I'd like to hear what the other mock trial cases are so I can read people lawyering them. Reading these comments makes my brain happy.

This should be a book series

I guess it depends on the fictional history of the trial, but I would argue that all successful resuscitations before and after this one resulted in a normal living human.

This one resulted in a horrible monster. How could he have predicted it would be a horrible monster? Science doesn't really recognize "souls" as real, so Dr Frankenstein - a scientist - would have had no reason to think a body made it disparate parts versus an intact corpse would act any differently upon revival.

(Obviously I'm not asking this for real merely just playing the part of a defense attorney here)

Nothing Frankenstein did? He rejected him at the first possible moment, not only that but every person he met treated him in the worst way they could. It is no surprise at all that he behaved how he did, the world left him very little choice.

i'd say you're guilty simply for creating the monster at all: mentally ill or not,digging up dead bodies,sowing them together and bringing them to life is a little beyond what most would see as reasonable even for someone that's insane (you didn't HAVE to create the monster for any reason: you CHOSE to and the amount of work required pretty much requires you to be sane enough to know what you're doing).

also you live in,what? the 1900's give or take? your ass can be locked up or even killed for a LOT less so you were already screwed.

you're guilty and will be lucky if you're not hanged.

If you like fantasy and fairie-like stories, you might enjoy Holly Black books, especially The Cruel Prince. I haven't read it myself, but a lot of people really love it. The second book in the duology just came out and Booktok is all over it :)

1. Lord of the rings

2. Song of Ice and Fire

3. Mistborn series

4. The Stormlight Archive

Ps: I love stories involving witches fairies and stuff, so any famous novels revolving that would be great

>Rule 3.3: Requests for personalized recommendations or suggestions are not allowed. Post instead to our Weekly Recommendation Thread (always CSS stickied at the top of any /r/books page), /r/suggestmeabook or /r/whattoreadwhen. Also try /r/booklists or our Suggested Reading list wiki page. Posts asking users to list their favorite/the best book of a genre, style, etc that don't include an answer and why in the body will be assumed to be recommendation requests and removed.

The most underrated series is Matthew Stover's Acts of Caine.

Downvoting doesn't make you any less wrong.

I think it's a mistake to come from the standpoint that "the charge mistakenly likens the Monster to a human child". I think the charge doing that is in your favor. If you try to refute that idea it'll get turned around on you - so make "The charge likens the Monster to a human child" the argument that is in your favor. Start here -

If the charge does assume that the Monster is like Frankenstein's child, then we must also ask ourselves a question about fathers and parents - when is it that a parent is no longer culpable for the actions of the child? It could be argued generally that this happens whenever the child reaches the "age of reason", whatever that might be for the culture in question. In our culture, that equates to the teen years sometime, but the actual age is not important - it's the autonomy that is gained. When one becomes an adult and stops being a child/minor/whatever, they gain personal autonomy.

Was the Monster acting with autonomy? We have to conclude that he was. He made the conscious decision to do the things that he did with direct influence or instruction from any outside party. Not only that, but he did those things while sustaining his own existence. Did Frankenstein abandon him, like so many fathers abandon children? Perhaps, and perhaps what he did was even worse than that (because Frankenstein is definitely morally reprehensible - you can't avoid that and should avoid trying to make him the "good guy" at any point). But if the Monster was a helpless dependent, then he shouldn't have even survived without Frankenstein. He not only survived, but he learned to speak and read while in hiding, from watching people. He was isolated, but he thrived and grew - all on his own. Did the father influence the child? Even with nothing more than absence this is inevitable - parents always influence their children. But did the father instruct or force the child - the Monster - to do what he did? No - he did that on his own completely.

Further, in his own narrative the Monster says that he initially wanted to connect with humans. It was only after mistreatment after mistreatment that he decided that he was going to start killing humans. If Victor was responsible, why didn't the Monster immediately begin killing after Victor abandoned him? The answer is because the Monster chose to do those things, and Victory Frankenstein was not involved in that decision. He created the person that made the decision, but he did not motivate it.

Finally: Did Victor Frankenstein intend to create a creature which would cause death? Absolutely not. His intentions were... sort of good. His real intention was to self aggrandize and be a little god. Still, at least he wanted to do so by creating, by bringing forth life from death. It was the Monster, while isolated completely from it's "parent", who decided that humans did not deserve to live. What did Victor Frankenstein ever do that would motivate the Monster to kill? Well... I guess the only thing would be that Victor did abandon him. But every single person the Monster meets rejects him. If Victor Frankenstein is responsible for the Monster's actions, so are we all, every single one of us who would run in fear at the sight of him. And I know I'm not responsible, and I don't think you are either - so that means Victor Frankenstein isn't, just the same.

Anyway, I'm rambling, but I hope this is cogent and maybe even helps. smoke bomb

I vaguely remember that Allingham poem (haven't read Little, Big) but it was decades ago and no way would I have got that reference.

This kind of thing leaves you vaguely paranoid that just about any book might be up to tricks you're not getting.

