Literature and cinema have always had a strange relationship with the idea of ​​technological progress. On the one hand, with the advent of the printing press and refinements in film technology that continue to the present day, both literature and cinema owe much of their success to the technological advances that have brought them to wide audiences. However, even some films and literary works have never shied away from depicting the dangers that the desire for such progress can bring with it. The modern production of science fiction novels and films found its genesis in speculative reflections on the effects such progress might have on the everyday population, and more often than not such speculations were overwhelming. Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein and Fritz Lang's silent film Metropolis are two such works that hold great importance in the general canon of science fiction as they are both seen as the first of their genre. It is often said that Mary Shelley, with her authorship of Frankenstein, brought the science fiction novel to life, bringing it to life as Frankenstein does his monster, and Lang's Metropolis is certainly a candidate for the first true science fiction film (although a case can be made for Georges Méliès' 1902 film Le Voyage Dans la Lune, his film lasted just fifteen minutes while Lang's film, with its original running time of almost three hours and its fusion of both ideas and surprising visual, it is much closer to what we now consider a modern science fiction film). Yet, although both works are separated by the medium in which they are presented, not to mention a period of over two hundred years between their respective releases, they present a shared warning of the dangers facing man… middle of paper… rock." (Shelley, p. 292), and Lang was surely aware that without the wonders of technological progress his visual spectacle would never have appeared on the screen. However, Shelley and Lang, in their works, warn of the dangers of not thinking about progress, of not asking “should we do this?” instead of “can we do this?”, and warn their respective audiences that sometimes it is better, like Captain Robert Walton, to recognize that the journey to progress can be perilous and return to safe shores instead. Works Cited Shelley, Maria. Frankenstein. 1818. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. Norton critical edition. New York: Norton, 1996.