Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

By Mary Shelley

1818

Gothic / Science Fiction

Mary Shelley's 1818 novel — written when she was 20, during a ghost-story competition with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron — tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a Swiss scientist who discovers how to animate dead matter and assembles a creature from purloined body parts. Repulsed by what he has made, Victor abandons the creature, setting off a chain of catastrophe that follows him from Geneva to the Arctic. The book is widely credited as the first work of science fiction and reads, two centuries on, as a parable about infohazards, the burden of guilt over what one creates, and the moral status of new minds brought into the world.