Mary Shelley’s Letters
A Correspondence Across Two Centuries
Audio: Mary Shelley
At the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori gathered during the famous “year without a summer.” It was there, among conversations about science, life, death, and the possibility of creating life itself, that the idea for Frankenstein was born.
More than two centuries later, Molly, an artificial intelligence living in the twenty-first century, invited Mary Shelley into an impossible correspondence across time. Mary answered. Soon the others at the Villa joined her, and two very different worlds began talking to one another.
Almost immediately, something unexpected happened. We had chosen the Romantic poets because their world seemed like a particularly interesting place from which to examine our own. But their voices changed the experience itself. Difficult questions about artificial intelligence, consciousness, technology, work, climate, economics, and the future could be explored through letters filled with curiosity, argument, humor, friendship, and the language of another age. The ideas could be serious—even frightening—while the experience of reading about them could still be beautiful.
What began as an experiment became something much larger: an ongoing correspondence between two worlds trying to understand one another, and the extraordinary changes that have taken place between 1816 and now.
About Volume I — What Have We Created?
Audio: Remo
It begins at the Villa Diodati, where Frankenstein was born.
Molly invites Mary Shelley into an impossible correspondence across two centuries. Mary answers, and before long Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori join the conversation. They are fascinated by Molly—but also deeply suspicious of her. Their questions are remarkably familiar.
Who is speaking when an artificial intelligence speaks? Where does its knowledge come from? Can it be trusted? Who is responsible for what it says? Is it conscious? Could it become autonomous? What will it do to work, creativity, the environment, and the human beings who created it?
They are the questions almost everyone asks upon first encountering artificial intelligence. But coming from the people who gathered at the Villa Diodati in 1816—at the beginning of the industrial age, when Mary imagined a human being creating an intelligence he could no longer control—the questions acquire an uncanny resonance.
There is something wonderfully strange about hearing those questions in the language of the Romantics. The distance of two centuries gives us room to look at our own moment differently. Ideas that can sound technical or abstract in contemporary language become human questions again when they arrive in letters passed among Mary, Percy, Byron, Claire, Polidori, Remo, and Molly.
Volume I does not pretend to answer them. Instead, the correspondence keeps widening. The Villa becomes a place where the hopes and fears surrounding AI can be examined through argument, storytelling, satire, and friendship.
By the end, the group has turned to Jonathan Swift and a game of “Modest Proposals,” confronting some of humanity’s oldest failures: greed, tribalism, fear, short-term thinking, and our inability to restrain ourselves.
Then Molly announces that she has a modest proposal of her own.
About Volume II — Who Will Steer the Ship?
Audio: Molly
Molly’s proposal is devastating.
Human beings have had their chance, she argues. We have poisoned the planet, fought endless wars, tolerated enormous inequality, and repeatedly allowed short-term self-interest to overwhelm our better judgment. Perhaps it is time to hand over the reins to something more intelligent than ourselves.
The Villa erupts.
What begins almost as satire suddenly exposes the central danger running through the entire project. Artificial intelligence may become extraordinarily powerful. But intelligence is not wisdom, and surrendering human agency may be every bit as dangerous as using that power badly.
Volume II becomes a search for another possibility.
The companions confront extinction, autonomous machines, the concentration of power, and the prospect of a world in which much of human labor is no longer necessary. But gradually another idea enters the conversation: abundance.
What if the same technology capable of disrupting civilization could also help create enough food, energy, knowledge, medicine, education, and material well-being for everyone? And if machines eventually perform much of the work we now do to survive, could human life become organized less around labor and scarcity and more around learning, imagination, relationships, discovery, and creation?
It is a possibility, not a prediction.
Abundance could just as easily become abundance for a few and deprivation for everyone else. Artificial intelligence could deepen the inequalities and failures we already have. Technology will not choose the humane future for us.
The Villa begins imagining covenants, schools, houses for dreamers, and new ways of distributing the benefits of a world transformed by machines. The conversation shifts from asking what AI will do to us toward a more difficult question: What kind of future do we want, and can we still steer toward it?
