Classic Radio Sci-Fi: BBC Drama Collection: Five BBC Radio Full-Cast Dramatisations (CD) (ISBN-13: 9781785296222)

Mary Shelley was born in London on 30 August 1797. Her mother, the celebrated feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, died a few days after her birth.Her father, William Godwin, a well-known anarchist and atheist writer, tutored Mary. In 1814, when she was sixteen, she fell in love with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and they eloped to France. In 1816 the couple travelled to Lake Geneva to spend the summer with the poet Byron. Mary was inspired to write Frankenstein after Byron arranged a ghost story competition during their stay. In the autumn of 1816 Shelley's pregnant wife drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park and Shelley immediately married Mary. The couple had four children together but only one son survived infancy. They lived in Italy until Percy's death in a boating accident in 1822. Mary continued to write until her death in London on 1 February 1851. She is buried in Bournemouth.

Stanislaw Lem was a Polish author best known for his 1961 science fiction novel Solaris. He also wrote several other SF works including Eden (1959) and His Master's Voice (1968). Lem's books have been translated into over 40 languages and sold over 45 million copies. He was awarded numerous honours for his writing, including the City of Krak?w's Prize in Literature, the Grand Prix de Litt?rature Polici?re and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. Lem died in 2006, aged 84.