Frankenstein

On a ship trapped in Arctic ice, an explorer takes aboard a dying man who tells him his story. Victor Frankenstein, a student of natural philosophy, has discovered how to give life to dead matter and built a man, then fled in horror from what he made. The creature, abandoned and rejected by everyone who sees him, teaches himself to speak and read, begs his maker for a companion, and when refused takes revenge on everyone Victor loves, until creator and creation pursue each other into the frozen north.

Mary Shelley began the novel at nineteen, during a summer by Lake Geneva in 1816 when Lord Byron challenged his guests to write ghost stories; it was published in 1818 and is often called the first science fiction novel. Twelve LibriVox volunteers read it in a little over eight hours.