Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is Mary Shelley's novel of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who assembles and animates a living being from dead tissue, then recoils from and abandons his own creation, setting in motion the tragedy that follows. Shelley conceived the story in the summer of 1816 near Geneva, during a ghost-story-writing contest proposed by Lord Byron; she was twenty when the novel was published anonymously two years later. Because its horror is grounded in the real scientific debates of its day over galvanism and the reanimation of dead matter, rather than in supernatural causes, scholars including Brian Aldiss have credited the novel as the first true work of science fiction as well as a landmark of Gothic fiction.