Episode ten: The modern Prometheus – humanism and speculative fiction | Unholy Histories podcast

On a wet night in the summer of 1816, in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, a teenage girl began to imagine a story about a man who creates life. Mary Shelley was eighteen. The novel she wrote that summer – Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus – is now widely recognised as the first work of modern science fiction. Its subtitle points to Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity: a figure beloved of humanists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a symbol of reason, defiance and progress. Its creature, brought to life by science and shaped not by divine will but by circumstance and environment, is, as this week’s panel puts it, a humanist mirror of what it means to be human. This week’s episode of Unholy Histories asks what happened next – and whether science fiction has been, from the beginning, a fundamentally humanist genre.

The tenth episode of our podcast traces the humanist ideas running through two centuries of speculative fiction; from Shelley’s creature and the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, through the feminist utopias of Florence Dixie and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to the radical visions of Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany and the writers who used imagined worlds to challenge racism, imperialism and the limits of gender.

Joining hosts Andrew Copson and Madeleine Goodall this week are S.I. Martin, British historian, author, educator and Humanists UK patron, who specialises in Black British history and literature; and Katie MacGregor Stone, literary critic and researcher of science fiction and utopian literature, who is currently writing a book about Frankenstein.

Together, the panel traces a line from Shelley’s Geneva to the present day. The conversation begins with Frankenstein itself – a novel that put “the science into fiction in a popular way for the first time” and whose creature, as MacGregor Stone argues, embodies the humanist insight that people are shaped by their environment, not born good or bad. That idea connects Shelley to Robert Owen, the utopian socialist who insisted that nurture and environment play a decisive role in who we become, and to the Romantic defiance of her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. The panel then turns to H.G. Wells – “the humanist science fiction writer par excellence” – whose novels The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and Things to Come imagined both catastrophe and the possibility of rebuilding, and whose later campaigns for international human rights placed science fiction’s visionary ambitions squarely in the service of humanist politics.

A central thread is the way writers of colour seized the genre to cut into questions of race and justice. W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story “The Comet” imagined Manhattan’s population wiped out, leaving only two survivors – a Black man and a white woman – free, for a moment, to begin again without racism. Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1903) imagined a hidden, technologically advanced Ethiopian kingdom, offering a different past as well as a different future. And Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Parable of the Sower used time travel and dystopia to place the legacy of slavery and the possibility of communal reinvention at the centre of American speculative fiction. Butler’s work, Martin notes, presents utopian ideals in an almost prosaic way, centring change and “positive fellow feelings” as the basis for a new kind of community.

The episode also traces the long tradition of feminist utopian fiction, from Florence Dixie’s Gloriana, or the Revolution of 1900 (1890) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) to Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Space Woman (1962), which explored the possibilities of relationships across difference on a galactic scale. MacGregor Stone draws attention to the uncomfortable eugenic strand in some of these works – Gilman’s utopia, she argues, was “very much based on the idea of maintaining a kind of pure white womanhood” – and to the ways in which feminist utopianism has at times allied itself with reactionary forces. The conversation then moves to the writers who pushed beyond those limits: Samuel Delany, whose spacers in “Aye, and Gomorrah” anticipated contemporary debates about gender and embodiment; James Tiptree Jr, the pen name of Alice Sheldon, who used science fiction as “a vehicle of potentially transforming the self”; and contemporary writers such as River Solomon, Torrey Peters and Jordy Rosenberg, who continue to expand the genre’s understanding of what gender is and what it could be.

A recurring theme is the contest over what science fiction is for. On the humanist side, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek stands as a landmark: a television series written by a humanist, starring humanists, and grounded in an optimistic vision of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. On the other, the panel does not shy from the genre’s darker currents. Martin traces the line from the imperialism baked into early “lost world” adventures to the white Christian nationalist science fiction promoted today by figures such as Theodore Beale. Science fiction, the panel concludes, is not inherently humanist – but it is fundamentally a human genre, and the humanist tradition within it, from Shelley to Butler, remains among the most vital and transformative threads in modern literature.

Tune in to this week’s episode as we uncover more about the novelists, dreamers and provocateurs who used imagined worlds to ask the most human of questions – and on the long tradition, from Prometheus to the stars, of speculative fiction as a space for humanist thought.

New audio episodes of Unholy Histories arrive every Wednesday, followed by video versions on the Humanists UK YouTube channel every Thursday.