It seems to me that Mary Shelley’s novels follow two persistent threads. The first is her extensive knowledge of history, politics, and the history of science. Frankenstein, Valperga, and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck all read like “what if” explorations of political or scientific history. Frankenstein imagines a world in which galvanism can truly reanimate the dead; Valperga asks what a woman endowed with power, moral agency, and romantic attachment to a rising tyrant might have seen and felt while standing opposite the real historical warlord Castruccio Castracani; and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck explores the possibility that the pretender Perkin Warbeck was, in fact, noble.

The second thread arises from her tumultuous personal life. The Last Man, Lodore, and Falkner feel like “what could have been” emotional reimaginings of loss, family, identity, and survival (with The Last Man also drawing on historical plague narratives). The Last Man envisions a world in which she herself—transformed into Lionel Verney—is the final survivor, accompanied by thinly veiled portraits of the men she loved and lost (Shelley and Byron). Lodore examines female identity and autonomy shaped by, and ultimately liberated from, the influence of Percy Shelley. Falkner, meanwhile, reworks her complicated relationship with her father, William Godwin, into a narrative about reconciliation and moral redemption.

In a sense, though, this is true of all storytelling—novels, films, and plays alike. Even Shakespeare reinvented preexisting tales, histories, and myths. Literature, in this way, operates much like science: each new creation builds on ideas, experiences, and structures that already exist.

But art and science are not merely remixes of what has come before. They are remixes guided by an emotional, moral, or intuitive truth arising from experience—even from imagined but plausible experience—something like a “flashlight” that directs the creative process. When Newton developed his theory of gravity, he was guided by such an intuitive light: his cannon thought experiment, his observation that projectiles travel farther with greater velocity, and his recognition that separating massive bodies requires proportionally greater force. The concepts of mass, force, and motion predated Newton; his counterfactual reasoning allowed him to perceive a deeper truth about how bodies interact.

In the arts, life experience and knowledge supply the flashlight that draws us toward particular emotional or philosophical counterfactuals—stories that explore paths we never walked but might have. In science, the flashlight often arises from the counterfactual itself (not many scietific truth reside in plain sight): it illuminates new ways to rearrange known facts and generates fresh counterfactuals that we call predictions.

In science, the counterfactual often seems to hold the truth — and that is precisely why it’s essential to keep expanding the boundaries of experience by exploring and by building tools (which function as new portals for our encounter with nature) — even tools not directly intended for scientific inquiry.

If Einstein had had no conception of an elevator or of being on a train — each of which offers distinct classes of phenomenal experience: the sensation of being pushed back by an accelerating train, the feeling of lightness in a descending lift — he might not have had a way to intuit the nature of freefall or acceleration. These kinds of phenomenal and embodied experiences arguably make possible the construction of counterfactuals such as “What would a freely falling person experience and observe?” and “What would an observer on a moving train experience and observe?” It is precisely these counterfactual constructions that revealed deeper natural truths, such as the equivalence principle.

The expansion of phenomenal and embodied experience through new tools often resembles a video game in which we unlock new map locations: once a location is unlocked, we are free to explore it. Likewise, once a category of embodied experience is “unlocked”, we gain the freedom and conceptual bandwidth to construct counterfactuals — in which scientific truths (at least in physics) seem to reside.

Who knows what forms of embodied experience we currently lack, and which may hold deep secrets? Might there be profound truths we cannot yet conceive because we lack the relevant bodily experience?