Frankenstein Unbound by Brian W. Aldiss

First published: 1973

Type of work: Science fiction

Time of work: The years 2020 and 1816

Locale: Texas and Switzerland

Principal Characters:

• Joseph “Joe” Bodenland, a deposed presidential adviser, who is transported by a timeslip from the twenty-first to the early nineteenth century
• Victor Frankenstein, a Swiss scientist
• Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the author of Frankenstein and the mistress and future wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley
• George Gordon, Lord Byron, the English Romantic poet
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet and the lover and future husband of Mary Godwin
• The Frankenstein monster
• The monster’s Mate
• Elizabeth Lavenza, Frankenstein’s betrothed
• Justine Moritz, a maidservant who has been accused of killing a child

The Novel

Frankenstein 1818), which can be considered the first real science-fiction novel, is subtitled “The Modern Prometheus.” Its author, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was the mistress and later the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the Romantic poet who wrote Prometheus Unbound (1820) and who was in part the model for Victor Frankenstein. In Frankenstein Unbound, Brian W. Aldiss combines the titles of Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s books and sends a time traveler from the twenty-first century back to Geneva in 1816, when Mary was engaged in writing her as yet uncompleted novel.

Frankenstein Unbound begins in the summer of 2020, in a series of letters from Joseph Bodenland—a liberal presidential adviser ousted by right-wing extremists and now staying at his ranch in New Houston, Texas—to his wife in Indonesia. The world is at war, but Joe hopes that the news of a space-time rupture will stop further conflict. Meanwhile, he is enjoying the company of his grandchildren, who still believe in myths. Their mythic make-believe games cause him to think of the major myth of his own time: “that ever-increasing production and industrialization bring the greatest happiness for the greatest number all round the globe....”

The infrastructure of space has become unstable because of nuclear warfare above the stratosphere. Joe thinks that “the intellect has made our planet unsafe for intellect. We are suffering from the curse that was Baron Frankenstein’s in Mary Shelley’s novel: by seeking to control too much, we have lost control of ourselves.” In New Houston, Joe experiences a thirty-five-hour timeslip back to the Middle Ages. Then, Mrs. Bodenland receives a cable stating that during a second timeslip, her husband rode out alone into an altered countryside, and when the ranch snapped back into the present, he and his car disappeared into the vanished land.

From that point onward, the novel is the taped journal of Joe Bodenland, relating his experience. He discovers that he has slipped in time and place back to Switzerland in 1816, when people are discussing the just-ended Napoleonic Wars. His years as a diplomat had made him knowledgeable about the country and fluent in its languages. He also finds that he has become young again and full of vigor. At an inn, he overhears gossip about a local murder, in which a maidservant named Justine Moritz was to stand trial for killing a small boy, William. Joe is surprised when a gentleman whose table he is sharing insists that Justine is innocent and that guilt lies on his own shoulders. Following his distraught acquaintance to Geneva, Joe learns that the man is Victor Frankenstein. “I felt myself in the presence of myth and, by association, accepted myself as mythical!” Joe follows Victor into the mountains, where they both see the monster.

As a child, Joe had read Frankenstein, but the original was confused for him by “the deplorable pastiches and plagiarizations put out by the mass media.” He remembered that Mary Shelley was the author but thought that Victor was purely fictitious. Falling in love with the unspoiled world of 1816, Joe hates the “conquest of Nature” by which the Age of Science has destroyed it and caused “the loss of man’s inner self.” Blaming Victor for this, Joe tries to undo the damage caused by his experiments. He attends Justine’s trial and hears her sentenced to be hanged. In vain, he tries to make Victor help her; Victor is too obsessed with himself, and Joe finds that a three-month timeslip has occurred and transported him overnight from May to August, when Justine is already dead.

