Frankenstein Unbound. Brian Aldiss (Random House, $5.95). The Dispossessed. Ursula K. Le Guin (Harper & Row, $7.95). Joy in Our Cause. Carol Emshwiller (Harper & Row, $6.95). Stellar 1. Ed. Judy Lynn del Rey (Ballantine, $1.25)

In the words of Noel Coward, Aldiss Is At It Again, frolicking with Time, merrily imitating other people's writing styles, and naturally bewildering the poor critic of Locus who cannot peg a late 18th-century novel written in modern English (and impossible American), a hero who's supposed to be Everyman but is really Nobody, and the out-and-out treachery of any novel (except Dracula) which begins with a letter to “My dearest Mina”! Aldiss's description of Mary Shelley's book in his critical work, Billion Year Spree, fits his own novel perfectly:

While Percy Shelley was writing Prometheus Unbound, Mary Shelley (at eighteen) was writing Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus – two opposing views of the consequences of modern industrialization. Hence Aldiss's title and his fascination with “this first great myth of the industrial age.” The structure of Unbound is not the usual cause-and-effect dramatic narrative, but a hyperbolic curve: from a deliberately flattened, neutral, conventional, s.f. twenty-first-century to the clumsy world of Mary Shelley's clumsy novel, to the historical milieu of its author (the portrayal of the literary circle of Percy, Lord Byron, and Mary at the Villa Diodati is particularly good) back to a sophisticated, “opened-up” version of Mary Shelley's novel, and from there to a splendid far-future world (with odd echoes of Hodgson's The Night Land). The aesthetic spiral from the flat, twenty-first century of the beginning to the marvelous far-future world of the end are part of what the novel is about; so is the “unfolding” of Mary Shelley's book in Brian Aldiss's book – Spree calls the original Frankenstein “ an exhausting journey without maps.” So is Unbound.

There is no question, I think, about the last quarter of the novel, where Aldiss breaks free of history, as it were, and writes his own version of the myth, but Joe Bodenland (New-Texan and former Presidential advisor) is such a clunkhead that it may not be possible to use him as a first-person narrator.