This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The summer of 1816 was cold and grey across Europe, an effect, unknown at the time, of ash from the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year before darkening skies worldwide. Mary Godwin, eighteen years old and not yet married to Percy Bysshe Shelley, was staying with him near Lake Geneva, in a rented house close to the Villa Diodati, where Lord Byron had taken up residence with his own physician, John Polidori. Confined indoors by the weather, the small group read aloud from a volume of German ghost stories, and Byron proposed that each of them write a ghost story of their own.
Byron and Percy Shelley each began something and abandoned it. Polidori's own contribution, later expanded into The Vampyre, would itself become the first vampire story published in English. Mary Shelley later wrote that she struggled for days to find an idea, until a conversation about galvanism, the reanimation of dead tissue through electrical current, then a genuine subject of scientific speculation and public demonstration, gave her a waking vision of a scientist recoiling in horror from the creature he had just brought to life.
That vision became Frankenstein, published anonymously two years later in 1818, when she was twenty. Because the novel roots its horror in the real, contested science of its own moment rather than in curses or ghosts, scholars including the science fiction historian Brian Aldiss have argued it deserves to be read as the first true work of science fiction, and not only as a late entry in the Gothic tradition Horace Walpole had founded half a century earlier. A single overcast summer, a parlor game among five people waiting out bad weather, produced one of the two or three most consequential ghost stories nobody actually finished writing as one.