If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear! Book #4 of 20 in the SDE Classics Science Fiction Collection Young scientist Victor Frankenstein, grief-stricken over the death of his mother, sets out in a series of laboratory experiments testing the ability to create life from non-living matter. Soon, his experiments progress further until he creates a humanoid creature eight feet tall. But as Frankenstein soon discovers, a successful experiment does not always equal a positive outcome. Considered the first true science fiction novel, Frankenstein has been well-received and studied since its first publication. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) was the daughter of philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin and the wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. She was eighteen years old when she began Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus and with its publication in 1818 created science fiction as a genre. She went on to write six more novels, many short stories, and numerous articles, but Frankenstein, her masterstroke, remains her best-known work.