Failing with Victor, Joe goes to the Villa Diodati, where he encounters Lord Byron. When Byron introduces Joe to Percy Bysshe Shelley and then to Mary, Joe finds that his “severance with the old modes of reality [is] complete.” They all engage in a debate about the role of science and the future. Shelley predicts the coming liberation of mankind through machinery, but Mary thinks that humanity first “will have to change its basic nature.” Byron suspects that machines may strengthen the evil in man’s nature and that “new knowledge may lead to new oppression.” Joe tells them that there will continue to be inequality, that “culture will become enslaved by the machines,” that goodness will become irrelevant because machines “become symbols of class and prosperity,” and that as systems become more complex, they become impersonal, have more danger of going wrong, and make it more difficult for the individual to operate them for good.

Alone with Mary, Joe tells her that her characters are alive, only a few miles away, while she insists that they are invented. Accepting “the equal reality of Mary Shelley and her creation,” Joe wants to borrow a copy of the novel to use it to ambush and kill the monster. He finds, however, that Mary has not yet completed the book. She tells him the story to the point at which Frankenstein agrees to make the monster a mate; beyond that, she has not written. Joe, in turn, assures her that she will finish the novel, marry Shelley, and become famous. For an idyllic day, Joe and Mary become lovers. Then he returns to Geneva, determined to persuade Victor not to create a female and to help him destroy the existing monster. When Joe goes to the Frankenstein house, Victor’s fiancee, Elizabeth Lavenza, and friend Clerval have him arrested, charged with murdering Victor. From prison, he writes a long letter to Mary, comparing his era to hers.

When a flood hits the prison, Joe is freed. Two other escaped convicts beat him and steal his fire. During a dreadful, freezing night in the mountains, the monster visits Joe, rebuilds his fire, and leaves him food. After recuperating, Joe returns to Geneva and discovers that a slip in both time and space has occurred; the lake has vanished, and a new ice age has come. Joe finds Victor again and goes with him to his secret laboratory, where they debate the role of science and the responsibility of the scientist. Victor is creating a mate for the monster and refuses to be dissuaded by Joe, who is shocked to find that Victor has given the mate the face of Justine Moritz. Joe then decides to kill both Frankenstein and his creature. In Victor’s stable, Joe finds his car, with a sealed nuclear drive that requires no fuel. On it is mounted a swivel gun, with which Joe plans to destroy the monster. When the monster and his mate emerge and engage in a grotesque mating dance, however, Joe watches in horrified fascination, unable to fire, while the monsters couple and then vanish. When Victor proposes making a third monster to kill the first, Joe shoots him dead and burns the tower. He then takes over Victor’s role and pursues the monsters in a hunt to the death across a bleak frozen wasteland created by a spreading rupture in time-space. Finding the monsters outside a vast citadel across an icefield—the last refuge of humanity—Joe shoots them both with tracer bullets from his swivel gun, killing first the female and then the attacking male. Then, anticipating a possible attack from the fortress, Joe waits “in darkness and distance”; the novel thus concludes with the same words as Frankenstein.

The Characters

Except for Joe Bodenland and a few minor characters, the characters in Frankenstein Unbound come either from Frankenstein or from actual history. Aldiss’ portrayals of Byron and Shelley correspond to the image one has of them from their life and works. A novelist takes a certain risk in re-creating great writers and inventing dialogue for them; the danger is that the fictional portrait will fall flat and the dialogue be far beneath the writers’ own style. Yet Aldiss succeeds brilliantly in making Byron and Shelley seem authentic; he endows the former with sardonic wit and the latter with eloquent idealism and nervous mannerisms. As for Mary, she is described as “fair and birdlike, with brilliant eyes and a small wistful mouth” and an irresistible laugh. Joe Bodenland finds in her a warm, generous affection, and in making them lovers, Aldiss may be indulging in a vicarious love affair with the founder of science fiction.

Aldiss takes liberties with the characters of Frankenstein, however, since he places them in an alternate world where they can assume a life of their own. Thus, Victor Frankenstein and his associates are far less sympathetic than in the original. In Frankenstein Unbound, Victor is less the noble hero of sensibility stricken with remorse for the horrors he has brought to his friends and family and is far more a morose, sullen individual, alternately wallowing in self-pity and subject to fits of megalomania. His fiancee, Elizabeth, and friend Clerval, both admirable in Frankenstein, are here presented as cold, arrogant, and hostile. Neither is killed by the monster, though they both are in the original.

