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This article traces the association of the Promethean with the daemonic in sf from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) to Ridley Scott's recent films, Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017). It explores the logic by which Promethean optimism - that is to say, the progressive belief in science as both enlightenment and salvation, as symbolized by the classical legend of Prometheus stealing the secret of Are from the gods to give to humanity - gives way to what Eugene Thacker has called the 'horror of philosophy'. Shelley's novel is perched ambiguously between both optimism and scepticism, as registered by her use of the older, Latinate 'daemon' to describe the Creature, meaning originally a benign supernatural being. The Creature, though, is viewed by all the other characters in terms of the Middle French 'demon', meaning an evil and possessive spirit. Shelley therefore conflates the etymology of both words, an elision exacerbated in the Alien films where the Xenomorph, in keeping with Thacker's philosophical turn, is wholly malevolent. The article will conclude by briefly suggesting how a new breed of Neo-Prometheans have theorized a recuperation of the myth as imperative to living with the existential crises of the twenty-first century.
Paradise Lost
In a lecture given to the Royal Society of Literature in 1825, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, building on the work of the German Idealist philosopher F.W.J. Schelling, described the myth of Prometheus, 'the most venerable, and perhaps the most ancient, of Grecian mythi', as a 'philosopheme' (Coleridge 2007: 1267). This term denotes a fundamental unit of philosophy, occurring within, but necessarily differentiated from, myth, which Coleridge understands as a pre-philosophical synthesis of metaphysics and poetry. Within this synthesis the 'efficient presence' of 'the philosophic mind' manifests itself in 'the sublime mythus' of reason's genesis (1267). For Coleridge, the process described in the Prometheus myth initiates an irreparable rupture which announces the overcoming of myth by reason. Reason perfects itself in myth before ultimately consuming and transcending it as a superior mode of thought. It emerges out of its own genesis myth as something fundamentally non-mythical - an alien element emerging from within a host body. For the most part, Coleridge's conception of the Prometheus myth adheres to the Enlightenment paradigm whereby reason engineers the elevation and perfection...