British · 1797–1851
Mary Shelley (1797–1851) wrote Frankenstein in a rented villa on the shores of Lake Geneva when she was eighteen, as part of a ghost story competition with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. Published anonymously in 1818, it is widely credited as the first science fiction novel — though it is also a horror novel, a philosophical meditation, and a study of what it means to be abandoned. Frankenstein is available to speed-read in warpread.app at 75,000 words.
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A young scientist, obsessed with the secrets of life, assembles a creature from corpses and brings it to terrible animation. What follows is one of literature's great moral indictments — of unchecked ambition, of abandonment, and of the violence we visit on those we refuse to understand. Often called the first true science-fiction novel.
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