Introduction

      I had no hesitation. I was obsessed with the matter of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: its tenderness and brutal remorse, and, beyond all that, its consideration of the difficulties of life that face us. So I got up one morning and eagerly began writing this novel.

      In a sense, I was just doing a duty, for I felt that anyone interested in the macabre or the mystical should not fail to read Mary Shelley’s novel. I was determined that my answering novel should embody simple human joys and sorrows: the loss of a mother, the loss of direction, the loss of a feeling for common humanity. But for all that, it should just be a grand little story …

      Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein whilst still in her teens – a remarkable feat. We feel in her writing resonances of Caleb Williams, arguably the finest novel written by her father, the political philosopher William Godwin.

      When I wrote my history of science fiction (Billion Year Spree), I claimed Frankenstein to be the first British work to which the label science fiction can be logically attached – particularly impressive in a field long dominated by men.

      My sensibilities were already telling me that for science fiction to really find acknowledgement as literature it should not simply embrace science, but should attempt to involve that wider world in which we live and move and have our being.

      So I embarked on this present book. It was first published by Jonathan Cape in 1973.

      My main character, Joe Bodenland, is taken back in time from our present to a period early in the nineteenth century, where Mary Shelley is beginning to write her book in Switzerland. There Bodenland stands, in a