In my old age, I’ve picked up a nasty habit: a fondness for literary biographies. Recently, I’ve enjoyed books about Keats, Shelley, Byron, Blake, Twain, Orwell, Tagore, Joyce, and others. It’s a strange affliction — utterly without rational basis, lacking the danger of street drugs, but like drugs delivering peculiar damaging delights. Last night, while enjoying Andrew Stauffer’s new Byron biography, Byron a Life in Ten Letters, I revisited the famous Frankenstein origin story. In the summer of 1816, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelly, Mary (Godwin) Shelly, John Polidori, and Claire Clairmont spent a long, extremely dark, and rainy summer together near the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. On one of that summer’s dark, gloomy days, they held a “Who can write the best horror story contest.” The winner of the contest was, of course, Mary Shelley with her epic Frankenstein.
If you’ve never read Frankenstein, get off your damn phone or computer, get a copy of the book and read! The novel is orders of magnitude better than all the movies and TV shows it has inspired. Ironically, the visual Frankenstein derivatives deform Mary’s masterpiece like her novel’s protagonist deformed body parts. Trust me, the book is another country; if you’ve never visited, you don’t know Frankenstein.
As Stauffer pointed out, Frankenstein wasn’t the only iconic monster to emerge from that bleak summer. Byron and Polidori created the urbane, upper-class, blood-sucking, murderous bad boy that Bram Stoker later elaborated into the Dracula we love today. So, shitty weather helped create both Frankenstein and Dracula. I already knew this. The Shelley Frankenstein story is so famous a Doctor Who episode is based on it. What I didn’t know was why the weather of 1816 was so shitty. Stauffer’s book connects the dots.
… a massive eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia the previous year was the cause of the extraordinarily bad meteorological conditions. According to Galen Wood, “The sun-dimming stratospheric aerosols produced by Tambora’s eruption in 1815 spawned the most devastating, sustained period of extreme weather seen on our planet in perhaps thousands of years.”
The summer of 1816 was later called the “Year without a summer.” Crops failed everywhere, and tens of thousands starved. It was a grand little mini-apocalypse, sure the body count was high, but we got Frankenstein and Dracula.
So bad weather is good for literature. Good to know! If one big volcano can play midwife to Frankenstein, imagine the literary canon that will derive from (say it in a deep, scary monster voice) Global Climate Change! As cities sink beneath rising seas, crops fail, deserts expand, billions move, and resource wars erupt, authors everywhere, perhaps even AI authors, will be inspired. Hey, the world might burn, but boy, we will see some banger literature.
Analyze the Data not the Drivel 