If you're feeling lost, unloved and lonely, despair not - solace may be just a microchip or two away

Two hundred years ago an 18-year-old woman named Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who would eventually give birth to four children - long since returned to dust and all but forgotten to humanity - conceived of her most famous offspring, one whose name endures to this day: Frankenstein.

So could the staying power of the 19th-century literary character, together with the story of his unrequited, murderous quest for love in the form of a man-made soul mate, explain the 21st century fascination with a robot called Geminoid F?