Much has been written and said about that rainy night of storytelling on Lake Geneva. If we close our eyes and concentrate, we can find ourselves perched on the windowsill. We can take a peek inside and listen to the stories they shared with each other until wee hours of the morning—every word, every uncomfortable silence.
It was 1816. What a strange time that was! The year without summer. Mount Tambora in Indonesia had erupted, causing a massive global climate disruption. All year there had been a sharp smell of sulphur in the wind. Increasing tensions were brewing on the horizon, shaping international relations anew. Argentina would declare independence soon while the outcome of the long Napoleonic Wars and the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo continued to remould Europe. The Swedish and the Norwegians had not been getting along previously, to put it mildly. Dualities of “us” versus “them” echoed everywhere and treaties were made only to be obeyed and then blatantly disobeyed.
The world was changing, fast and furious.
It was the year Lord Byron wrote Darkness, imagining an apocalyptic end for our planet. This was not the voice in She Walks in Beauty, surely one of the most beautiful poems in the history of literature. It was a much more pessimistic voice. A gloomier era. Against this eerie background Frankenstein was born.
Writers are the sons and daughters of their time and yet this particular writer was far ahead of her time.
Mary Shelley. Not even 18 years old then. The creator of Frankenstein.
The mother of science fiction.
Did she get the recognition she deserved?
A group of friends were spending the evening at Byron’s house—a grandiose villa with a stunning view of the lake. It had been raining incessantly for days, the sky various shades of molten grey. The guests were members of the literati—writers, poets, devoted readers.
Let’s focus on the host for a moment.
Byron, the maverick, the Romantic poet and playwright, the acerbic satirist, the boy lord (he was only a child when he was given the title of lord and only 20 years old when he took his seat in the House of Lords)….
Byron the animal lover (when he was a student at Cambridge he was so upset to learn that dogs were not allowed that he brought in a bear instead. He would then build his own menagerie with monkeys, falcons, eagles…)… Byron the aristocrat, the eccentric, the exile… Byron, the Greek hero, the supporter of the oppressed. Always larger than life. Charismatic. Hypnotic. You would either fall in love with him, and many did, to such an extent that his wife coined the term “Byronmania” (or Byromania), or you would strongly dislike his endless ego. There was no middle ground with him.
It was the same Byron who that night by the Lake Geneva asked his guests to each produce a ghost story.
And they did.
But no one expected a teenager to win that strange competition of talents.
Mary Shelley.
Frankenstein was both a gothic horror story and a science fiction story simultaneously. In other words, in one night, the young Mary invented two genres at once. And yet, why is it that her name has been posthumously mostly identified with the former but less so with the latter?
That is because the gothic as a genre has been largely attributed to the feminine and the sci-fi as a genre to the masculine. And this is a duality, yet another duality, that needs to be smashed.
Mary Shelley was the mother of science fiction.
But we almost never connect her name to Blade Runner or Terminator or Matrix, just like we don’t necessarily connect it to Solaris or Neuromancer or The Left Hand of Darkness. But in reality a whole gamut of science-fiction movies and novels and novellas owe their beginnings to her fabulous mind.
In this Age of Angst and Divisive Social Media and Undivinable AI, as we are beginning to realise that we might have unleashed a runaway technology beyond our wildest imagination, and probably beyond our power and control, Frankenstein remains an incredibly prescient story to remember.
Alongside the woman who gifted this important genre to all humanity.
A very welcome post. Of course there are other prior claimants for the invention of SF, including Margaret Cavendish, but it’s important to dispose of any notion of SF as a ‘masculine’ genre. Apart from Le Guin, whom you referenced, there have long been many notable female authors in the field; just from quick recollection there are classics like Octavia E Butler, Andre Norton (one from my formative years), Anne McCaffrey, through to more recent names like Ann Leckie, Becky Chambers, Martha Wells, and N K Jemisin. And plenty more besides.
It also struck me that 1816 was the year before Jane Austen’s death and presumably she was writing Persuasion at the time. I
I’m always fascinated by the way certain things turn out to be synchronous.
With Frankenstein, Mary Shelley also gave us the first and most profound parable of the modern industrial age: our creations become our undoing and ultimate destruction. It's interesting that she saw Frankenstein as Promethian where as the contemporary mind thinks of him more as Deus ex Machina.