Victor Frankenstein creates life and immediately abandons his creation, setting in motion a tragedy that destroys everyone he loves. Mary Shelley was eighteen, spending a summer with Byron and Percy Shelley near Geneva, when she dreamed the central image of the novel. The creature is articulate, suffering, and morally complex, nothing like the monster of later films. The novel asks who the real monster is, and the question has no easy answer. Shelley published it anonymously at first. The book invented science fiction, or at least gave it its founding myth. Prometheus brought fire; Frankenstein brought something worse.