his characteristic style. The crops failed across Europe, the worst affected area being Germany, France, Switzerland and Ireland. In Wales, too, small armies of hungry people began to be seen, an echo of a previous time.

In the United States, still an infant nation nestled on the coast, people observed a strange “dry fog”, which made the sunlight red. There was snow in New England in the middle of summer, and widespread harvest failure, spurring rapid colonisation of the interior.

Some coastal states lost up to a third of their population to this exodus, one of the worst affected being Vermont. From the small town of Norwich, on the border with New Hampshire, the Smith family left for the better pastures of western New York, a region known as the Burned-over district because it had been so heavily affected by recent religious revivals. This new environment particularly affected their 11-year-old son, Joseph, who subsequently went through a series of religious experiences that would a decade later culminate with the Book of Mormon.

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The worst affected region of Europe was around the Alps, with desperate hunger suffered in France, Germany and Switzerland. In the Rhineland, one man became so frustrated with the problem of feeding horses that he began work on a horse-less form of transport. The result was Karl Drais’s velocipede, the prototype of the bicycle. (A few years later he also invented the typewriter.)

But the terrible conditions in the Alps failed to deter Britain’s leading romantic poet from heading to Switzerland on summer holiday.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a precocious young man, filled with great talent, self-confidence and terrible political opinions. Of all dead celebrities, Shelley would probably be the most popular — and annoying — on social media. He once suggested an alliance of “enlightened, unprejudiced members” to resist “the coalition of the enemies of liberty” ( 963  2.2K ) and declared of his fellow radicals that “You are many, they are few” ( 10K  21K ).

Like many political idealists, Shelley was an awful human being, especially to his first wife, and at this point had run off with the 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, a talent in her own right, hardly surprising when she was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, two great left-wing political philosophers of their day.

Sailing along the Rhine during their elopement, Shelley and Godwin had both been inspired by the “monstrous, inhuman appearance of several of the huge German labourers on board”, as Richard Holmes put it, as well as the schlosses they drifted by, one of which was a Castle Frankenstein. That summer their journey to stay at Lord Byron’s rented villa in Switzerland was marked by difficult weather, and impassible roads. Then, upon reaching their destination, they couldn’t row on Lake Geneva because of the rain and wind.

Byron, increasingly gloomy with the weather, was writing a rather downbeat poem at the time, called “Darkness”:

“All earth was but one thought—and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devoured.”

And they were going to be stuck with him for weeks.

The freakishly cold weather forced the group, along with Byron’s doctor John William Polidori, indoors where they sat around a fire night after night and began to read German ghost stories. Then Byron suggested they each write one themselves.

Godwin agonised over her subject. The group had previously discussed the ideas of galvanism and Erasmus Darwin’s speculation on the generation of life. There was great excitement, and anxiety, at the time at the deeper questions of life and death, in particular the Vitalism debate, and the question of how life starts. Scientists such as Luigi Galvani in Italy and Franz Anton in France had experimented on animating dead animals with electricity.

Mary Godwin was fascinated by all this and its uncomfortable potential. When she was 14 her father had taken her to see the brilliant scientists Humphry Davy give a lecture on chemistry. Davy spoke of future experiments in which man would “interrogate Nature with Power… as a master, active, with his own instruments.”

A few days after the competition began she had what she described as a “waking dream” in the middle of the night in which “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”

Godwin began to write her story.

All the men dashed theirs off relatively quickly. Godwin, though, took 14 months. Three weeks before the birth of her daughter, in August 1817, the now-married Mary Shelley handed in the manuscript – Frankenstein. And when the book came out, almost nobody noticed. It sold just 500 copies, and most people thought it had been written by a man – most likely Shelley’s husband or father.

What a waste of her lockdown — or so she thought.

Among the other stories written in this competition, The Vampyre would have a huge cultural impact on the birth of horror. It was written by neither of the famous poets but by Dr Polidari — and yet when it was published, the magazine incorrectly attributed it to Byron. Eventually Frankenstein, too, would have a huge influence on culture, in this case in the realm of science fiction.

Although the book initially failed to have an impact, over the course of the 1820s, Mary Shelley’s creation grew more and more famous, pushed by often scandalous stage adaptations. One censorious newspaper begged its readers: “DO not take your wives, do not take your daughters, do not take your families!!! – The novel itself is of a decidedly immoral tendency” and called it “PREGNANT with mischief.” Obviously exactly the sort of publicity that will guarantee seats.

Shelley’s lockdown story would become one of the most influential novels in history, encapsulating mankind’s Promethean dilemma, our fears of boundless control over nature (not coincidentally, the novel used weather as a mood-setter). The plays, however, took huge liberties with the story, which came to have more of an influence on our idea of Frankenstein due to subsequent film adaptations. Frankenstein went from being an obsessive but idealistic figure, representative of the radical optimism of the age, into the prototype mad scientist muttering “the fools, the fools” in his lab while thunder and lightning raged outside. Likewise the Monster, an articulate and thoughtful figure in the novel who ruminates on man’s great inhumanity, became a sort of mindless Munster character with bolts on the side of his head.

