In the January 2002 Harper’s magazine, contributing editor L.J. Davis traces “modern” science fiction’s roots to the cultural environment that produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Shelley, it seems, was driven to write Frankenstein, at least in part, after reading about scientist Luigi Galvani, who had been the first to make a deceased frog’s leg twitch by applying electricity to it.
In retrospect, Galvani’s seems a pretty humble achievement, but at the time, neither electricity nor the origin of life was well understood. Galvani at first concluded that the experiment had partially reanimated the frog and that electricity was therefore the elixir of resurrection, among other things. Overcome with enthusiasm, he subsequently “festooned his shrubbery with frog body parts,” hoping to predict approaching electrical storms and, at the same time, tap into the spark of life that supposedly crackled invisibly in the air.