THE FIRST SCIENCE FICTION WRITER

                Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on August 30, 1797.  Her parents were a famous feminist and a famous philosopher.  She eloped at age 17 with the famous poet Percy Shelley.  He was 21 and married.  They had started their affair at her mother’s gravesite.  Shelley’s wife committed suicide.  They ended up in Switzerland, staying at a chateau with Lord Byron and his doctor John Polidori in 1816.  The quartet entertained themselves at night by discussions and debates.  One of those debates was whether a corpse could be reanimated or “galvanized”.  One night, after a series of nights reading ghost stories, Byron suggested they each try to write a story better than the ones they had been reading.  Mary was at first unsuccessful, but one dark and stormy night, her restless sleep led to the germ of a story.  “I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life.”  Encouraged by the others to develop it, she ended up writing “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus”.  It was published in 1818.  It is now considered the first science fiction novel.  Less well known is that Polidori was inspired to write the first vampire story.  His novella was called “The Vampyre”.  The quartet suffered their own horrors in the years after. A few years later, Percy died in a sailing accident.  The previous year Polidori committed suicide.  Byron died in 1824 of a fever.  Mary was the only one to live past 50.

P.S.  The other day I posted on the effects of a lunar eclipse on the Athenian disaster of the Sicilian Expedition.  It is possible that another act of nature contributed to the writing of “Frankenstein”.  In 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted, killing up to 100,000 people.  It is now considered the deadliest natural event in history.  The ash impacted the weather worldwide.  In Europe it resulted in crop failures and unstable weather.  The numerous thunder-filled nights with their oppressive darkness caused depressed and fearful attitudes.  It was on one of those nights that Mary Shelley tossed in her bed.

https://www.history.com/news/frankenstein-true-story-mary-shelley

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/frankenstein-published

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley