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

El tiempo es un espectro que puede encontrarse en todos mis libros. (BA) El tiempo y el espacio se han salido de quicio, por así decir. Ya no podemos ni siquiera confiar en el ordenamiento de la progresión temporal; quizás mañana será la semana pasada, o el siglo pasado, o el tiempo de los faraones. El Intelecto ha hecho de la Tierra un planeta peligroso para el intelecto. Somos víctimas de esa maldición que cayó sobre el barón Frankenstein en la novela de Mary Shelley; por pretender dominar demasiado, hemos perdido el dominio de nosotros

Frankenstein Desencadenado es de hecho uno de los mas descarnados diálogos entre el Creado (el hombre, la Criatura, el Monstruo) y su Creador (el Científico, Dios). El terrible dolor del monstruo ante el abandono de su Creador, su cuestionamiento y su eventual rebeldía y destrucción del Dios, el diálogo final entre ambos... es una obra maestra.

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. ( )