The Birth of the Laboratory: Frankenstein and the First Thought Experiment

The rain fell without mercy on the shores of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816. It had been raining for weeks, so long that the guests at the Villa Diodati had nearly forgotten what sunlight looked like. Lord Byron had proposed they pass the dreary hours by reading ghost stories to one another—German ones, the kind that chilled the blood and made one grateful for the warmth of the hearth. But the stories only sharpened their appetites for the impossible. "We will each write a ghost story," Byron declared, and the challenge hung in the damp air like smoke from the fireplace. Mary Godwin, then Mary Shelley, then just nineteen years old, felt the weight of the task settle upon her shoulders. She was young, unmarried but expecting, traveling with the man who would soon be her husband, surrounded by the most brilliant and dangerous minds of her age—and she could not think of a single story to tell.

This is the founding myth of modern science fiction, and like all founding myths, it has been told so many times that its edges have worn smooth, its texture familiar, its revelations almost predictable. Yet something essential gets lost in the retelling. We remember that Mary Shelley eventually produced Frankenstein; we remember that the novel became one of the most enduring works of literature in the English language; we remember that it emerged from a moment of creative competition and inclement weather. But we often fail to reckon with what this means—that the first great work of science fiction was born not from wonder at technological possibility, not from the intoxication of industrial progress, but from anxiety. From fear. From the specific, articulable dread of what happens when human beings presume to usurp the functions of nature, of God, of creation itself. Mary Shelley's monster was not a triumph of imagination over limitation; he was a nightmare about the consequences of imagination overreaching itself. And this, we shall argue throughout this book, is the essential move of science fiction as a genre: not to celebrate what we might become, but to think through with rigorous care what we will inevitably face when we become it.

The summer of 1816 was not merely a literary anecdote but a convergence of historical forces that made such a novel not only possible but necessary. The previous year, 1815, had witnessed the most catastrophic volcanic eruption in recorded human history: the explosion of Mount Tambora in what is now Indonesia. The eruption ejected so much ash and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere that 1816 became known as the "Year Without a Summer." Crops failed across Europe. Famine followed. In Switzerland, where the Villa Diodati sat perched above Lake Geneva, the weather was so cold and dreary that the guests reportedly stayed indoors for days, reading to each other by candlelight, telling stories to pass the hours of darkness even in the middle of summer. The world's climate had been disrupted by a natural catastrophe, and humanity's relationship with the forces of nature—those forces it believed it understood and could control—had been revealed as fragile, contingent, and ultimately beyond mastery. Mary Shelley did not know about Mount Tambora in the way we now know about it, with our understanding of plate tectonics and atmospheric science. But she knew that something had gone wrong with the world, that the summer was cold and strange, that the boundaries between the natural and the unnatural had become dangerously permeable.

Yet the Tambora eruption explains only the meteorological conditions of the novel's conception. To understand why Frankenstein took the form it did, why the thought experiment that Mary Shelley constructed has proven so durable and so generative, we must understand the intellectual climate in which she wrote—the questions that the Romantic era was asking about science, nature, creation, and the place of human beings within the grand scheme of things. Mary Shelley was not merely a young woman trapped by rain at a lakeside villa; she was the daughter of William Godwin, the radical philosopher of utilitarianism and perfectibilianism, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist theorist who died giving birth to her. She had been raised on questions of social reform, of human perfectibility, of the relationship between knowledge and virtue. She had absorbed, through both nurture and study, the Enlightenment conviction that reason could unlock the secrets of nature and the Romantic counterconviction that such unlocking carried dangers that reason alone could not contain. Percy Bysshe Shelley, her future husband, was one of the greatest poets of the age, and his presence at Villa Diodati ensured that she was immersed in the highest reaches of contemporary thought about imagination, creativity, and the sublime. When Byron asked for ghost stories, he was not merely seeking entertainment; he was participating in a cultural moment that was obsessed with the boundaries between the natural and supernatural, the living and the dead, the created and the creative.

The notebooks that Mary Shelley kept during this period reveal the painstaking process by which her story developed. She struggled, she tells us in the famous introduction she wrote for the 1831 edition of the novel, to find a subject that would "speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror." She tried and failed to imagine stories of ghosts and supernatural visitants, the kind of tale that the others seemed able to produce so easily. It was only when Percy Shelley suggested that "the extraordinary nature of man's employment" might serve as the basis for a story that her imagination caught fire. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated," she recalled thinking; "galvanism had given token of such things." And in that moment, the thought experiment was born: what if we could create life? What would happen if we succeeded? What would be the consequences, not for the creator but for the created? Mary Shelley's genius—her radical departure from the ghost story tradition and her inauguration of something new—lay precisely in her focus on aftermath. The supernatural tale of her contemporaries asked what it would mean if the dead returned; Mary Shelley asked what it would mean if someone made the dead return, and then had to live with having done so. The question was not "Is this possible?" but "What follows if it is?"

The novel that emerged from this moment of inspiration, first published anonymously in 1818 and then with Mary Shelley's name attached in the 1821 edition, tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young Swiss scientist who becomes obsessed with the secret of life. Through years of solitary study and forbidden experimentation, he discovers the means to animate dead matter, and in a fit of manic creation, he assembles a creature from the parts of corpses and brings it to life. The creature, hideous in form, is initially peaceful and even noble; he is an infant in the body of a giant, a blank slate upon which the world will write its lessons. But those lessons, as Frankenstein's creature discovers, are almost uniformly lessons of rejection, abandonment, and violence. The creator flees from his creation; the creation flees from humanity; and in the end, both are destroyed, leaving behind only a trail of corpses and a meditation on the responsibilities that attach to power. The novel is structured as a series of nested narratives—Walton's letters to his sister frame Frankenstein's narrative, which frames the creature's narrative—creating a kind of hall of mirrors in which truth and perspective become unstable, in which the reader is never quite sure whose version of events to trust. This structural complexity is not merely aesthetic; it is thematic. The novel is about the failure of communication, the impossibility of understanding across difference, the way that fear and prejudgment poison even the most promising of relationship