Book Review: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley (the first ever sci-fi novel)

Reading ‘Frankenstein’ for our podcast was my fourth time reading this startling novel, and it’s never less than brilliant. I’ve studied it twice - once at A Level and once at university, and reread it for myself and has more than survived that level of scrutiny, it thrived under it.

You can listen to our episode of The Dark Academicals right here:

We also just watched ‘Mary Shelley’ from 2017 as part of our Summer AV Club and it gave so much more depth to the novel that we expected and added a real fresh perspective.

In case you’ve only seen movie re-tellings or adaptations, here’s a very brief summary of the novel:

'Now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart ...'

Obsessed with creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life with electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear.

Such a simple, straightforward synopsis of a book woven with meaning and messages about life, death and what it means to be a human, and to be alive.

Even though we read ‘Frankenstein’ as our dark academia adjacent novel for this season of the podcast and it connected to a lot of our dark academia tropes, as we talked about this book we realised that it also had touch points with so many other genres: the Gothic, horror, a ghost story, and sci-fi (it’s the first sci-fi novel!). Underlying those foundations of genre, is an emotional, far-reaching novel about connection, and missed connections.

As the novel unfolds and we reach the story of The Creature’s making and then the path that sets him and Frankenstein on for the rest of their lives. Shelley introduces the conflict of nature vs nurture but extrapolates that to social nurturing and what happens when you end up on the other side of that. Frankenstein and The Creature begin on very opposite sides and their opposing experiences move them closer and closer together in terms of the search for something more, in drive to learn, the need for warmth and love and home, and crushing weight of loss and grief.

I’m so glad we finally got ‘Frankenstein’ on the podcast! Have you read this classic?

Written by Sophie