Brian Aldiss, Frankenstein Unbound (London, 1991).
Lord Byron appears in Frankenstein Unbound and in Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates.
Aldiss imagines timeslips as environmental pollution caused by nuclear war in space! (Combining the traditional with the topical.)
In Genesis, the Terrestrial planetary intelligence, Gaia, has re-created humanity and, at the end, awaits:
"...the judgment from the stars." (PART TWO, XII, p. 248)
In Frankenstein Unbound, Joe Bodeland has murdered Frankenstein, his monster and the female monster which, in this version of the story, Frankenstein had completed. At the end, Bodeland awaits the judgement of the future:
"They would know where I was, and what I had done.
"So I would wait here until someone or something came for me, biding my time in darkness and distance." (PART TWO, 27, p. 216)
Someone: future humanity? Something: future monsters? The fact that Bodeland records no more maybe implies what the judgement was.
Most interesting: Bodeland's interactions with Byron and the Shelleys.
Next interesting: His interactions with Frankenstein and the monster.
Least interesting (to me): His trek through the future wasteland.
Worthy of celebration in Poul Anderson's Old Phoenix:
"Somewhere, there might be a 2020 in which I existed merely as a character in a novel about Frankenstein and Mary." (PART TWO, 24, p. 194)
2 comments:
Hence I always place contemporary or near-future books in alternate histories!
Kaor, Paul!
I took a quick look thru some of my SF books for anything by Brian Aldiss, but I only have one: BILLION YEAR SPREE, his history of science fiction. I also do have the two volume collection he edited, GALACTIC EMPIRES. I purchased them around 1980 because they included Anderson's "The Star Plunderer" and "Lord of a Thousand Suns."
Ad astra! Sean
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