The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Read Online Free PDF Page B

profound social events. The American Revolution was an assertion of political independence of thought. The French Revolution was a radical overturning of traditional society in the very heartland of the Western world. People at last had begun to act in accordance with their private thoughts. During the 1790s, the structure of traditional society began to break down.
    At this very same time, the new Western material science finally overcame its inertia and moved beyond the stages of criticism and theory, beginning to demonstrate its practical power to transform the world. In the latter part of the Eighteenth Century, the Industrial Revolution began. The steam engine was perfected. The power loom was invented, and the modern factory system emerged. Canals were dug to facilitate commerce. Balloons were flown, demonstrating scientific mastery of the skies. With the Nineteenth Century, the pace of change began to accelerate. In the fifteen years that followed Horace Walpole’s death in 1797, the gaslight, the steamboat and the locomotive were all invented.
    Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in the year that Horace Walpole died. The world that she grew up in was very different from his. It was a world with reason to believe in change, a world that was beginning to associate change with the creative powers of science.
    At the turn of the Nineteenth Century, the balance between the old views and the new was still precarious. There was profound ambivalence about the new modern world that was being ushered into being. Great enthusiasm alternated with great fear and reluctance, sometimes within the same person. Often within the same person. The new moderns of the Nineteenth Century dared to do what had not been done before, and were frightened at their own audacity.
    Mary Shelley was an archetypical young modern of the early Nineteenth Century—a second-generation modern. Her parents had been among the first during the 1790s to advocate new ways contrary to tradition and attempt to live them. Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, had lived with a married man and borne a child out of wedlock. Mary’s father, William Godwin, to whom Frankenstein is dedicated, was a minister turned freethinker, the author of Political Justice, a radical critique of society, and the pioneer social novel, Caleb Williams.
    When the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was dismissed from Oxford in 1811 for authoring a pamphlet entitled “The Necessity of Atheism,” it was only natural that he would seek out the acquaintance of the foremost freethinker of the day, William Godwin. In 1814, he met young Mary Godwin in her father’s home, and with the aid and company of Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, eloped with her. Mary was sixteen, Shelley five years older. Shelley was already married and a father, with another child on the way, but no matter. In terms of traditional society, Percy Shelley’s and Mary Godwin’s conduct might be scandalous, but they were only acting out of principle. The willful new ideas of the times were in their heads and they could not bear not to live as they believed.
    In the summer of 1816, when she began Frankenstein, Mary and Shelley were living with Claire near Geneva, Switzerland. Much had happened to Mary in two years. She had borne Shelley two children, one of whom had died when only two months old. She and Shelley would not be married until the end of December, three weeks after the discovery of the suicide of Shelley’s wife, Harriet, who drowned herself in the Serpentine.
    Their party in Geneva was joined by George Gordon Byron, with whom Claire had begun an affair, and by whom she would have a daughter in 1817. In an age when poets were pop stars, Byron was a poet and rebellious spirit even more notorious than Shelley, singing sympathy to the devil. He was rumored to have an incestuous relationship with his half-sister. Crippled and handsome, the bearer of a noble