The night that science fiction was born from a dare
Ursula K. Le Guin once called science fiction “the mythology of modern technology”. It goes without saying that by definition, modern technology hasn’t been around forever, and even less so, the will to mythologise it in the arts. Then, amid a gathering storm in every sense, a dare was thrown down that fittingly changed the world in the same sense that science fiction as we know it now unfurled. As Ray Bradbury puts it: “Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again.”
With that in mind, let’s venture back to a dark and stormy night in an Italian villa back in 1816 and the dawn of science fiction. Mary Shelley was holed up in barricaded property on the shores of Lake Geneva. Outside, a violent downpour waged. This deluge was one of many in the famous Year Without Summer. A volcanic eruption had shrouded the world in a plume of ash that cast a cold snap over civilization, and cloudbursts swept in from all directions.
With the weather so treacherous and interminable, Shelley and her housemates were succumbing to chronic boredom. Thankfully, for the sake of the arts, those guests were esteemed writers like Percy Bysshe Shelley, Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron and his physician John Polidori. The only thing tempering this languid lockdown of discontent was the natural romanticism of a spooky thunderstorm. Thus, Lord Byron suggested the only thing for it, they would each go off and write a ghost story and then entertain themselves with recitals of the tales in the evening.
So, Mary Shelley absconded to her quiet corner of the residence and decided she would deal with something truly terrifying. Over the course of the previous century, science itself had pretty much arisen from the depths of a hobbyist realm. The birth of electricity had seen the periodic table double and a rapid surge of advancements in all areas. Being a scientist was now an established profession, and progress followed suit for all.
These new-fangled scientists made the subject a hot topic with exciting public lectures, and this made it a field of interest outside of mere academia. However, for some folks, this rapid advancement proved frightening. Were the storms a-waging wrath of the gods, had things gone too far and were all the aghast moments that they had seen unfurl actually a folly of pride more so than a triumph of human progress? These were all questions that had been brewing, but a storm to end all storms in a year without summer brought them to the fictional fore.
That night, after Byron’s suggestion, the writers and physicians gathered to tell their tales. However, it wasn’t merely Shelley probing at the future with her ghastly story of a Dr Frankenstein and his experiment gone awry. John Polidori also had a tale of early vampirism that eventually led to Dracula fiction. These were not just ghostly stories, you see, but discussions about life. Thus, often the gang got waffling, and the tales began to transmute into portents of life and death and how technology was weaving its way into the debate.
In the paraphrased words of Bradbury, we were no longer just dealing with things that weren’t true, but the potential of things that soon would be and how these prognostications of the scientific experiments would soon change the world forever. We might not be able to make a human from parts as Frankenstein spookily foretold, but the notion of an experiment escaping the will of its master and wreaking untold havoc is all too familiar.
