In early 18th century a new variety of romantic novel appeared. The Gothic novel usually followed the formula of a young woman trapped in an old dark house or mysterious castle with an evil yet often irresistible male anti-hero, against a background of supernatural (or at least suspicious) events unfolding before a climax that disclosed some revelatory secret. In 1818, a volume sometimes categorized as a Gothic novel was published but, in reality, this was something unprecedented. It was probably the first true SF novel. In 1816 nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley, wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, penned Frankenstein at a villa near Geneva after a nightmare inspired by the agreement between the Shelleys, Lord Byron, his lover Claire Clairmont and his physician John Polidori to hold a ghost-story contest. The evening the competition was conceived is celebrated as one of the definitive moments in Romanticism and a milestone in the development of horror and fantasy.

Frankenstein depicts a post-Enlightenment rationalist hero, a scientist, who uses the new technological expertise of the Industrial Age to create a man, with the intention of improving the lot of humanity. But, like the Greek Prometheus, Frankenstein is doomed to be punished eternally for discovering the secrets of life when his creation (whom he neglects because of its monstrousness) seeks to avenge itself upon the experimenter and society. Man's disrespect for other life, the dangers of tampering with the laws of nature through technology and the subsequent disastrous events are fundamental aspects of Frankenstein paralleled in a vast number of SF stories published since. Radically different from (and superior to) every single film adaptation, it is a work of immense power despite being emotionally overwrought. It was revised in 1831 and both versions remain in print. Significantly, Shelley established SF as something beloved of the young and rebellious. Not only was she still a teenager when she wrote the book (later writers like Brunner, Silverberg and Delany were similarly precocious) but she was married to a notorious atheist. She was also a woman, a woman whose mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was the recognized founder of feminist thought. Mary Shelley herself will always be recalled as the mother of the most misunderstood monster literature ever spawned.

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