A brilliant and eccentric (read “mad”) scientist, aided by a physically grotesque assistant, takes it into his head to play God with dire consequences. Frankenstein? No. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark,” a story published twenty years after Mary Shelley’s Gothic masterpiece.
“The Birth-Mark” is certainly not the most famous Hawthorne story, and it doesn’t even come close to being one of the best. But it has always appealed to me, despite its painfully dated melodrama and—to our twenty-first-century sensibilities—naïve fear of progress (read “science”). But as a piece of speculative fiction, as an example of the nineteenth century’s fear and fascination with scientific progress, and as a tragic romance, I love it. The lead character, a stereotypical mad scientist type, is blinded not by ambition or pride, like many tragic figures—and in the end it isn’t science or progress that dooms him—but love.
We look at scientists differently these days, but our fear of technology run amok lingers. It is, perhaps, even more pervasive now than in Hawthorne’s day. So I thought it might be fun to take the underlying themes of “The Birth-Mark” and place them squarely in the middle of that fear, in a possible future where that fear might be fully realized. For we suspect—well, deep in our hearts we’re pretty damn sure—that it isn’t the scientists who are mad … it’s science itself.