This May, Liverpool Book Art will be curating a third major exhibition of Book Art in the city’s Central Library. Following the great success of 2016’s ‘Shakespeare Now’ exhibition, organisers have decided to celebrate the fact that 2018 marks 200 years since the first edition of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus’.

Frankenstein is a classic work for a variety of reasons. Not only is it arguably the very first work of science fiction, but it is also a core text of Gothic literature, with Dracula not being published until nearly 80 years later. Its themes of ambition and hubris, ethics and morality, responsibility for the consequence of one’s actions, free will and empathy have been important since the book was first published. Today, they appear hugely relevant, whether considering genetic manipulation and synthetic biology, artificial intelligence and machine learning, or Silicon Valley’s ‘disruptive technologies’.