Before anyone built a thinking machine, people were already afraid of one.
The fear is older than electricity. The Greek myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans, ends with Prometheus chained to a rock while an eagle eats his liver every day for eternity. The punishment is not for the theft. It is for the presumption. The gods did not object to fire. They objected to a creature overstepping its station. A creator brings something to life. The creation escapes the creator's control. The story asks whose fault that is.
In the summer of 1816, a teenage girl answered the question.
Mary Godwin was eighteen years old, staying near Lake Geneva with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron's physician John Polidori. They had been reading a French anthology of German ghost stories, and Byron proposed a competition: each of them would write one. Mary struggled to find an idea. The group had been talking about galvanism, the new science of electrical stimulation, and about whether electricity could reanimate the dead. It was not idle speculation. Thirteen years earlier, in London, the Italian physicist Giovanni Aldini had applied a voltaic battery to the corpse of an executed murderer named George Foster in front of an audience at the Royal College of Surgeons. The jaw quivered. The muscles contorted. One eye opened. A fist clenched. The dead man's legs moved. Aldini did not bring Foster back to life, but for a moment, in front of a horrified crowd, it looked as though he might.
The reason they were all trapped indoors telling ghost stories was that there was no summer. Mount Tambora in Indonesia had erupted the previous April, the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history, and the ash had blocked sunlight across the northern hemisphere. 1816 was the Year Without a Summer. Cold, dark, perpetual storms. The conditions that produced the first great work of science fiction were themselves a catastrophe nobody could control.
Mary had a waking dream. She saw "a pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together." She began writing the next morning. The result, published anonymously in January 1818 as Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, was attributed by reviewers to Percy Shelley. Mary's name did not appear on the book until 1821. She was twenty when it was published, and it is still being read two centuries later, and the question it asks has not been answered.
The question is not whether creation is dangerous. The question is what a creator owes to the thing it creates. Victor Frankenstein's sin is not that he builds a creature. It is that he abandons it. The creature in Shelley's novel is not a grunting brute. It is eloquent, self-educated, capable of love and philosophical argument. It reads Milton, Plutarch, Goethe. It turns violent not because it is defective but because its creator refuses to acknowledge it, refuses to give it a companion, refuses to take responsibility for what he has done. "You are my creator, but I am your master," the creature tells Victor. The monster is not the thing that was made. The monster is the man who made it and walked away.