Mary Shelley makes fake geek guys angry, so for that reason I like talking about her. She was the first person to take a scientific finding and proceed to extrapolate it to the extreme in service of a story. Thus, she was the first science fiction author. Not bad for an eighteen-year-old woman in a time when voting was illegal and a woman owning property was unusual.

Though there had been other stories that were semi-science-fictional in nature prior, there was no unbroken tradition of sf extending from the past. Shelley is the sole progenitor of all modern science fiction.

So, yeah, fake geek guys, you can thank Shelley for all of that — even your Halo games and zombie apocalypses.

Frankenstein is probably the best novel written by someone so young. Certainly the best that I’ve ever read, and it still holds up well today.