7 reactions
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is beautiful
Beautifully tragic at least. It’s one catastrophe after another. It’s very approachable for a 200 year old Novel and I was completely enthralled by her use of language. I’m still completely fascinated by the emotional and philosophical complexities presented in the novel as well. I think it might be one of my favorite books period.
I had been listening to a lecture course titled *How Great Science Fiction Works* by Prof. Gary K. Wolfe and the very first lecture discussed Mary Shelley and the Birth of Science Fiction. It recounts the origins of *Frankenstein*; the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley brought his 18-year-old wife, Mary, to visit his friend Lord Byron at Byron’s summer home in Switzerland. Because the weather was too miserable to go outdoors, Byron suggested an indoor activity: Each of the guests would make up a ghost story and read it to the others in the chilly evenings.
Byron wrote a fragment of a poem. Another visitor, Dr. John Polidori, wrote a reasonably scary story called *The Vampyre*, which later became one of the inspirations for Bram Stoker’s novel *Dracula.*
The teenage Mary based her story on a nightmare she’d had. The monster in Mary’s story was created not by magic or alchemy—Victor Frankenstein was a scientist who rejected those supernatural ideas—but by the application of electricity in an attempt to reanimate dead tissue.
After listening to that I was inspired to read *Frankenstein*, which I thoroughly enjoyed of course. In *Frankenstein*, Shelley invented one of the central concerns of science fiction: that a scientific education divorced from moral education and the abandonment of responsibility for one’s own achievements could lead to disaster.
Beautifully tragic at least. It’s one catastrophe after another. It’s very approachable for a 200 year old Novel and I was completely enthralled by her use of language. I’m still completely fascinated by the emotional and philosophical complexities presented in the novel as well. I think it might be one of my favorite books period.
I had been listening to a lecture course titled *How Great Science Fiction Works* by Prof. Gary K. Wolfe and the very first lecture discussed Mary Shelley and the Birth of Science Fiction. It recounts the origins of *Frankenstein*; the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley brought his 18-year-old wife, Mary, to visit his friend Lord Byron at Byron’s summer home in Switzerland. Because the weather was too miserable to go outdoors, Byron suggested an indoor activity: Each of the guests would make up a ghost story and read it to the others in the chilly evenings.
Byron wrote a fragment of a poem. Another visitor, Dr. John Polidori, wrote a reasonably scary story called *The Vampyre*, which later became one of the inspirations for Bram Stoker’s novel *Dracula.*
The teenage Mary based her story on a nightmare she’d had. The monster in Mary’s story was created not by magic or alchemy—Victor Frankenstein was a scientist who rejected those supernatural ideas—but by the application of electricity in an attempt to reanimate dead tissue.
After listening to that I was inspired to read *Frankenstein*, which I thoroughly enjoyed of course. In *Frankenstein*, Shelley invented one of the central concerns of science fiction: that a scientific education divorced from moral education and the abandonment of responsibility for one’s own achievements could lead to disaster.
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