The Summer Mary Shelley Invented Science Fiction
In June 1816, Mary Godwin was eighteen years old and living in a rented villa on the shores of Lake Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Byron’s physician John Polidori, and Byron’s companion Claire Clairmont. The weather was catastrophically bad — cold, dark, and rainy throughout a summer that should have been Mediterranean. They were indoors most of the time, reading German ghost stories aloud and eventually agreeing on a competition: each of them would write a supernatural tale. Byron produced a fragment. Polidori produced The Vampyre, the novella that established the aristocratic vampire archetype later developed by Bram Stoker. Mary produced, over the following months, a story about a scientist who created life and found he could not be responsible for what he had made.
The bad summer of 1816 has a specific cause. On April 10, 1815, the volcano Mount Tambora in what is now Indonesia erupted in the largest volcanic event in recorded history — roughly four times more powerful than Krakatoa. The eruption ejected an estimated 150 to 180 cubic kilometers of material into the atmosphere. The sulfur dioxide reached the stratosphere and spread globally, reflecting sunlight and lowering temperatures worldwide. 1816 became known as the Year Without a Summer. Crops failed across Europe and North America. There were famines, food riots, and significant population displacement. The Swiss region where the Villa Diodati stood experienced the worst June weather in living memory.
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus in this context, and the context matters. The novel’s creation narrative — a scientist who assembles a being from dead matter and galvanic science, animates it, and then recoils from what he has done — was not an abstract gothic fantasy. It was written in a moment when scientific optimism and natural catastrophe occupied the same frame, when the dominant intellectual culture of the Enlightenment (reason can solve the problems of nature) was being tested against an atmospheric event that no amount of reason could address. Victor Frankenstein’s error is not that he creates life. It is that he creates life without accepting responsibility for it. He makes a being and then treats it as something that should not exist.
The creature in the novel — not a monster, a creature, a person, as Mary Shelley is careful to establish through his eloquent first-person account of his own consciousness — is educated, sensitive, capable of love, and driven to violence by systematic rejection. He has been given existence without consent and denied the conditions that make existence bearable. The novel asks who is responsible for this, and its answer is unambiguous: the creator is responsible. Frankenstein spends the novel evading this responsibility. The creature spends it demonstrating the consequences of evasion.
Mary Shelley was the daughter of William Godwin, the political philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, who died of complications from childbirth eleven days after Mary was born. She had grown up in a household that treated ideas as the substance of daily life, had begun a relationship with Percy Shelley when she was sixteen (he was married to someone else), had lost a premature baby the year before Geneva, and was living in circumstances that polite English society found scandalous. She wrote a novel at eighteen, in a rented villa, during an ecological disaster, and it became the foundational text of science fiction and of the ethical question that science fiction has been asking ever since: what do we owe what we make?
The novel was published anonymously in 1818. It was widely assumed to have been written by Percy Shelley, who had provided the preface. The second edition (1823) was published under Mary’s name. The question of how much Percy contributed to the text has been argued by scholars for decades; the current consensus is that the work is substantially and essentially hers, with editorial input from Percy that falls within the normal range of what writers do for each other.
Percy Shelley drowned in a storm off the Italian coast in 1822, at 29. Mary lived until 1851, editing his works, raising their son, writing four more novels, and watching Frankenstein become something she had not entirely intended — a story so elastic that every generation could find in it the specific anxiety it needed. The Victorians read it as a warning about industrial production. The twentieth century read it as a warning about nuclear science. Contemporary readers find in it warnings about artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and the creation of minds whose interests their creators did not account for.
She wrote it to win a ghost story competition during a volcano winter. The story has not stopped being relevant since.