Did You Know That Mary Shelley Played A Role In The Creation Of The Mecha Genre?

(Art by Richard Rothwell.)

Today is the birthday of Mary Shelley, the woman behind the story of Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus. The story is largely remembered as being one of the earliest examples of science fiction, as well as an interesting piece of gothic horror. Shelley conceived of the idea when her and some friends were challenged by Lord Byron to write a ghost story one gloomy day; inspired by discussions of galvanism, Darwin, and the idea of a corpse being re-animated, Shelley wrote her story about a scientist who gives life to an artificial man, only to abandon the creation when it proves too frightful for him, thus beginning a dreadful tale concerned with knowledge, creation, and the idea of humanity wielding a power it cannot control.

Shelley's story has many similarities to the earlier legend of the Golem of Prague, and predicts many of the themes that would later be used in Karel Capek's play Rossum's Universal Robots; the play's story of humanity creating a servant race that eventually rebels and conquers the world (a plot revisited again and again in science fiction) is foreshadowed when Victor Frankenstein is ordered by the Creature to create a female companion for it, only to destroy it out of fear that the two will become the progenitors of a "race of devils" who will "make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror." Probably somewhat less well known is how Shelley's Creature also influenced the creation of the Mecha genre popularized by Japanese manga and anime, beginning with Tetsujin 28.

As recorded by Frederik L. Schodt in The Astro Boy Essays, Tetsujin's creator Mitsuteru Yokoyama took inspiration from Frankenstein (the film version) in creating his story about a mechanical monster built by humans (in this case, Japanese scientists who wanted a superweapon for the military during World War 2). Unlike the Creature, however, Tetsujin has no agency, and is only as good or evil as the person who commands him via remote control. Yokoyama's creation would go on to influence other mecha stories, such as Go Nagai's Mazinger Z, and would eventually culminate in Guillermo Del Toro's 2013 film Pacific Rim, which gives Shelley's Creature a sideways reference in its tagline "To Fight Monster, We Created Monsters," referring to the Jaegers (mecha) and Kaiju, both of whom are revealed in-story to be artificial constructs used as weapons of war by their respective creators.

Exactly which direction Shelley's story will influence pop culture next is still up in the air, but if one thing is clear, it's that the Creature isn't going away anytime soon.