So that's what we're talking about.
Frankenstein is kind of a remarkable book in a lot of ways. For one thing, it was written by a teenage girl, Mary Shelley. She was 18 when she first started writing Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Dang, that's young!
Frankenstein is also considered to be the first work of science fiction. This novel has a monster created not by magic or pulled from folklore, but made by science, using scientific methods. It includes scientific ideas popular at the time of writing, such as galvanism, working them into the story, and also addresses moral and ethical questions of science, like, is it okay to create life and then abandon it?
(This question is why I don't care for Victor Frankenstein very much.)
The book is also interesting because Mary Shelley created a monster, just like Victor Frankenstein did. This wasn't a creature from folklore: it wasn't a ghost, or vampire, or werewolf, or witch, or any other undead or magical threat. And yet we still include Frankenstein's monster in that list when we name traditional Halloween monsters/costumes.
Frankenstein's monster, and the title character "mad scientist" himself, have been added to the monster pantheon, and it's all because of this book. It has had such an impact on the world and on horror and science fiction as genres, so it deserves credit.
If you haven't read it, I recommend doing so. It's not very long and it's worth it.
Anyway, for the rest of this post I'm going to share some of my favorite pictures and links about Frankenstein, so feel free to enjoy it.
- This Overly Sarcastic Production video on Frankenstein. It's clever and summarizes the story rather well.
And on that note:
There are also a bunch of puns and jokes online, but I'm not including them here because most of them only tangentially relate to the book. You can also go on YouTube for other summaries and audio book versions of the novel, if you want.
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