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   Ben Royce 🇺🇦 (benroyce@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Mar-2025 11:29:23 JST Ben Royce 🇺🇦

   #womensHistoryMonth

   What do many consider the first #scienceFiction?

   One of the first works of #horror (certainly #bodyHorror)?

   #MaryShelley's "#Frankenstein"

   Written as a *teenager*

   A teenager who had recently lost a baby

   I think that's key

   Horror not from taking life

   But creating life

   She went to Switzerland with her lover Percy Shelley who was fleeing creditors in Britain

   The summer was cold and rainy so Lord Byron (yes him) proposed a #ghostStory #writingContest

   I think she won

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     Ben Royce 🇺🇦 (benroyce@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Mar-2025 11:29:23 JST Ben Royce 🇺🇦

     in reply to

     footnote:

     that summer, 1816, wasn't just unnaturally cold and rainy in Switzerland, the whole world felt it. It was called "the year without a summer." There was famine from crop failures all over the world

     this was all due to the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia

     so we can say, via the creativity of one bored cold teenager cooped up with nothing better to do except write, that we owe "Frankenstein" partly to massive climate disruption from a volcano

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora

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     Ben Royce 🇺🇦 (benroyce@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Mar-2025 11:29:23 JST Ben Royce 🇺🇦

     in reply to

     an interesting connection:

     it was #LordByron who proposed the #ghostStory #writingContest that led to #MaryShelley writing "#Frankenstein", and he was the father of another #womensHistoryMonth notable: #AdaLovelace

     her story is well known, but less well known is that she predicted #AI

     she rejected it

     her rejection was not without teeth, because a later champion of AI you might have heard of, #AlanTuring, spent an inordinate amount of time refuting her critique

     https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/ada-lovelace-worlds-first-computer-programmer-who-predicted-artificial

     Steve's Place repeated this.
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     Ben Royce 🇺🇦 (benroyce@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Mar-2025 11:29:23 JST Ben Royce 🇺🇦

     in reply to

     "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis, but it has no power of anticipating any … relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with."