Frankenstein
Mary Shelleybegan writing Frankensteinwhen she was only eighteen. At once a Gothic thriller, a passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, Frankensteintells the story of committed science student Victor Frankenstein. Obsessed with discovering the cause of generation and life and bestowing animation upon lifeless matter, Frankenstein assembles a human being from stolen body parts but; upon bringing it to life, he recoils in horror at the creature's hideousness. Tormented by isolation and loneliness, the once-innocent creature turns to evil and unleashes a campaign of murderous revenge against his creator, Frankenstein. Frankenstein, an instant bestseller and an important ancestor of both the horror and science fiction genres, not only tells a terrifying story, but also raises profound, disturbing questions about the very nature of life and the place of humankind within the cosmos: What does it mean to be human? What responsibilities do we have to each other? How far can we go in tampering with Nature? In our age, filled with news of organ donation genetic engineering, and bio-terrorism, these questions are more relevant than ever.
Stats for nerds
15recommend
64mentions
59people
2009–2026years
27% recommend72% neutral2% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I would settle for everybody in tech reading Mary Shelley and realizing that Victor Frankenstein was the real monster. It won't even cost you money; the OG of science fiction has been in the public domain for decades.
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/mary-shelley/frankenstein
Or just grab a bootleg ROM of Final Fantasy IV, fire up an emulator, and ask yourselves, "What would Cecil Harvey do?"
- Yeah there’s balances to be struck. Tho I would push back a bit on the notion of great works being outdated. Think of them more as having survived the gauntlet of time, crushing generation after generation of newer writing with their undeniable superiority, emerging as the strongest and most adaptable ideas & stories that couldn’t be stopped even by the churn of centuries of change in language, culture, ideologies, wars and more.
Eg Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein will eat alive nearly anything written today, it accurately critiques a future it never saw like a laser beam cutting across time. Few if any works today possess such original and enduring foresight.
This is especially true as a generation of people are now getting deskilled by AI. Even if we have the writers capable of such feats, we likely lack the audience for those works because that requires a societal sophistication we may have lost. And so those works may never be adequately appreciated to let them ever break out of this little moment in time.
- > My goal now is to use less words to convey an idea.
This is what I'm encouraged by Grammarly as well. To some extent, perhaps the book "Elements of style" encourages this too.
However, I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. She writes long (wordy?) sentences that are clear, and even feels beautiful to read. I really enjoyed her writing.
But I'm not a native speaker. A question for the native speakers: what's your take on this? Has Shelly's writing style gone out of fashion, or are these two (Shelley's style and succinctness) different things?
- I agree wholeheartedly. It's become one of my goto resources for learning about the history of various topics from science to literature. The episode on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is fantastic.
- Several immediately come to mind.
Short stories: The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (Ken Liu); Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation (Ted Chiang); The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury)
Novels: The Monk (Matthew Gregory Lewis); Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
- Have Space Suit Will Travel (Heinlein)
Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (one story in the book "Different Seasons" by Stephen King)
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury)
Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky)
Frankenstein (Shelley)
Brave New World (Huxley)
Farenheit 451 (Heinlein)
Never Cry Wolf (Mowatt)
A Whale for the Killing (Mowatt)
The Machine Stops (Forster)
Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
Starship Troopers (Heinlein)
The Jungle Book (Kipling)
Lost in the Barrens (Mowatt)
The Republic (Plato)
Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke)
Ringworld (Niven)
The Stainless Steel Rat (Harrison)
The Hobbit (Tolkien)
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson)
The Odyssey (Homer)
The Man who Would be King (Kipling)
The Pearl (Steinbeck)
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick)
A Scanner Darkly (Dick)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
Dracula (Stoker)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)
A Christmas Carol (Dickens)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll)
Watership Down (Adams)
Gulliver's Travels (Swift)
Animal Farm (Orwell)
