Frankenstein Unbound by Brian Aldiss Page A

which I had but glimpsed, made the situation that much more precarious.
    These matters rolled round and round my brain, like a thunderstorm, like clothes in a tumble-dryer. As I drove along the edge of the lake eastwards, I was hardly conscious of the beautiful and placid scenery. A steady rain began to fall. Perhaps it prevented me from noting how rapidly the season seemed to have advanced. The trees were now heavy with dark-green foliage. The corn was already ripening and the vines were in full leaf, with bunches of grapes hanging thickly.
    My own world was forgotten. It had been displaced by my new personality, by what I believe I called earlier my superior self. The fact was that all sorts of strange gearshifts were taking place within my psyche, and I was eaten up by the morbid drama of Frankenstein. Once more I tried to recall what was to happen, as recounted in Mary Shelley’s book, but what little returned was too vague to be of use.
    Certainly Frankenstein had gone away to study—to Ingoldstadt, I now knew—and there spent some years researching into the nature of life. Eventually he had built a new being from dismembered corpses, and had reanimated it. How he had overcome all the complex problems of graft rejection, septicemia, and so on—not to mention the central problem of bestowing life—was beyond me, although I took it that fortune had favored his researches. He had then been horrified by what he had done, and had turned against the creature to which he stood as God stood to Adam—that sounded like the baffled reformer again to me! In the end (or in the present future) the creature had overcome him. Or had he overcome it? Anyhow, something dreadful in the way of retribution had occurred, in the nature of things.
    In the nature of things? Why should something dreadful come of good intentions?
    It seemed an immensely important question, and not only when applied to Frankenstein. Frankenstein was no Faust, exchanging his immortal soul for power. Frankenstein wanted only knowledge—was, if you like, only doing a bit of research. He wanted to put the world to rights. He wanted a few answers to a few riddles.
    That made him more like Oedipus than Faust. Oedipus was the world’s first scientist. Then Frankenstein was the first R & D man. Oedipus had received a lot of dusty answers to his researches too.
    I broke off that silly line of thought and retraced my mental steps.
    Whatever previous generations made of it, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was regarded by the twenty-first century as the first novel of the Scientific Revolution and, incidentally, as the first novel of science fiction. Her novel had remained relevant over two centuries simply because Frankenstein was the archetype of the scientist whose research, pursued in the sacred name of increasing knowledge, takes on a life of its own and causes untold misery before being brought under control.
    How many of the ills of the modern world were not due precisely to Frankenstein’s folly! And that included the most overwhelming problem of all, a world too full of people. That had led to the war, and to untold misery before that, for several generations. And what had caused the overpopulation? Why, basically, those purely benevolent intentions of medical gentlemen who had introduced and applied theories of hygiene, of infection, of vaccination, and of inoculation, thereby managing to reduce the appalling infant mortality rate!
    Was there some immutable cosmic law which decreed that man’s good intentions should always thunder back about his head, like slates from a roof?
    My dim recollection was that there was discussion of such questions in Mary Shelley’s novel. I needed desperately to get hold of a copy of the book. But when had it first been published? I could not recall. Was it a mid-Victorian novel?
    There were some fragments of my education in English literature which did return to me. And that was why I drove eastwards along Lake Geneva. I