(4.5 / 5)
When she was just eighteen, Mary Shelley started writing Frankenstein. Frankenstein tells the story of devoted science student Victor Frankenstein, at once a Gothic mystery, a passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of science. Obsessed with seeking the cause of generation and life and giving animation to inert matter, Frankenstein assembles a human being from stolen body parts, but he recoils in terror at the hideousness of the creature as he brings it to life. The once-innocent creature, tormented by alienation and loneliness, turns to evil and unleashes a campaign of murderous vengeance against Frankenstein, his maker.
Frankenstein, an instant bestseller and a significant ancestor of both the genres of horror and science fiction, not only tells a scary tale, but also asks deep, unsettling questions about the very existence of life and the location within the universe of humanity: what does it mean to be human? What duties do we have to each other? How far can we go by manipulating nature? These issues are more important than ever in our day, loaded with reports of genetic modification for organ donation and bio-terrorism.
Frankenstein, an instant bestseller and a significant ancestor of both the genres of horror and science fiction, not only tells a scary tale, but also asks deep, unsettling questions about the very existence of life and the location within the universe of humanity: what does it mean to be human? What duties do we have to each other? How far can we go by manipulating nature? These issues are more important than ever in our day, loaded with reports of genetic modification for organ donation and bio-terrorism.
A masterpiece here. -Phillip Pullman
One of the day’s most original and most complete productions. Percy Bysshe Shelley—Percy Shelley
Mary Shelley’s novel’s greatest mystery and most astonishing feat is that the creature is more human than his maker. This nameless being is more lovable than its creator and more hateful, more to be pitied and more to be hated, as much as a modern Adam as his creator is a modern Prometheus, and above all able to give the attentive reader the shock of added consciousness in which aesthetic awareness forces a greater self-realization. Harold Bloom- Harold Bloom