Is 'Frankenstein' a science-fiction novel?

Novels rarely fit neatly into genre-categorisations, more often containing elements of multiple ‘types’. Frankenstein is no exception. Immediately upon its first publication, the novel challenged existing literary ideas about form, asking scientific questions and providing as many varied answers. Science-fiction, itself a relatively new term and concept, might typically involve monstrosity, inhuman experience and the sublime. Shelley incorporated all of these themes alongside fundamental explorations of life, death and the borderlands between them. The novel immediately asks the reader to suspend pre-existing biological and physiological knowledge about the creation of life, for instance. However, Frankenstein is a novel that is only partly about science – the miraculous ‘birth’ takes up a small fraction of the text – which might deter its categorisation as a sci-fi novel. That said, Shelley used contemporary questions about biology, the potential of human experiment and the redundancy of a spiritual Creator in order to fantasise about the human condition, about responsibility and self-interest, and about the relationship between society and its individual members. Ultimately, although Shelley was writing before the official categorisation of science-fiction emerged, she pre-empted some of its familiar tropes. More importantly, though lacking the vampires and aliens of subsequent texts, Shelley combined science-fiction and moralistic concerns to create a novel that defies neat categorisation, and instead occupies undefinable ground. Frankenstein is a commentary on the human condition, part-romance, part-thriller, and part-science fiction, Shelley re-imagined normality in a way familiar enough to be believable, but unfamiliar enough to be disconcerting.