short ones from Mary and Percy about the publication of their work, are fictional creations. In the Metropolis/The Ruins at Luna section, the facsimile edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, edited by Charles E. Robinson, was an invaluable resource.
Throughout the book, I have taken liberties small and large with many of the sources I have used, including the writings of Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Claire’s note to Leigh Hunt after Shelley’s drowning, for example, uses nearly her exact words, but I have greatly shortened the letter and slightly rearranged it. In another case, Claire’s thoughts about the German word for ghost in the Ice Diary section were actually expressed by her brother, Charles Clairmont, in a letter of February 26, 1820, from Vienna, to Claire and Mary in Pisa. And when in these pages Claire writes, “Fanny, I’m not well. My mind always keeps my body in a fever,” this is in fact a sentence from one of Fanny Imlay’s few surviving letters to Mary (written in 1816): “I am not well my mind always keeps my body in a fever. But never mind me—.” Fanny Imlay’s obituary is reproduced here word for word as it appeared in The Cambrian on October 12, 1816.
In the Dream of the Red Chamber section, Clerval’s friend in Aosta is based on a man who is said to have lived there in the eighteenth century. A brief account of his life can be found in The Italian Valleys of the Pennine Alps (1858) by Reverend S. W. King. This man subsequently became a character in Xavier de Maistre’s The Leper of the City of Aosta (1811). Henry Clerval, in the Dream of the Red Chamber section, figures in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as Victor Frankenstein’s dear and devoted friend, who is killed by the monster. Of Clerval’s love for things Eastern, and his desire to go East, Mary Shelley wrote, “He came to the university with the design of making himself complete master of Oriental languages… he turned his eyes towards the East as affording scope for his spirit of enterprise. The Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit languages engaged his attention.” In A Monster’s Notes, Clerval is not murdered after all; I have sent him East as he wanted, but to China, not Persia, where he translates the Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber.
Red Inkstone, the commentator on the Dream of the Red Chamber manuscript, is in fact thought to have existed, though there is much speculation as to who he might actually have been. The majority of his marginal comments in this book, as well as all of Cao Xueqin’s notes, are my invention. The excerpts from the novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, are actual quotes I’ve often slightly adapted. I used Yang Xianyi’s and Gladys Yang’s excellent four-volume unabridged translation, published by Foreign Languages Press in Beijing under the title A Dream of Red Mansions. Although technically Clerval would have used the Wade-Giles system of transliteration in his work as a translator, for the sake of clarity and consistency I have used pinyin, which is now considered standard. It is this form of transliteration that is used in newspapers and in most current literary translation, such as David Hawkes’s relatively recent translation of Dream of the Red Chamber (Story of the Stone).
Below is a list of main sources consulted for each section and sources for specific quotations the reader might be curious about. I have often used inexact or foreshortened quotations, adapting them as necessary. As the monster is a note-taker, not a scholar, I gave him quite a bit of leeway.
10 “Q. ‘What exactly do people do’”: The interview with Dr. Anne Foerst, adapted and rewritten by me, is from Claudia Dreifus, “Do Androids Dream? M.I.T Is Working on It,” The New York Times, November 7, 2000.
ICE DIARY
Main sources for this section include: The Clairmont Correspondence, edited by Marion Kingston Stocking (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995) and The Journals of Claire Clairmont 1814-1827, edited by Marion Kingston (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968). Other main sources I used for details of Claire Clairmont’s life include: R. Glynn Griylls, Claire Clairmont (London: John Murray, 1939) and Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995).
Throughout this section, information on the Northern explorers is from Arctic Explorations and Discoveries, edited by Samuel M. Smucker (New York: Orton & Co., 1857); Pierre Berton, The Arctic Grail (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988); J. Douglas Hoare, Arctic