The Birth of Monsters: Mary Shelley and the First Science Fiction

The year is 1816. A massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia two years earlier has thrown the entire Northern Hemisphere into chaos. Crops have failed across Europe. The Thames has frozen solid in summer. And on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the weather has turned so violent that the rain falls sideways, the lightning splits the sky in fury, and the waves of the lake crash against the rocks like angry ghosts demanding entry to the shore.

It is in this atmosphere of natural disaster and human unease that a small group of English travelers has gathered at the magnificent Villa Diodati, a grand estate overlooking the water. They are a remarkable company: the famous Romantic poet Lord Byron, whose dark good looks and scandalous reputation precede him; his personal physician, the young John Polidori; the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, barely twenty-three but already expelled from Oxford for atheism; and Percy's seventeen-year-old companion, a pale, thoughtful young woman named Mary.

Mary Godwin, as she was born, has already lived more life than most people twice her age. She is the daughter of William Godwin, the radical philosopher who wrote about political justice and the perfectibility of human nature, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist writer who died giving birth to her. Growing up surrounded by intellectuals and revolutionaries, Mary learned to think deeply about the biggest questions humans can ask: What is justice? What is our responsibility to one another? What happens when powerful people act without moral restraint?

The group at Villa Diodati has come to this particular corner of Switzerland because Lord Byron has leased the villa and invited his friends to stay. The young Percy Shelley, still not yet the famous poet he will become, has brought Mary along despite the fact that their relationship is deeply controversial. Mary is Percy's step-sister—in a sense, since Percy was briefly married to Harriet Westbrook, a young woman he abandoned when he fell in love with Mary. They are living together without the blessing of marriage, traveling through Europe like modern-day pilgrims, carrying with them Mary's half-sister, Claire, who has attached herself to Byron with her own complicated romantic hopes.

It is a gathering of romantic idealists, young people who believe that the old world is dying and a new one must be born. They talk endlessly about philosophy, about poetry, about the great revolutions that have reshaped the world—political revolutions in America and France, but also intellectual revolutions in science and thought. They read aloud to each other from the ghost stories of German writers, tales of the supernatural that make the night seem even darker and more frightening.

One evening, as the storm rages outside and the candles flicker in the draft, Byron proposes an entertainment. "We are each to write a ghost story," he declares. The challenge ignites their imagination. Who can write the most terrifying tale? Byron himself begins to sketch out a story about a skull-headed lady; Polidori considers a narrative about a skeletal figure; Percy ponders various supernatural possibilities.

But Mary Godwin sits silent, her mind working through darker corridors. She watches the storm, listens to the wind howling through the trees, and asks herself a question. Not a question about ghosts or specters or the supernatural—Mary has no interest in writing a simple ghost story. Her question is different, more profound, more dangerous.

What if a scientist—not a wizard, not a wizard's apprentice, but a man of learning and reason—what if such a man attempted to create life? What would happen? What would be the consequences? And crucially, who would bear responsibility for what came next?

This question, born in the darkness of that Swiss summer, would become the foundation of the novel *Frankenstein*, one of the most important works of fiction ever written. Mary Shelley began her story on June 30, 1816, and over the next several months she would craft a tale that would invent an entirely new literary genre, raise questions about scientific ethics that we are still debating today, and tap into fears about human ingenuity and power that have only grown more relevant with each passing decade.

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To understand why Mary Shelley's question was so revolutionary, we need to understand what it meant to write about science in the early nineteenth century. The word "scientist" itself had not yet been invented—that would not happen until 1834, when William Whewell coined it to describe people like Michael Faraday, who was just then revolutionizing our understanding of electricity and magnetism. In Mary's time, people who investigated the natural world were called "natural philosophers," and they operated in a cultural landscape very different from our own.

The most dramatic advances in natural philosophy were coming from a new understanding of electricity. In 1780, Luigi Galvani had discovered what he called "animal electricity" by demonstrating that the legs of a dead frog would twitch when touched with metal instruments. Galvani believed he had discovered the vital force that animated living creatures—a kind of spiritual electricity that flowed through nerves and muscles. His nephew Giovanni Aldini would later perform spectacular public demonstrations, applying electrical currents to the exposed brain of a hanged murderer and claiming to have made the dead man's face twitch and contort into what looked like grimaces.

These experiments were the talk of Europe. They suggested that life itself might be nothing more than a physical process, something that could be started and stopped, triggered and extinguished, like a machine. If electricity could animate dead tissue, what might it do to dead bodies? What might it do to recently deceased humans? These were questions that made people uncomfortable, questions that suggested the boundary between life and death might be more permeable than anyone had imagined.

Mary Shelley knew about Galvani's experiments. Her husband-to-be Percy Shelley had written a poem about them, and the intellectual circles she moved in were obsessed with the implications of these discoveries. The Romantics, despite their reputation for emotional excess, were deeply interested in science. They saw it as a way of understanding the forces that moved the natural world—the same natural world that inspired their greatest poetry. What interested them was not science as a dry academic discipline, but science as a kind of modern magic, a power that humans might use to reshape the world according to their will.

This is the context in which Mary's question emerged. She was not writing about a fantasy world of sorcery and enchantment. She was writing about something that seemed genuinely possible, something that might actually happen in the near future. Her scientist, Victor Frankenstein, studies natural philosophy at the University of Ingolstadt, learning the latest discoveries in chemistry and electricity. He becomes obsessed with the secret of life itself, and after years of research, he discovers the means by which to animate dead matter. The moment of creation is described with vivid, almost biblical language: a lightning flash illuminates his workshop, and the creature he has assembled from the parts of corpses suddenly opens its yellow, watery eyes.

But here is where Mary's thought experiment diverges from what we might expect. In a simpler tale, the creature would be a monster from the start—evil, violent, dangerous. The story would be about good triumphing over evil, about the scientist's righteous battle against the abomination he has created.

Mary's story is nothing like this. Her creature is initially innocent, even gentle. He emerges into the world with no knowledge of himself or his surroundings, like an infant taking its first breaths. He is curious, eager to learn, desperate for connection. His first actions