Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, begun when she was eighteen on a ghost-story dare at Lake Geneva, in which a young scientist named Victor Frankenstein assembles a living being from dead flesh and then, horrified, flees from it. Often called the first modern science-fiction novel, it is also the modern world's deepest parable about the things we create and then refuse to take responsibility for. The creature it made famous is the maker's victim, not a brute, and the name 'Frankenstein' belongs to the scientist, not the monster he abandons.
Almost everyone calls the monster Frankenstein. That is the first mistake, and the novel itself is built on it. Frankenstein is the man who makes the creature, a young scientist who learns to give life to dead matter, builds a being out of corpses, and then runs from it in horror the moment it opens its eyes. The creature has no name. People picture a lumbering, bolt-necked brute, but in the book he is gentle, brilliant, and desperate to be loved. He turns to violence only after his maker abandons him and every human being he meets recoils from his face. The real horror was never only the science. It was the maker who created a life and then refused to answer for it. And it was begun by an eighteen-year-old woman, and published when she was twenty.