Title page -- Copyright page -- Table of contents -- Chapter One The Frankenstein Myth, Scientism, and Generative Anthropology -- Four Stories, One Formula -- Defending the Mad Scientist Plays God Formula -- Resisting Victimary Attitudes -- More Criteria for Counting as a Story that Builds Up the Frankenstein Myth -- Scientism as the Reduction of Anthropology to Biology -- Studying to Say Almost Nothing of the Origin of Language -- On That Which Necessarily Must Have Happened Accidentally -- The Exchange of Abortive Gestures of Appropriation -- Experience of the Object-as-Sacred: Revelation without Cognition -- Experience of the Object-as-Esthetic: Imaginary Possession, Recognized Inviolability (To and Fro) -- The Object-as- Cosmological: From Good (Minimal) Scienceto Scientism -- Exchangeability and Desacralization -- Tortured Matter, Multiple Errors -- Chapter Two Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818): Experiment and Irreversibility -- Two Ways of Approaching the Book and Its Author -- Victor's Early Career: Discovery and Experiment -- Irreversible Experiment and the Event-Structure ofScientific Revelation -- The Mock-Creation Scene of Failed Integration -- The Vain Scientist as Pseudo-Savior -- A Concluding Retrospective -- Chapter Three Allegories of Playing God in The Island of Dr. Moreau -- H. G. Wells and Biological Thinking -- Moreau Playing the God of Punctualist Creation Theology -- Moreau Playing the Gradualist "God" of Liberal Theology -- Moreau as One Who Believes in Scientific Species-making (The Atheist Plays God) -- The Island of Mr. Prendick -- On the Mercy-killing of the Leopard Man -- Hypnotism and the Unnatural Language of the Beast People -- Prendick's Farewell -- Chapter Four Karel Capek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)Mechanical Not Erotic -- R.U.R. as Rebellious Heir to Frankenstein and Moreau.

To Believe in an Economy of Mechanical Value -- Android Automata and the Comedy of Baffled Activism -- Altered Androids and Mechanical Resentment Mobilized -- Committee Robots and Primary Humanoids -- Capek's Originary Script and the Popularity of Robots -- Chapter Five Blade Runner: Minimizing the Difference of the Impossible Human -- Blade Runner as Postmodern Frankenstein: Contesting the Nondifference Thesis -- Corporate Science and Postmodern Paranoia: Tyrell as Scapegoat -- Falling in Love with the Impossible Human -- Victimary Thinking and the Human/Replicant Boundary -- On the Vanity of Eldon Tyrell -- Batty's Enigmatic Gesture of Rescue -- On the Dying Lines of Roy Batty -- Chapter Six Afterword: Sharing the Human Scene -- Inequality and Mad Science: Imagining a Mind-Materializer -- Sharing Our Origin in Language -- Endnotes -- Notes to 1 / Minimal Anthropology -- Notes to Two / Shelley's Frankenstein -- Notes to Three / H. G. Wells's Moreau -- Notes to Four / Karel Capek's R.U.R -- Notes to Five / Scott's Blade Runner -- Notes to Six / The Human Scene -- Works Cited -- Primary Sources (Instantiations of the Frankenstein Myth) -- Secondary Sources -- INDEX.