How a gloomy Swiss summer birthed the world's first science-fiction masterpiece
In short: In 1816, a volcanic eruption turned the European summer into a cold, storm-ridden nightmare. Trapped indoors by the gloom, a group of radical thinkers turned to ghost stories, inadvertently setting the stage for Mary Shelley to invent a new kind of horror that would haunt pop culture forever.
The origins of *Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus* are deeply intertwined with the personal tragedies and radical intellectual circles of its author, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Born to the feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft and the anarchist philosopher William Godwin, Shelley was immersed in a world of Enlightenment ideals and literary giants like William Blake and William Wordsworth. Her own life was marked by the struggle of life and death; her mother died just 11 days after her birth, and Shelley experienced the profound grief of losing her first daughter in March 1815.
The spark for the novel arrived during a summer at Villa Diodati in Cologny, Switzerland. Shelley, then 18 and traveling with her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, joined a group including Lord Byron. The weather was atypically cold and stormy, a phenomenon likely caused by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which led to 1816 being known as the “year without a summer.” During these inclement evenings, the group read *Fantasmagoriana*, a collection of German ghost stories.
While the novel is a cornerstone of Gothic horror, it is also recognized as one of the first science-fiction stories. It was first published on January 1, 1818, by a small London publisher that printed only 500 copies on inexpensive paper. Since then, the tale of a scientific genius bringing a monster to life has become a global sensation, adapted hundreds of times across film, television, and stage, proving that the creature was truly a product of its turbulent era.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Fact, Fiction, and Frankenstein's Monster
- Also: Frankenstein | Book, Summary, Movie, Monster, Mary Shelley, Characters, & Facts | Britannica
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