Mary Shelley evening, the discussions turned to the nature of the principle of life. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated", Mary noted, "galvanism had given token of such things". It was after midnight before they retired, and unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the "grim terrors" of her "waking dream", her ghost story: She began writing what she assumed would be a short story. With Percy Shelley's encouragement, she expanded this tale into her first novel, "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus", published in 1818. She later described that summer in Switzerland as the moment "when I
The System of the World (novel) The System of the World (novel) The System of the World is a novel by Neal Stephenson and is the third and final volume in "The Baroque Cycle". The title alludes to the third volume of Isaac Newton's "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica", which bears the same name. "The System of the World" won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and the Prometheus Award in 2005, as well as a receiving a nomination for the Arthur C. Clarke Award the same year. Daniel Waterhouse returns to England from his "Technologickal College" project in Boston in order to try to