The Tower Is Always Burning

Brian Aldiss published *Frankenstein Unbound* in 1973, not 2004. The Spanish translation, *Frankenstein Desencadenado*, may have found a new edition around that date, but the novel itself belongs to the early seventies — written in the shadow of Vietnam, the Club of Rome's *Limits to Growth*, and a moment when nuclear anxiety had curdled from existential dread into ambient background noise. This matters because the book sets its frame narrative in 2020, and Aldiss, writing from fifty years out, tried to imagine what kind of world would produce a man desperate enough to chase Frankenstein's monster across fractured time. He imagined nuclear war in Earth-Moon orbit. He imagined destabilized spacetime as a consequence of weapons testing. He imagined a Houston renamed and ruined, racial conflicts left unresolved, and a society that had mastered certain technologies while failing utterly to master itself. In 2020, the real world offered a pandemic, not a temporal rupture — but the texture of Bodenland's letters home, the sense of normalcy shredded while children play symbolic games in the yard, reads with an eerie domestic familiarity. Aldiss got the mood right. The mechanism was wrong. The feeling of living inside a slow-motion civilizational crack was not.

What Aldiss could not see from 1973 — and what no 2004 reprint could fix — is the specific shape of our present relationship to creation and creator. Bodenland's horror at Frankenstein's laboratory is the horror of a man confronting biological manipulation: stitched corpses, galvanic reanimation, the monstrous female bearing Justine's stolen face. It is body horror, surgical horror, the Promethean sin rendered in flesh. In 2026, the more unsettling resonance is not with biotech but with generative AI — systems that assemble the new from the harvested dead, that wear familiar faces without permission, that their creators cannot fully control and whose inner workings remain opaque even to those who built them. Aldiss frames the debate as Victor versus morality, science versus spirit. He does not imagine a world where the creature might be incorporeal, or where millions of small Frankensteins could spin up a creation before breakfast. The novel's central argument — that the act of creation carries an inescapable moral debt — has not aged. Its assumption that such acts require a lone genius in a tower has.

The novel's most striking structural choice is to collapse fiction and history into one plane. Bodenland meets both Victor Frankenstein and Mary Shelley. They coexist. The creature is real, and so is the woman who wrote him into being. Aldiss treats this not as a clever postmodern trick but as a literal consequence of broken time: when causality fractures, the wall between the imagined and the actual dissolves. In 2026, after years of deepfakes, hallucinating language models, and synthetic media that cannot be reliably distinguished from documentary evidence, this conceit has shed its playfulness. We live in Bodenland's condition. The fictional and the historical occupy the same feed. The question of whether something was created or merely described has become, for millions of people on any given day, genuinely unanswerable. Aldiss meant it as metaphysics. It has become infrastructure.

The book sits at a peculiar junction. It inherits directly from Shelley's 1818 novel, obviously, but also from H.G. Wells's time-travel tradition and from the New Wave's insistence that science fiction interrogate its own assumptions rather than merely extrapolate gadgets. It gave something to the metafictional SF that followed — novels like Tim Powers's *The Stress of Her Regard*, stories that treat Romantic-era figures as characters in speculative plots. It also prefigures the now-common move of using time travel not for adventure but for moral audit: sending a modern consciousness back to confront the origins of a present catastrophe. Bodenland does not go back to fix things. He goes back to understand why they broke. He fails even at that. The tower burns. The monster escapes. The pursuit continues into a frozen future where ruined cities float in mist. Aldiss offers no resolution because the Frankenstein problem — what do we owe what we make, and what does it owe us — does not resolve. It just changes venue.

If the creature now walks among us not as stitched flesh but as emergent pattern, trained on the harvested corpus of the dead and the living alike, and if its creators insist they bear no more responsibility than Victor did — then the question the book raises in 2026, which it could not have raised in 1973 or 2004, is this: when the monster is not a singular abomination but a service available on subscription, who exactly is Frankenstein?