In the summer of 1816, Lord Byron was shocked by the weather in Geneva and wrote one of the first apocalyptic treatments of ecocide. He didn’t know it, but a volcanic explosion in Indonesia the year before had covered Europe with a blanket of ash particles in the sky. The year 1816 is now known as the “Year Without a Summer.” The writing vacation in Geneva proved very rich for Byron, not just with his magnificent “Darkness” but also for his association with the wunderkind poet Percy Shelley and his young wife, a teenager named Mary Godwin. “Frankenstein” was the everlasting literary result of that gathering, and it wasn’t written by ether of poetry’s bad boys, but by the teenage Mary Shelley, daughter of literature’s first feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. This song is part of the “Monsters & Mothers” musical written by Seth Flynn, Sandra Bishop and Seanie Blue.
