Well written, weaves around the Mary Shelley story in an interesting way.
Never really got what the point of it was though. ( )

This book is just terrible. I hate to think what the Dracula counterpart was like. I’m going to mark it as abandoned even though I will probably slog through the rest of it. The writing is pre-pubescent at the best of times and the whole thing smells like a dash off. I know it’s science fiction but the whole thing is also preposterous. The premise is shabby and the execution even more so. [a:Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley|11139|Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1386351586p2/11139.jpg], not to mention Byron, and Percy Shelley, would be spinning in their graves if they knew a half-wit hack like Aldiss hitched his wagon to her team.

It would take me as much time to explain this mess as the book is long, so I’m not going much into the nonsense that is supposed to be a plot. The action starts in the distant future of 2020. Now for some time I’ve been telling sf authors you need to pitch things a whole lot farther in the future, or make it at least hazy and ambiguous what “future” time we’re talking about, like “a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away,” but nobody listens. The otherwise excellent [a:Philip K. Dick|4764|Philip K. Dick|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1264613853p2/4764.jpg] made some of the same mistakes. Millennials don’t know or care dick about Nixon (How’s that for clever prose? Wait on it. You’ll get it eventually.). If you don’t do this the future “era,” so to speak, looks stupid because you know it won’t turn out that way no matter how prescient you think you might be. Better to project an alternative history future. It sits better, like Blade Runner 2049. Otherwise you’ve already got one foot in the grave with the “future” reader.

Then there’s the romance between Mary Godwin and our protagonist Joe Bodenland. Could have only been written by a repressed male. Never mind. There’s also these time slips where bits of the Earth presumably get pushed forward and backward in time and space. These provide Aldiss’s Deux Ex Machina to move things conveniently along when he needs to. Then there’s the fact that the whole Frankenstein story is somehow “real” and not Mary Shelley’s invention. Like she wasn’t clever enough to come up with it on her own.

Aldiss was always a lightweight in the circle of New Wave speculative fiction; the right place at the right time.

[a:Michael Moorcock|16939|Michael Moorcock|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1424079041p2/16939.jpg] should be ashamed for writing the introduction and not telling the reader it was a practical joke, like [a:L. Ron Hubbard|33503|L. Ron Hubbard|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1485578081p2/33503.jpg]’s stuff. ( )

This is the first novel in Brian Aldiss's monster trilogy; I unwittingly read the later novel Dracula Unbound first, two months ago. In this one it is 2020 (the book was published in 1973, when that was still the fairly far future), when increasing stability in the space time continuum is causing timeslips, one of which sends Joseph Bodenland back to 1816 Switzerland. He meets Mary Shelley, plus Percy and Lord Byron, during the summer the former wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein. There are some great scenes where Bodenland interacts with these literary giants, revelling in their speculative thinking, way ahead of its time, but very unrealistically idealistic from a 21st century view point. However, time is more mixed up than he thinks - in this version of 1816, while Mary Shelley still wrote Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein is also a real person who created a real monster, and its female partner, which Bodenland pledges to hunt down, to prevent what he sees as the impact of Frankenstein's amoral scientific endeavour on his own present day situation. The novel is thus a perhaps slightly awkward amalgam of literary homage, Gothic horror and thriller chase. I found the ending slightly unsatisfactory. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2684342.html

I had not actually read this before - but I had long ago listened to a 1978 commercially released cassette recording of Brian Aldiss actually reading the book. The tapes together were only 2h42m, so it must have been somewhat abridged (though the book is anyway only 216 pages).

Aldiss is at his best when he examines fragmentation and transition. (That's why the first two Helliconia books are much better than the third.) Here, his protagonist, Joe Bodenland, is yanked from the world of 2020, recovering from a global conflict where space and time have come adrift, and deposited in Switzerland in 1816, in both the world of Mary Shelley and the Villa Deodati and the world of Frankenstein's Geneva which she invented. Bodenland weaves in and out of both stories, making love to Mary, pursuing the monster, ending in the middle of nowhere anticipating doom. Given Aldiss's own reverence for Shelley as the originator of science fiction (two hundred years ago this summer) there's a lot going on here, and I don't feel fully able to unpack it, but I really liked it.

The 1990 film starred John Hurt as the protagonist (renamed Buchanan, which may be easier to say but has less linguistic resonance), Bridget Fonda as Mary Shelley and Raul Julia as Frankenstein. I may even try and watch it some time. ( )

Brian Aldiss held my attention for several days with this book, but left me confused as to whether this was an attempt to write a piece of what came to be called steam punk, or an involved literary puzzle, like the Jasper Fforde Thursday Next, novels. still, it's worth reading, and gives a bit of depth to those more interested in the doctor than the monster. ( )