Frankenstein; or, the modern prometheus
Mary Shelley's 1818 novel follows Victor Frankenstein, a young Swiss scientist who discovers the secret of animating lifeless matter and assembles a living creature — then, repulsed by what he has made, abandons it the moment it draws breath. Rejected by his maker and feared by everyone he meets, the creature grows eloquent, lonely, and vengeful, and the two are bound together in a pursuit that carries them from the Alps to the Arctic ice.
Framed as letters from the explorer Robert Walton, Frankenstein is a foundational work of both science fiction and Gothic horror. It asks what a creator owes the thing it creates, and turns ambition, isolation, and the hunger for knowledge into a tragedy that still shapes how we imagine science overreaching itself.
How it begins
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking. I am already far north of London, and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is for ever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There—for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators—there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.