I haven't read Nabokov's Ada but saw a review of it when it came out, by the New Zealand writer Bruce Mason. He mentioned an offhand phrase that seemed to come out of nowhere, "Te Work-Basket". Mason was alerted by the "Te", which is Māori for "the". Like me he didn't know what "work-basket" was in Māori so he looked it up. "Paro no mahia". Māori has no "s" sound, so that's the closest you can get to "paronomasia" - which is ancient Greek for "pun".

I'm sure the reader's experience was greatly enhanced by that. My reaction was, bugger it.

Frankenstein is guilty of a lot of things but his creation's murders is not one of them. Yes, the way he treats the creature is atrocious.

But the creature murders out of carefully planned selfishness. It shows itself to be intelligent and reasoning and the line of reasoning it chooses to follow is that it can use intimidation, torment and murder to force Frankenstein into creating a companion for it.

The creature's killings aren't the result of a lack of self control or lashing out in a moment of insanity. The creature calculatedly chooses to murder carefully selected targets designed to force Frankenstein into doing its bidding.

I'd plead innocence on the basis that nothing Frankenstein has done causes the creatures cold, cruel, calculating plotting nature. If the creature had randomly lashed out, maybe. But there's nothing random about its actions.

The creature didn't turn into an amoral monster that doesn't know any better due to Frankenstein's neglect. It knows exactly what it's doing and chooses its course of action for maximum effect on Frankenstein.

Frankenstein's careless creation of the monster is an entirely unrelated crime to the monster's rampage.

If OP wants the explanation of why Stephen King wrote as Richard Bachman, it's easiest to just read the intro to that collection.

Thanks for looking into it

such an attention seeker that guy...

No, I just knew it wasn't mine so it felt like stealing.

I have really enjoyed reading it. It's more than 1200 pages long, so plenty to dip into, plenty to contemplate, and plenty to savour. Definitely worth the effort I put into finding it.

Yeah, that's my understanding as well.

Then I read The Long Walk. It's an immediately engaging, yet horrifying, story of a kid from Maine going through something awful but with a shitty ending.

I was like, god damn you published the most Stephen King story ever as "Not Stephen King"

I can't recall. It was the first hint I would get as an adult that the universe listens and hints to us all the time. It was strange to find that book on the sidewalk.

It had a very particular black and white vortex logo too.
I'll have to find it in storage and return to this thread when I do.

I want to say it was something like "the hidden structure of the universe"

Well, there was no precedence to create said monster at all?

Its not like, "what man, I was trying to create life, but like, totally thought I would have the soft lovable cuddly undead. Who ever heard of murderous evil, abomination against humanity sort of undead? Totally surprised me I swear!"

I definitely know what you mean, sometimes the longer a book is, the more intimidating it can seem. I remember reading parts of that book a long time ago, and I also enjoyed his book Diary of a Writer. What other classics did you enjoy?

Hmm.. Well, it seems like it was something that left an impression on you. That's great, I'll have to look into that, thanks.

The primary test for negligence is this:

If a reasonable person would have foreseen the reasonable possibility of harm and would have taken reasonable steps to prevent it happening, and the person in question did not do so, negligence is established.

It would be unreasonable for any person to expect it to be actually possible to stitch together parts from multiple corpses, shock the resultant pile of dead meat with lightning, and instead of it being burnt to a crisp to have it suddenly sit up and question it's existence.

More than this, no reasonable person could be expected to believe, nor to prepare for such a seemingly impossible event occurring, regardless of whether or not they themselves had collected, portioned, and stitched the corpses together, and then sent up a kite with the purpose of catching an unlikely lightning strike.

Because no reasonable person could have truly expected such an outcome as a monster being born - the very notion being ludicrous and utterly impossible to all learned and unlearned men alike - it is unreasonable to expect even a person attempting such a creation to have any preparation whatsoever for its containment, nourishment, or care of any kind.

It would be even more unreasonable to expect such a collection of electrically animated meat to burst out the door and go on a rampage across the countryside, because such things cannot reasonably be expected to ever occur in the first place.

On these grounds, it is unreasonable to expect any person, regardless of any other circumstance, to foresee any harm, or indeed any events whatsoever happening beyond the smell of burning meat on a hospital gurney.

Therefore, you can only be reasonably held accountable for complaints about the smell of overcooked meat being disagreeable, which in the Germany of the 1700's (which is where the creature is literarily created, at the University of Ingolstadt), is not a crime. more than this, the meat was not charred in any way, but instead walked away complaining of existential dread, so that not even a bad smell was involved at all. You are therefore not responsible for the extraordinary and utterly unimaginable events that occurred once the monster leapt up from the table.

No man can be responsible for the impossible, and until the monster actually stood up, every aspect of its existence and behavior was universally considered impossible.

On these grounds, you must be considered guiltless and all charges must be dropped.

Right, definitely, I wish there were those mini standalone libraries in my neighborhood, but unfortunately they're all randomly placed in other parts of the city. If I lived near one I would walk to them all the time. You're quite lucky in that regard. But thankfully the local bookstore never lets me down, so I can't complain too much. I totally agree. They're also sometimes called "Take a Book, Leave a Book" in which you can only take a book if you leave one in its place. But I suppose it's okay to take one without leaving anything, I'm sure plenty of people do that.