Mary Shelley’s other fiction
Jun. 22nd, 2007 12:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesLJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)
The only work of Mary Shelley’s known to most people today is her great novel Frankenstein. In fact she quite a few books, and a number of short stories, including several in the gothic and science fiction genres. Peter Haining’s Frankenstein Omnibus, which I bought yesterday in a used bookstore for $2, includes two such tales. The Reanimated Man was based on a celebrated (at the time) media hoax about a man supposedly revived after being frozen in a glacier for 200 years. Not a great story but interesting. Transformation is much better. A young man who has dissipated his inheritance meets a strange dwarf, a dwarf apparently possessing supernatural powers, and strikes a bargain with him, a bargain involving the temporary swapping of bodies. While The Reanimated Man is ostensibly scientific, Transformation involves magic. It seems that Mary Shelley wasn’t especially interested in the methods used, but she was interested in the consequences of unnatural life, of unnatural interference in the processes of life. It’s quite a neat little story.
Has anyone else read any of Mary Shelley’s short fiction?
dfordoom)The only work of Mary Shelley’s known to most people today is her great novel Frankenstein. In fact she quite a few books, and a number of short stories, including several in the gothic and science fiction genres. Peter Haining’s Frankenstein Omnibus, which I bought yesterday in a used bookstore for $2, includes two such tales. The Reanimated Man was based on a celebrated (at the time) media hoax about a man supposedly revived after being frozen in a glacier for 200 years. Not a great story but interesting. Transformation is much better. A young man who has dissipated his inheritance meets a strange dwarf, a dwarf apparently possessing supernatural powers, and strikes a bargain with him, a bargain involving the temporary swapping of bodies. While The Reanimated Man is ostensibly scientific, Transformation involves magic. It seems that Mary Shelley wasn’t especially interested in the methods used, but she was interested in the consequences of unnatural life, of unnatural interference in the processes of life. It’s quite a neat little story.
Has anyone else read any of Mary Shelley’s short fiction?
