SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the night Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein. June 16, 1816.

Luigi Galvani's work of making the severed limbs of animals move with the application of electricity had been all the talk for a number of years. Mount Tambora had exploded nearly a year earlier (July 15, 1815), throwing so much ash into the upper atmosphere it resulted in 1816 being called the "Year Without A Summer", where it snowed in New England in June and July, and frost killed crops across Europe.

Shelley, 18, and her boyfriend, Percy Shelley, 22, had run away from England, where he had abandoned his pregnant wife. They were accompanied by her sister and Percy's physician. They toured Europe, visiting Castle Frankenstein on the way to meet Lord Byron in Switzerland. Mary's sister had slept with Percy and was besotted with Byron. Byron was lusting after Percy. Meanwhile, Percy's physician was enamored of Mary... which is why we know a lot of this stuff, because he essentially kept a stalker's diary about Mary.

This was a big scandal, of course, and the group was treated badly everywhere they went, so they retreated to Byron's Swiss villa.

Because of the weather during what was called Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death, crops failed everywhere, resulting in a refugee crisis. For Shelley's group of the idle wealthy who wanted to play, though, they were trapped inside for days on end by the severe storms caused by Tambora's disruption of the climate.

So they sat around reading ghost stories until Byron declared them not frightening enough and challenged everyone to write something scarier.

Mary was the only one who couldn't come up with an idea and the others teased her for days. She thought perhaps she could spin a tale of her mother coming back to life, but it was more maudlin than scary. One night, June 16th, she was watching the massive lightning storms raging around the mountains and she remembered Galvani's experiments.

In a flash, it came to her: the lightning, galvanism, reanimation of corpses, hostile villagers, Castle Frankenstein, the condemnation and shunning of the crowds....

Everyone else gave up on their stories and went back to screwing around, but Mary kept at it for two years.

And that is how the Affluenza Tour of the Literate Kardashians of the 1800s resulted in the world's first Science Fiction novel.

Thank-you for sharing this. Some classic texts really merit their fame and I feel Frankenstein is certainly one of them.

Cool. And don't forget that Mary was intimately involved with the creation of life herself, spending these years being pregnant, nursing, and grieving, as three of her four babies died.

LOL. As I was reading your post, I couldn't help but think, "They were the Kardashians of the 1800s." and then I saw you drew the same conclusion.

Valerie wrote: "LOL. As I was reading your post, I couldn't help but think, "They were the Kardashians of the 1800s." and then I saw you drew the same conclusion."

One difference, the Romantics had talent ... or is that too judgy :)

Wow ... thank you, I didn't know this much about the dynamics within this group of artists! Their monstrous behaviour aside, kudos to Mary Shelley, for going where no man/woman had gone before.