The monster itself, far from looking hideous, is beautiful in a terrifying sort of way; the features are not quite human but resemble a helmet face painted on a skull; the monster looks “like a machine, lathe-turned.” Aldiss’ monster is less guilty than that of Shelley; he has killed William and caused the death of Justine, but he does not murder Elizabeth and Clerval. Thus, dying, he can legitimately cry that no fury he could possess could match that of Bodenland.

Bodenland is perhaps the least fully developed character in the novel. Though he is the narrator, the reader does not get a vivid image of him; one never even learns what he looks like. An intruder into this world, he serves mainly to alter the action and to engage in Platonic dialogues about the role of science, the nature of mankind, and the course of history. His thoughts tell more about the Shelleys, Byron, Frankenstein, and his associates than about Bodenland himself. Once stuck in the world of 1816, he ceases to think about his own world or his lost family; he simply plunges into the Frankenstein drama, driven by a boundless curiosity and compulsion to get involved. In one sense, he is the conscience of the novel; able to foresee the future consequences of Frankenstein’s work, he tries to “wreck the fatalism of coming events.” In another sense, he becomes corrupted, so that toward the end, he realizes that he has “lied, cheated, committed adultery, looted, thieved, and ultimately murdered.” When he kills Victor and then takes over his role to pursue and destroy the monsters, he becomes as deadly as they, and the dying monster accuses him of not knowing compassion.

Critical Context

Concurrently with Frankenstein Unbound, Aldiss was working on Billion Year Spree (1973), a history of science fiction, which he published the same year as the novel (1973). It opens with a chapter on Mary Shelley and considers Frankenstein to be the first science-fiction novel, the “origin of the species.” Calling Frankenstein “the first great myth of the industrial age,” Aldiss finds that it “foreshadows many of our anxieties about the two-faced triumphs of scientific progress” and “the disintegration of society which follows man’s arrogation of power. We see one perversion of the natural order leading to another. Frankenstein is loaded with a sense of corruption....” Frankenstein Unbound, even more so, has this sense, and it is Mary Shelley’s concepts that Aldiss explores in more depth in his novel.

It is at the same time a gloss on Frankenstein, to which it is also indebted for its structure. Both begin as epistolary narratives and then shift to the first-person narrative of the protagonist. During the course of Frankenstein Unbound, Joe analyzes Mary, her milieu, and the characters, episodes, and ideas of her fiction, and she herself tells him the circumstances under which she began her work, while Victor later summarizes for Joe the experiences of the monster during the period in which he was abandoned and before he killed William.

Up to the point at which Mary has not yet completed the novel—the point at which Victor has promised to make the monster a mate—Aldiss follows the outlines of Mary Shelley’s novel, though he alters the characters in it; thereafter, he feels free to change the course of events, as Bodenland interferes with them. Though Joe complains that his recollections of the novel were obscured by travesties of it on film, Aldiss borrows from the James Whale films Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) the title of Baron Frankenstein, the details of Victor’s laboratory in the tower of a ruined castle, and the image of villagers with torches who might come to burn it, though they never do.

Frankenstein Unbound is not only a science-fiction novel but also to some extent a historical novel, as Aldiss re-creates in some critical detail the world of 1816 before he alters it with slips in time and space. In contrasting the world of 2020 with the Romantic era of the early nineteenth century and the developments between them, Aldiss shows considerable historical awareness.

Besides the innumerable film sequels, there are several forgettable novelistic sequels to Frankenstein by inconsequential authors. Aldiss, one of the preeminent British science-fiction writers, has not written a sequel but has entered the novel and created an alternate-universe version of it that enables him to explore in more depth the themes and meanings that Mary Shelley originally raised.

Bibliography

Aldiss, Brian W. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction, 1973.

Hall, H. W. Review in Library Journal. XCIX (August, 1974), p. 1988.

Rogan, Helen. Review in Time. CIV (August 5, 1974), p. 84.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus, 1818.