English writer
Mary Shelley’s gothic-horror masterpiece Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) has come to be viewed as the first genuine science fiction novel. She married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816, two years after they had eloped to the Continent. During 1816 the Shelleys spent much time with Lord Byron and his physician, John William Polidori, in Geneva. During the course of their socializing, the suggestion arose that they should each write a ghost story. Nothing came of Byron's or Percy Shelley's efforts, however Dr. Polidori wrote The Vampyre (1819) and Shelley created Frankenstein.
The increasing critical attention Frankenstein has received in recent years has focused on Mary Shelley herself, on her relation to her father's rationalist philosophy, and on her life with her husband at the time of the book's inception. The novel itself has been analyzed in terms of these concerns, perhaps most fruitfully in studies of its relation to the idea of the "natural man". The monster — who reads Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) — is in a sense a blank slate, and he is driven to violence by the revulsion and persecution of others; he has to learn to be a monster. Alternatively, he can be thought of as an embodiment of the evil latent in mankind, in which case he need merely be given the opportunity to be a monster.
Shelley wrote a further proto-science-fiction novel, The Last Man (1826), set at the end of the 21st century, in which a plague decimates humanity. The surviving Americans invade Europe, and although the war ends before the extinction of humanity, the remaining British are soon reduced through strife to the last man of the title, who strongly resembles Shelley’s late husband; the novel ends as he sails off to nowhere in a small boat. The tale served as a model for much subsequent work by other authors who used its basic idea of a world in which there can be a last survivor.
Selected Bibliography:
Frankenstein (1818)
The Last Man (1826)
Tales and Stories (1891)
Film/TV Adaptations:
Frankenstein (1931)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994)
