SciFi Novels Were Invented by an Angsty Teenage Girl

Teenage girls can’t catch a break. People, particularly nerdy men, treat being a teenage girl as if it is some absolute guarantee of vapid stupidity. This makes me so damn mad, and not least of all because the whole idea of a science fiction novel owes its existence to an angsty teenage girl who ran away from a broken home.

The first work of science fiction that could truly be called a “novel” was Frankenstein. If you’ve not read it, pop culture might make you think it’s about a monster named Frankenstein. If you have read it, you know it tells the tale of the young Victor Frankenstein, a chemistry student who is fascinated by the idea that he might be able to give life to inanimate matter. He succeeds, and creates a monster that ultimately ruins his life.

Curmudgeonly male science fiction fans might think that the author of this work was a bitter male graduate student tormented by his relationship with science. Instead, the reality is rather different and tells a tale that I think should be inspiring to teenage girls everywhere:

Frankenstein was written by an eighteen year old girl, and it was inspired by the swapping of scary stories during what amounted to a slumber party…among some of the best 19th century writers.

Mary Shelley was a teenager when she ran away from home. She was the child of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, both prominent thinkers of the 18th century who’d lived quite unconventionally.

Mary Shelley’s mom was amazing. She, too, ran away from home at a young age. She founded a school to teach radical feminist ideas in her 20s, lived alone with two different women, and then ran to France at the start of the French Revolution because it sounded awesome. She made a living as an independent author of books about human rights and feminism, never relying on a man for money. In France, she got involved with an American con man and adventurer, who saved her life by pretending to be married to her—but who also got her pregnant and abandoned her. She chased after him, nearly killed herself, and then went on a spy mission to Scandinavia with only her daughter Frances and her maid in order to win him back. Seeing as he was a total womanizing jerk, it didn’t work, but she did write a book about her experiences that made Godwin fall in love with her.

He fell in love with her through her writing, and eventually the couple married—despite the fact that her previous adventures out of wedlock lost them both a number of friends. They lived in separate, adjoining houses after marriage, which they called “The Polygon,” because unlike other couples of the day, they wished to both continue life as independent professionals. Often, communicated by letter, their love affair of the mind continued without their necessarily seeing each other.

Still, they found time to make a child together. Conceived just prior to their marriage, Mary Wollstonecraft gave birth to Mary Wollstonecraft, Jr., in 1797…and died 10 days later. This event changed the future Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley forever. Mary Shelley grew up in a world where her mother was a gravestone and a series of writings on feminism. Her only parent was her anarchist progressive father. She idolized her mother, and learned a sense of independence from what remained of Wollstonecraft in her writings. In Mary Shelley’s world, a free woman who had a child out of wedlock was a social outcast, but the young Mary learned how to be a woman from people who rejected that view.

When her father finally remarried, Mary’s life changed for the worse, and she ultimately ran away from home—like her mother before her. A child of a single parent, influenced by dangerous feminism, Mary fled a broken home where her stepmother encouraged her father to ignore her. She then fell in with a cabal of romantic poets, a circle of nineteenth century hippies who might have been social outcasts if not for their bright center, the controversial nobleman Lord Byron.

In the summer of 1816, this group of friends started telling each other increasingly fantastic ghost stories as part of a challenge to expand their minds. Mary, who attended a demonstration some time earlier where a scientist used electricity to make a corpse move as if alive, was inspired to create Frankenstein. Into this book, written and refined over the course of that summer, she poured her fascination with death, her loneliness, her longing to be understood by a society that is not ready for a woman who is as independent as her mother’s writings taught her to be. Eternally an outsider, Mary Shelley envisioned a future where a technological “monster” would hold up a mirror to human society and show that in our fear of the new and strange, we display a terrifying inhumanity.

Victor Frankenstein and his monster are constructs who challenged a lot of prevailing attitudes of the day. A man of science who created life, Frankenstein flew in the face of the Christianity that dominated the day. At odds with his creation, he learned that the ability to create something comes with an inherent responsibility for it—a responsibility that the hubristic Frankenstein was never ready to meet. Going further, the novel intertwines the monster’s desire for a female counterpart with Victor’s own quest for love, underscoring the wild idea that women are pretty damn important.

Before Frankenstein, there was no such thing as a science fiction novel. It is literally the first, and it started the long tradition of using science fiction to challenge the morality and scientific ambitions of the author’s society. Unlike the male dominated mid-20th century works of science fiction, this first science fiction novel was written by a young girl who ran away from home and fell in with radicals. A girl who was telling ghost stories during a slumber party—perhaps her era’s equivalent of late-night social media use—invented an entire genre that has defined the future and helped to create the world that we know.

And she did it by putting her perennial life as an outsider into a fantastical narrative of science gone too far, a horror story that mirrored her own experience of feeling like a stranger within her own culture, refused personhood and legitimacy by accident of her birth.

Now, not everyone writing a blog on tumblr has friends like Lord Byron, nor the creative genius of an 18 year-old Mary Shelley. I’m not trying to say that every teenage girl is a modern Mary Shelley. Instead, I mean to wake you up from the ridiculous cultural impression that no teenage girls could ever be like her. Mary Shelley wasn’t much different from many of the people I see on the Internet every day, and she did something amazing. Something that many snooty male fans owe her a debt for, a debt that they’re totally ignorant of when they make jokes about “vapid,” “whiny” teenage girls.

I hate that. These attitudes turn young women off to a genre that should be their legacy, a genre created by a woman and furthered by many great woman writers in the decades since. When we turn off young women to science fiction, we do society a great disservice, and we create lasting scars on society and on women in particular. I don’t want to be the person who stifles someone who could be the next Mary Shelley, and I don’t want you to be that person either.