December 18, 2017
Chemist Harkup follows A Is for Arsenic with this entertaining look at Mary Shelley’s life and the science of her time. The work has a dual structure, following the life of Mary Shelley (1797–1851) chronologically while examining the elements of science in the narrative of the novel. Readers familiar with Shelley may recognize the famous origin story of Frankenstein in Lord Byron’s 1816 challenge at Villa Diodati in Switzerland that he, Mary, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and others should each “write a ghost story.” Throughout, Harkup highlights individuals that Shelley knew who may have inspired characters in the novel. She also dutifully details the 18th- and 19th-century rise of chemistry as a science and the final decline of alchemy. Electricity features prominently in Harkup’s account, in particular “galvanism”: the “electrical stimulation of muscles to produce movement after death.” Harkup’s discussion of how Victor Frankenstein might have acquired his “raw materials” includes information on anatomists of the day and their means of acquiring corpses. Her description of bodily putrefaction after death and means of staving that off are not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. Harkup’s fun potpourri of science and history should prove satisfying to both science readers and literary aficionados.
February 1, 2018
Chemist and author Harkup (A Is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie) draws on history, psychology, sociology, and literature to present a picture of the genesis of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein. Harkup's analysis includes potential influences and cultural biases, and her picture contains numerous evocative details. Her loose chronology of the development of science is certainly informative, and her chronicling of Shelley's story is lively and stirring. Some readers may be transported. Some readers, looking for citations (for everything from assertions to direct quotes) and finding nothing but a bibliography, an index, and a time line, might wish for more scientific rigor. Although Harkup's work is ostensibly about making the monster, she also includes a wealth of material on how the content was received during Shelley's lifetime and how Shelley's life was affected. VERDICT Anyone interested in where Shelley's ideas may have come from will find a multitude of context in Harkup's volume. This is fascinating for those interested in the development of sf and in the difficult life of one of the genre's first authors.--Audrey Snowden, Milford Town Lib., MA
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
November 15, 2017
Examining the science of "a work of fiction that has enthralled, inspired and terrified for two centuries."In 1818, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), an educated young woman, used the latest science to "create her masterpiece, Frankenstein." Gothic romances, featuring a wide array of grotesque backgrounds, were the rage of her era, but all relied on ghosts, magic, and other supernatural elements. By sticking to facts and accepted theory, Shelley produced the first science-fiction novel. It was a hit. "The terrifying spectacle of a creature brought to life from a collection of dead flesh, scavenged from dissection rooms and graveyards, was all the more terrifying because it felt all too possible," writes chemist and author Harkup (A Is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie, 2015) in her second book. Much of Shelley's science was wrong, but the author keeps readers entertained with an expert mixture of biography and the scientific problems that we--but not Victor Frankenstein--would face in reanimating a collection of body parts. Harkup breaks no new biographical ground, but few readers will object to another account of literature's most famous menage a quatre in which Mary and her stepsister matched wits with poets Byron and Shelley, leading to much immortal writing and many pregnancies. While Mary's Frankenstein discovers the essence of life, scientists no longer postulate such a substance, and Mary reveals few details. Rather than speculate, Harkup devotes the majority of her text to histories of the sciences that Victor purportedly mastered (electricity, chemistry) and the medical problems that should have defeated him (rejection, decay, infection).A lucid and entertaining book that is neither literary criticism nor a biography with serious ambitions but mostly a series of essays on science, history, and early-19th-century British society often only distantly related to building Frankenstein's monster.
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January 1, 2018
When Earl Bakken created medicine's first portable, battery-charged pacemaker, he drew his inspiration from an unlikely source: Victor Frankenstein. But the world's most famous monster-maker could inspire a medical breakthrough only because his creator, Mary Shelley, had herself absorbed a great deal of the pathbreaking science of her own era. In this fascinating investigation, Harkup illuminates the contemporary science that fed Shelley's potent imagination, giving readers interpretive insight into the creative metamorphosis that made Frankenstein a prototype of an entirely new genre: science fiction. Readers see, for instance, how the knowledge Shelley gleans from her study of anatomy and galvanism shapes her riveting account of how Frankenstein assembles and revivifies the human body parts of his Promethean creature. Complementing her account of the science that Frankenstein uses, Harkup surveys the real-world scienceincluding Bakken's pacemakerthat Shelley's novel anticipates. The feat Frankenstein achieves in fiction harmonizes surprisingly well with the aspirations of medical pioneers who now contemplate transplanting human heads! An unexpected bridge between Romantic literature and modern science.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)