The Price of Knowledge

Mary Shelley and the earliest science fiction novels

“One man’s life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought; for the dominion I should acquire and transmit over the elemental foes of our race.” - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, 1818

It is a mystery why Mary Shelley is not inexorably referred to as the ‘Mother of Science Fiction’, given that those that follow later in the 19th century make claim to being the genre’s ‘Father’. She preceded Jules Verne’s ‘scientific romances’ by nearly half a century with Frankenstein, her first novel, and nearly forty years for The Last Man, considered not only her best work but also the first post-apocalyptic novel in English. This latter book was largely overlooked when it appeared, since it arrived in a spate of ‘last man’ poetry brought about by the revelation of extinction in the face of the discovery of dinosaur bones. Yet it foreshadows every ‘end of civilisation’ tale that follows in supposing that the greatest of disasters ultimately strip humanity down to something rather less than we imagine of ourselves.

Mary Shelly occupied an incredible crossroads in the history of European thought. Both her parents were Enlightenment philosophers - her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, gained renown for her arguments towards the equality of women and had great influence, including upon her daughter (despite dying not long after she was born). Yet her circle of friends - the wild poet Lord Byron, vampire-populariser John Polidori, and her eventual husband Percy Blythe Shelley - were key to the Romantic movement. Together they rejected the glorification of reason characterising Enlightenment thought in favour of emotional expression, individualism, and a revival of certain themes common to the medieval period. The tensions between these two philosophies play out in Mary Shelley’s science fiction.

Frankenstein is much misunderstood. Although the being Victor Frankenstein creates becomes a murderer, it is born innocent (a theme taken from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy). Society’s revulsion for its hideous appearance drive it to evil, beginning with it being rejected by its ‘father’, whose obsession blinds him to what he has done. As much as Victor Frankenstein has come to represent the archetypal ‘mad scientist’, it is worth noting that the word ‘scientist’ did not even exist in 1818, being coined in 1834 - although the novel certainly exposes the forces leading to this word’s debut. Shelley writes that “in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder”, and notes that “none but those who have experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science.”

Yet the opening quote for this piece is not spoken by Victor Frankenstein, but by the novel’s narrator, Captain Robert Walton, who seeks to find the north pole and thus the source of the Earth’s magnetic field. He sets off with a passion for scientific discovery, but is swayed from this course by his conversations with Victor Frankenstein after rescuing the wretched man from the ice and discovering how his attempt to overcome death through ‘galvanism’ (electrical impulses) led him to utter ruin. Thus the novel’s subtitle ‘The Modern Prometheus’, alluding to the Greek myth of the titan who gives the knowledge of fire to mankind and is punished for it.

So is Mary Shelley anti-scientific, opposed to discovery…? This is not quite the theme of the novel, which is much more concerned about the risks of obsession and the evils unleashed by alienation. Indeed, many of her novels are ultimately philosophical commentaries on society. In The Last Man, where a plague is driving humanity to extinction, she turns against both Enlightenment and Romantic individualism to sketch the sense in which humanity’s good is contingent upon community. Foreshadowing our contemporary preoccupation with the apocalypse (greatly intensified after the dropping of the first atomic bomb), The Last Man asks what happens when “the vessel of society was wrecked, and the shattered raft, which carried the few survivors over the sea of misery, was riven and tempest tost.”

Captain Walton, persuaded by the warnings of Victor Frankenstein, gives up his fixation with uncovering the source of the geomagnetic field, and he and his crew return to those they left behind. Unlike The Last Man, which is predicated upon an inescapable extinction, the implication of Frankenstein’s ending is that the disaster of hubris can still be averted by turning back. But more than this, Walton learns that the price of knowledge can be far greater than we anticipate. It is a warning that humanity has not yet learned.