Frankenstein Unbound was published by Jonathan Cape in 1973. Joseph Bodenland, an American politician in the year 2020, is caught in a “timeslip” — a rupture in the fabric of spacetime caused by nuclear weapons testing — and deposited in Switzerland in 1816. He finds himself in a world where Mary Shelley is writing Frankenstein at the Villa Diodori on Lake Geneva, and where — impossibly — the real Victor Frankenstein also exists, conducting his experiments in a nearby village.
The conceit allows Aldiss to explore his lifelong argument about science fiction’s origins. In his critical history Billion Year Spree (1973, published the same year), Aldiss argued that Frankenstein was the first true science fiction novel — that Mary Shelley’s insight, in having her scientist create life through technology rather than magic, inaugurated the genre. Frankenstein Unbound dramatizes this argument: Bodenland, a man from the technological future, recognizes Frankenstein as the prototype of the modern scientist — brilliant, arrogant, irresponsible — and Mary Shelley as the prophet who understood, before anyone else, where scientific hubris would lead.
The novel is relatively short and swiftly paced — a philosophical adventure rather than a literary experiment. Roger Corman adapted it as a film in 1990 (his last directorial effort for twenty years), with John Hurt as Bodenland.
Collecting Frankenstein Unbound
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1973): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $80–$200
- Very good/very good: $30–$80