This Monstrous Thing(86)

As a writer of historical fantasy, I get the marvelous job of adjusting pieces of history to serve my narrative, and I took some liberties, both with the technological and social landscape of my alternate Europe and with the life of Mary Shelley herself. But the fictional anxieties that plague Alasdair’s world are reflections of real anxieties of the time. Though almost none of the steam-and-cog-powered technology in my Geneva existed in 1818 (and some never existed at all) and no one was worried about clockwork cyborg men, they were worried about and often fearful of the rapidly industrializing world and the societal shifts occurring because of it. The discrimination and prejudice Oliver, Clémence, and the clockwork men and women face is a reflection of the very real and equally nonsensical cultural prejudices that defined European society at the time. Oliver’s failed uprising is fictional, but inspired by the June Rebellion in Paris in 1832 and the age of revolution in which Europe was entrenched.

And then there are facts that I ignored completely, because I am willing to play fast and loose with history in order to tell a better story. Mary Shelley had two children—one living and one dead—when she came to Geneva in 1816, both of which I omitted. She and Percy also left Geneva in September of 1816, but I extended their stay to match the timeline in Frankenstein. The university in Ingolstadt was closed in 1800, but I wanted Alasdair to share the same collegiate aspirations of his literary alter ego, Victor Frankenstein. The sections from Frankenstein have been altered to reflect my steampunk creation myth rather than Mary’s science-based one, and they are meant to read as the novel might have looked had it been written in my alternate hyper-industrialized history.

All stories set in the past are shadows, impressions of the way things were, but still half-imagined. It’s what excites me most about both reading and writing historical fantasy—the collision of truth and invention. This book is my invention, and, above all, a work of fiction. I take responsibility for all the truths within it that I stretched, massaged, and fused clockwork to.

1. Quoted in Sunstein, Emily W., Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 58.

2. Lady Caroline Lamb, quoted in Hoobler, Thomas and Dorothy, The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein. (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006).