Mary Shelley

Credited with founding science fiction as a field, Shelley’s key contribution to the genre was Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. She completed the novel in 1817, when she was still a teenager, after she and her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, were challenged to produce a ghost story by their friend Lord Byron. The book’s terrifying insight - that we could make life and intelligence – continues to be one of science fiction’s enduring themes.