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Two hundred years later, this story in all its incarnations still exercises a powerful grip on the popular imagination, still informs our fears about “playing God” in areas such as genetics and bioscience, and even our concerns about the things we do to nature in the wake of the coronavirus.

The explosion of 1815, and the lost year it caused, brought about all sorts of unintended consequences; just as our lost year will, too. How we live, how we work, how we treat our sick and old. Almost certainly, the huge focus on medical technology necessitated by Covid-19 will have beneficial knock-off on effects.

Millions of lives have been altered in ways we had no control over because of powers beyond on control, and pushed us to explore, and to think, and to write. And out there somewhere is the man or woman who has written the next Frankenstein.

Hers is a weird and engaging and extremely funny take on Shelley’s classic. It bounces between past and present and imagines where our current obsession with identity – and its reconstruction – will end as technology opens up endless possibility.

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There are two Marys narrating this story. The first is Mary Shelley, back in the 19th century, recounting how she came to create her own tale of Frankenstein and his monster; the second is Ry (short for Mary) Shelly, who stars in the modern version.

Ry is a transgender – or “hybrid” – doctor experimenting with the idea of what a human is. Half-male, half-female, “they” (preferred pronoun) describe themselves as “liminal, cusping, in between, emerging, undecided, transitional…” Ry is keen to explore what might come next.

Enter Victor Stein. The celebrated tech visionary and modern-day monster maker is working at the cutting edge of the discipline of “accelerated evolution”. He wants to create a superior species, which would be unaffected by distinctions such as race, gender and sexuality. “You aligned your physical reality with your mental impression of yourself,” Stein says to Ry. “Wouldn’t it be a good thing if we could all do that?”

Stein’s aim, though, is to go beyond Ry’s mere transgenderism. He’s more interested in transhumanism: the idea that human beings should be able to so thoroughly augment their bodies that they become superhuman. Gender identity is the leaping off point for Winterson’s book. It then poses the question: where should we stop? Once we have transcended gender, where next?

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One step behind Stein is Ron, his dodgy business partner, who sees bodies as having an essential purpose: for sex. So he is building sex bots – they are all “girls”, with “top-grade silicone nipples” and “extra-wide splayed leg position”. They lack humanity but are “indistinguishable from the human form”.

He may be an unreconstructed sexist, but Ron has the funniest lines. He is determined to make the country of Wales the epicentre for sex bots, and argues that giving men access to silicone women will solve the problem of rape and sexual abuse.

The sexbots are totally compliant, in a way that should send shivers down the neck of any woman who has been the victim of domestic or sexual coercion. Ron says that the sexbots are a very good thing indeed because, horror-upon-horror, sometimes women say ‘no’ to sex.

When these bots are rolled out, human on human interaction will be unnecessary. But what happens when relationships are dehumanised? That, I think, is what Winterson is trying to decipher. And it’s this part of the book made me shudder. I’ve explored this myself, when writing about the effects of paying for sex. It’s dangerous.

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The book hints at unhappy consequences if we replace human life as we know it. “The monster once made cannot be unmade. What will happen to the world has begun,” muses Frankissstein‘s Mary. It suggests to me that if we indulge that desire to change a body, and take it to its limits, then we are heading for monumental disaster.

Winterson clearly had fun writing this book – and parts of it are hilarious. But there are other parts that are dark and difficult. It is obvious to those of us who have been embroiled in debates surrounding the validity of constructed identity, that natal females will not be best served by the implementation of new technologies. Dr Stein’s dodgy experiments point to womb transplants one day becoming the norm for trans women; Ron’s sex bots may soon become the partner of choice for porn-weary men.

In the Frankissstein future, love may not exist at all. Flesh will be a thing of the past, and bodies will be built like machines. The book seeks to shift our perspective on humanity, I think, and the purpose of being. We are, it suggests, close to a future in which humans are no longer the smartest beings on the planet. It also implies we are the architects of our own evolutionary downfall. Technology today is allowing us to shape our notions of sex and gender; tomorrow, it will shape our end.

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In a recent interview, Winterson admitted a certain ambivalence regarding gender: “I don’t really think of myself as female or male, I just think of myself as me. I’m not even sure I see myself as human. I don’t feel particularly human.”

I often say I don’t know what being a woman ‘feels like’, usually in response to those who argue about the notion of a gendered brain. I merely feel human, I say. Frankissstein, however, imagines a time when even feeling human will be a thing of the past – and that is monstrous indeed.