Welcome to the Science Fiction Zone!  Each week this website (part of science news.org) features an activity that brings an aspect of science fiction to students.

There are also articles and reviews of science fiction stories.

Did you know that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, was the first work of science fiction?

During the snowy summer of 1816, the "year without a summer" the world was experiencing a long cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815.  Mary traveled with her future husband Percy Shelley to Lake Geneva Switzerland to spend the time with poet Lord Byron.  Forced to stay indoors one evening because of the cold and rainy weather, the group of friends decided to have a ghost-story writing contest.  It is here that she began writing Frankenstein.  She completed the novel in 1817 when she was only 19 years old.

"How I, then a young girl, came to think of and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?"