As Time Magazine recently reported, the name given to Hurricane Sandy--Frankenstorm--is an effort to be funny, and to chime in with the spirit of Halloween.
However, given that Sandy has also been described as a "freakish" storm, a hybrid of two disparate storm systems, I don't think the reverberations of the word "Frankenstorm" are all that funny.
It has literary resonance: I am reminded of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's memorable monster. He shares many of the qualities attributed to Sandy: he is a "freakish" "hybrid" of man and beast. Shelley's misshapen monster bears physical resemblance to humans yet he has no soul; in Shelley's time, the soul was the seat of humanity.
Sandy has no soul--the monstrous terms in which it is being discussed makes its monstrosity evident.
Finally, Frankenstein, the monster was a creation of a scientist, who was hubristic enough to engineer a creature into being. In this, Victor Frankenstein, the brilliant scientist of Mary Shelley's novel, offended nature.
Sandy, as Naomi Klein, has indicated, could be a product of geoengineering. Geoengineers
advocate high-risk, large-scale technical interventions that would fundamentally change the oceans and skies in order to reduce the effects of global warming
In other words, they could be the 21st century's rough equivalents of Victor Frankenstein.
Is hurricane Sandy a hideous progeny of our era's Victor Frankensteins?
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