Word: aldiss
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FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND by BRIAN W. ALDISS 212 pages. Random House...
...Brian Aldiss jumps a few years ahead to 2020 to describe a world not only in ruins but also mutated in the most frightening way. The entire structure of tune and space has been disrupted by a nuclear war so that past and present, here and there, exist simultaneously. One never knows from day to day if he will awake in medieval times or the age of the Pharaohs...
...Aldiss's hero is Texan Joe Bodenland, who, in a variation on H.G. Wells' Time Machine, adventurously drives his car smack into the flux and arrives in 1816 at the edge of Lake Geneva. Joe stumbles upon a villa containing Byron, Shelley and Mary Shelley, who is writing Frankenstein. His subsequent relationship with Mary is dominated by the presence of Dr. Frankenstein and friends, who are quite as "real" as Mary, their creator. Joe comes to see Frankenstein's pursuit of pure scientific truth without social responsibility as the root of modern technological society, where "the head...
...Aldiss has always written with gusto. This book is not just an exciting, macabre story. Using a verbal counterpoint -19th century literary style against the curt phrases of the 21st-the author has brought off a convincing interpretation of Frankenstein for today...
...Brian Aldiss has apparently been dropping acid since I last read him, and, more importantly, he happens to be turning his visions (somehow, a nicer word than hallucinations) into excellent prose. In "The Serpent of Kundalini" he turns a literary trick I have never seen before; he sketches a symbol so vividly that the concept behind it is assimilated long before it is explicitly stated. The symbol is a sort of paper-bag human frame crumpling at various points in the story, and the concept is that of an alternative not take, one of our potential selves that begins...