About Frankenstein

By Mary Shelley · first published in 1818 · Science Fiction

Mary Shelley began Frankenstein in the summer of 1816, when she was eighteen, during a rainy holiday at Lake Geneva where Lord Byron challenged his guests to write a ghost story each. What she produced was something new: a tale of horror in which the terror comes not from the supernatural but from a laboratory.

Victor Frankenstein, a gifted student, discovers how to animate dead matter and builds a living being. The moment it opens its eyes he is disgusted by what he has made and runs away. The rest of the novel follows the consequences. The creature is not the grunting monster of the films. He teaches himself to speak and read, longs for company, and turns violent only after every human he meets, starting with his maker, rejects him. Readers have argued for two centuries over which of the two is the real monster.

The book is often called the first science fiction novel, and its questions about what inventors owe to the things they create have not aged. It is told as a story within a story. This preview contains the opening letters of Robert Walton, an explorer sailing for the North Pole, who will soon pull a half-frozen stranger from the ice.