3 ideas
In Clemente Palma's 1934 Peruvian novel, written in Spanish, a scientist uses radiation to turn the images of Hollywood film stars recorded on celluloid into living, embodied copies. The copies cannot last, and they inevitably fade away. The episode is an early Latin American science-fiction case of technology manufacturing people from media images, and of that creation failing to endure.
Read this way, the novel treats film celebrity as a separate, manufactured entity that audiences desire. Taken to its conclusion, that fantasy produces beings with the glamour of the image but none of the durability of real life.
The scientist's radiation succeeds at the dramatic act of animation and fails at keeping what it animates alive. The narrative separates the power to bring something into existence from the ability to make it last. Scientific mastery that achieves creation still falls short of permanence.