Brian Aldiss - Frankenstein Unbound

For Bob and Kathy Morsberger, who appreciate

what Mary Shelley started

Alas, lost mortal! What with guests like these

Hast thou to do? I tremble for thy sake:

Why doth he gaze on thee, and thou on him?

Ah, he unveils his aspect: on his brow

The thunder-scars are graven: from his eye

Glares forth the immortality of hell …

Byron, Manfred

Make the beaten and the conquered pallid, with brows raised and knit together, and let the skin above the brows be all full of lines of pain; at the sides of the nose show the furrows going in an arch from the nostrils and ending where the eye begins, and show the dilation of the nostrils which is the cause of these lines; and let the teeth be parted after the manner of such as cry in lamentation.

Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting

Table of Contents

Title Page BRIAN ALDISS Frankenstein Unbound

Dedication For Bob and Kathy Morsberger, who appreciate what Mary Shelley started

Epigraphs Alas, lost mortal! What with guests like these Hast thou to do? I tremble for thy sake: Why doth he gaze on thee, and thou on him? Ah, he unveils his aspect: on his brow The thunder-scars are graven: from his eye Glares forth the immortality of hell … Byron, Manfred Make the beaten and the conquered pallid, with brows raised and knit together, and let the skin above the brows be all full of lines of pain; at the sides of the nose show the furrows going in an arch from the nostrils and ending where the eye begins, and show the dilation of the nostrils which is the cause of these lines; and let the teeth be parted after the manner of such as cry in lamentation. Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting

Introduction

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Part Two: The tape-journal of Joseph Bodenland

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

I had no hesitation. I was obsessed with the matter of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein : its tenderness and brutal remorse, and, beyond all that, its consideration of the difficulties of life that face us. So I got up one morning and eagerly began writing this novel.

In a sense, I was just doing a duty, for I felt that anyone interested in the macabre or the mystical should not fail to read Mary Shelley’s novel. I was determined that my answering novel should embody simple human joys and sorrows: the loss of a mother, the loss of direction, the loss of a feeling for common humanity. But for all that, it should just be a grand little story …

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein whilst still in her teens – a remarkable feat. We feel in her writing resonances of Caleb Williams , arguably the finest novel written by her father, the political philosopher William Godwin.

When I wrote my history of science fiction ( Billion Year Spree ), I claimed Frankenstein to be the first British work to which the label science fiction can be logically attached – particularly impressive in a field long dominated by men.

My sensibilities were already telling me that for science fiction to really find acknowledgement as literature it should not simply embrace science, but should attempt to involve that wider world in which we live and move and have our being.

So I embarked on this present book. It was first published by Jonathan Cape in 1973.

My main character, Joe Bodenland, is taken back in time from our present to a period early in the nineteenth century, where Mary Shelley is beginning to write her book in Switzerland. There Bodenland stands, in a realm where Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron are nearby.

Though Bodenland ultimately has to meet the monster, he fares best when he meets Mary herself. She tells him she is ‘setting up shop as a connoisseur of grave stories’. Her knowledge of science, or some science, is first demonstrated when they discuss the variety of weather conditions. In fact, the weather in 1816 was bizarre – an immense volcanic eruption off an Indonesian island caused ‘the year without summer’ in Europe.

Bodenland encounters the monster near a great unaccountable city (a materialisation of the distant volcanic eruption, perhaps). Such events inevitably echo alarming proceedings in my own life. The novel ends with the same phrase concluding Mary Shelley’s novel.

Mary went on to make a career of writing. Among other things, she wrote six other novels. None of them have the strength of her first, which, we may conjecture, is imbued with the misery of her mother dying just a few days after Mary’s birth.

In Frankenstein Unbound , Bodenland and Mary take a swim together, and then make love. (This is what authors do when they are half in love with a female character. They call it sublimation. Bodenland, c’est moi!) The text declares that the Mary and Bodenland were ‘scarcely less than phantoms to each other’. There’s an admission! But the solid world beyond the lovers was no phantom, and it is there that the rest of my story lies.

Brian Aldiss

Oxford, 2013

Letter from Joseph Bodenland to his Wife, Mina:

August 20th, 2020

New Houston

My dearest Mina,

I will entrust this to good old mail services, since I learn that CompC, being much more sophisticated, has been entirely disorganized by the recent impact-raids. What has not? The headline on today’s Still is: SPACE/TIME RUPTURED, SCIENTISTS SAY. Let us only hope the crisis will lead to an immediate conclusion of the war, or who knows where we shall all be in six months’ time!

But to more cheerful things. Routine has now become re-established in the house, although we still all miss you sorely (and I most sorely of all). In the silence of the empty rooms at evening, I hear your footfall. But the grandchildren keep the least corner occupied during the day. Nurse Gregory is very good with them.

They were so interesting this morning when they had no idea I was watching. One advantage about being a deposed presidential advisor is that all the former spy-devices may now be used simply for pleasure. I have to admit I am becoming quite a voyeur in my old age; I study the children intensely. It seems to me that, in this world of madness, theirs is the only significant activity.

Neither Tony nor Poll have mentioned their parents since poor Molly and Dick were killed; perhaps their sense of loss is too deep, though there is no sign of that in their play. Who knows? What adult can understand what goes on in a child’s mind? This morning, I suppose, there was some morbidity. But the game was inspired by a slightly older girl, Doreen, who came round here to play. You don’t know Doreen. Her family are refugees, very nice people from the little I have seen of them, who have arrived in Houston since you left for Indonesia.

Doreen came round on her scouter, which she is just about old enough to drive, and the three of them went to the swimming pool area. It was a glorious morning, and they were all in their swimsuits.

Even little Poll can swim now. As you predicted, the dolphin has been a great help, and both Poll and Tony adore her. They call her Smiley.