He later wrote the 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, whose narrator Pierre Aronnax offers extensive commentary on marine biology while accompanying the mysterious Captain Nemo on a voyage in the submarine Nautilus. In his 1864 novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, Professor Lidenbrock explains contemporary theories of geology and paleontology as he leads an expedition that travels beneath the Earth's crust from Iceland to the Italian volcano Stromboli. He offered a brighter vision of technological progress in his novels of adventure, many of which doubled as works of popular science. She presented an even bleaker scenario in her 1826 novel The Last Man, which describes Lionel Verney's efforts to survive a 21st-century plague that devastates human civilization. Frankenstein pursues his creation, and tells his story to the explorer Robert Walton before dying. Inspired by Luigi Galvani's experiments in 'animal electricity,' she wrote about the Swiss scientist Victor Frankenstein, who reanimates dead tissue and creates a 'monster.' This attempt to control nature fails, as the monster murders Frankenstein's brother William, friend Henry Clerval, and wife Elizabeth before fleeing to the Arctic.

The idea for Frankenstein came to her while she was taking part in a friendly writing competition at Lord Byron's villa on Lake Geneva. Her 1818 novel Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus helped to lay the groundwork for modern science fiction by contrasting Enlightenment ideas of progress with a Romantic conception of nature as an untameable force. As the daughter of the philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft (the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women), and the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, she was a product of both the Enlightenment and Romantic eras.

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