ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how 'sciences, and scientific imagination come to shape social imagination', and vice versa. It focuses on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (one of the earliest works of modern science fiction) to examine what this iconic work has to say about science, society and the role of the scientist. For, while Frankenstein is a milestone in the development of the genre, it arose out of the intertextuality of earlier writing created within the historical dynamics of the Western world. The chapter then discusses the science fiction of author's own era in order to demonstrate that this 'privileged' literature of modernity has continued the diagnostic and prognostic work of which this genre is capable. It also focuses on a single exemplary text, in this case Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), a writer and a novel with strong affinities to Shelley and her work.
