According to John Clute and Peter Nicholls’s in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, “a ‘Gothic’ is a romantic novel which has a strong element of the mysterious or the supernatural,” (Clute 510). More specifically, the Gothic as pertaining to science fiction (SF) is, “The Thing in the Cellar,” (Clute 511). It is the Thing (be it monster, man, virus, etc.) lurking beneath the surface, waiting to wreak havoc on every story of exploration, discovery, or invention.

One key element of gothic fiction is the gothic body—traditionally synonymous with the abject or monstrous body—which represents some dark secret of the protagonist, his family, or his society. The reanimated creature of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus, made up of bits and pieces of corpses, is a prime example of the othered or outcast gothic body. Over the past two-hundred years, however, the gothic body has evolved from the Modified Other to the Modified Self. Bruce Sterling’s novel The Artificial Kid, featuring a society where body modification is the norm, is a prime example of the new gothic body.

The gothic body has not only evolved in fiction, though. It has progressed from the pages of SF stories to the street. For example, Shelley Jackson’s novel-in-progress, Skin, will be tattooed, one word at a time, on the bodies of willing participants, and, “will be published nowhere else, and the author will not permit it to be summarized, quoted, described, set to music, or adapted for film, theater, television or any other medium,” (http://ineradicablestain.com/skin.html). Participants in Jackson’s work, rather than reading about a modified monster or man, will modify themselves, becoming gothic bodies themselves.