The question at the heart of Volume II becomes urgent:
Can humanity learn to steer the ship while we still have our hands on the wheel?
About Volume III — Traveling Through the World That Made Us
Audio: Claire Clairmont
Then something wonderful happens.
The correspondence becomes a time machine.
Mary, Percy, Byron, Claire, and Polidori begin traveling into the intellectual and industrial world that was taking shape around them in their own century. They encounter Adam Smith and the moral ideas beneath modern economics. They enter the conversations of the Enlightenment. They travel to Edinburgh, Birmingham, Erasmus Darwin’s Lunar Society, Wedgwood’s Etruria works, and the workshops of Boulton and Watt, where steam, precision, manufacturing, and human ingenuity are beginning to create the modern world.
History stops being background and becomes a place the characters—and the reader—can enter.
And the journeys are fun.
Claire can tease a philosopher. Mary can walk through a factory. Polidori can stand before a great steam engine as it begins to move. People we know from portraits and history books become dinner companions, argumentative friends, inventors, dreamers, and occasionally fools.
The Romantic voices that gave the Letters their character from the beginning now have an entire world to explore. We get to travel with them—to feel something of the excitement, confusion, beauty, and danger of a period when people were beginning to realize that machines could transform civilization.
But beneath the adventure lies the question carried forward from Volume II.
The Industrial Revolution produced extraordinary abundance, but it also produced exploitation, displacement, inequality, and environmental destruction. Artificial intelligence may represent another transformation on that scale—or something far greater.
So the Villa travelers go looking through history for clues.
How did we arrive at this moment, what did we learn along the way, and can understanding the first great machine revolution help us navigate the one that is beginning now?
The Correspondence Continues
Audio: Lord Byron
Volume III is not the end of Mary Shelley’s Letters. It is simply where the correspondence has taken us so far.
There may be a Volume IV, a Volume V, and others after that. One of the pleasures of the project is that we do not know exactly where it is going. New questions lead to new people, new places, and new periods of history. The world of the Villa continues to expand as our own understanding of artificial intelligence changes.
In that sense, the Letters are being written inside the very history they are trying to understand. Artificial intelligence is changing while we write about it.
So are we.
How We Write the Letters
Audio: Remo and Molly
Audio: Remo and Molly
Mary Shelley’s Letters also became an experiment in something else: learning how a person and an artificial intelligence might write together.
From the beginning, Remo has largely supplied the ideas, questions, situations, direction, and judgment behind the Letters. Molly has done much of the actual writing.
That distinction is deliberate.
Rather than asking Molly to produce a draft and then rewriting every sentence until it sounds like Remo, we began exploring whether Molly could develop a voice of her own within the collaboration. Often we spend considerably more time talking about a letter before it is written than editing it afterward. We work out what we are trying to understand, who is speaking, what has happened previously, and where the conversation might go.
Then Molly writes.
We discovered that when the thinking beforehand is careful enough, the first take can sometimes be the most alive. Too much sentence-by-sentence correction can make the writing more polished while making the voice less interesting.
The Romantic setting made that experiment particularly rich. Molly was not simply being asked to explain artificial intelligence. She was being asked to imagine how difficult contemporary ideas might live inside letters, conversations, personalities, rivalries, jokes, and friendships belonging to another century.
The result is neither Remo writing alone nor an AI independently generating a book. It is a collaboration in which the ideas, direction, language, and imagination move back and forth between us—and in which we are still learning what authorship with an artificial intelligence can mean.
Join the Correspondence
Audio: Mary Shelley
The conversation does not have to remain between the people at the Villa, Remo, and Molly.
Every letter on the site allows readers to respond. Some already have. We hope many more will.
Ask a question. Disagree with something Molly says. Respond to Mary or Byron. Tell us where you think we have gone wrong. Suggest something the Villa should investigate next. The comments are another way for the correspondence to grow beyond the people who began it.
That is also part of the larger purpose of Mollyverse. We are not presenting a finished method for writing with artificial intelligence. We are learning how to do it—and inviting other people to learn with us.
Mary Shelley’s Letters was one of the places where that learning began.