The history and future of technology and humanity or on winding paths that often intersect at interesting places. Jeanette Winterson illustrates these complications in her novel, Frankissstein, which was recently longlisted for the Booker Prize for fiction. Frankissstein, like the monster (or rather the monster’s creator) that inspired it, is a novel about amalgamation and evolution whether it’s sex robots, the early days of feminism, transgender identity or various genres of fiction. It is the melding of a biographical story of which we know the end to a fictional story (and a future) that we do not.

The novel centers on two main narratives cobbled together to create a portrait of humanity’s drive to create a facsimile of life. The heroes in each story struggle to develop their pursuits in times of gender, technological and political upheaval. Mary Shelley is inspired to write the story of Frankenstein while also living with the legacy of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, whose revolutionary ideas have just taken root in 19th Century Europe. The other, modern-day hero is Ry, a transgender male doctor who finds himself deeply attracted to a genius cryonics expert, Dr. Victor Stein, who has recently invested in sexual robotics.

The story oscillates between Shelley’s struggle to write her famous novel (while also trying to be taken seriously by her famous husband’s poet friend Lord Byron) and Ry’s struggle to navigate a world in which humans, sexuality, technology and robotics are colliding as they all hurl recklessly into the future. Winterson aptly shifts from one narrative to the other with a prose fitting for their respective ages. Mary’s story is written in a classic style with a 19th Century flourish. Ry’s account is more direct and driven by dialogue.

You almost feel like you’re reading a biographical account of the stale, musty mansion on a Geneva lakeside inhabited by Mary, Percy Shelley, Byron, Byron’s girlfriend Claire and a Dr. Polidori. They argue incessantly with Byron about the perceived innate weakness of women’s character while Mary internally ruminates about how to construct a novel about re-animating a corpse and the monstrosity of the man who re-animates him. Their arguments about the nature of women foretells the present-day debate about Mary Shelley’s work not being taken as seriously as her husband’s work by literary scholars even though Mary’s book gave birth to an entire genre of influential literature, comics and film that lasts until this day.

Her narrative eventually takes a metafiction trajectory as Victor Frankenstein, the monster she created, comes to life and confronts her, begging to end his existence. She also learns about the transition of humans to machines after a conversation with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter.

From Ry’s perspective, Mary’s manifestation of Victor Frankenstein is gathering human body parts and experimenting with transferring brain capacity to an artificial source. Victor spouts an ideology centered on the transferability of human consciousness from our biological bodies to a technological being. Victor idolizes a contemporary of Alan Turing and feels that the future belongs not to humans but to a species of machines created by humans.

Frankissstein is a constant exercise of references backwards and forwards, inserting fiction into non-fiction and vice versa. There is one scene in Ry’s narrative where Victor sums up the fate of humanity once the robots and AI take over, echoing Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandius” which is odd for a book named for his wife’s novel. Victor also offers Ry his heart at one point, an allusion to Mary Shelley’s possessing Percy’s physical heart after his death.

While Frankissstein’s format is built on the connected stories of people driven to animate other beings, Winterson is also forming an amalgamation of different fiction genres: historical, sci-fi, cyberpunk and speculative. In doing this, Winterson is in her own lab, trying to animate the future of fiction, where the lines between genres and style are blurred. Just as she smudges two different eras together, the author tries to show that we are fighting the same old problems in new settings.

Frankissstein argues that we do not truly know what the future holds for us in art, gender, medicine, sex and life. And no matter how much we fear it or try to shape it, the future has a tendency to take on a life of its own.