The Frankenstein Riff

Abstract

Scholarly discussions of the relationship between Stars and Frankenstein have been marginalized in favor of other intertexts. Mary Shelley’s masterwork is an important point of reference. The text of Stars is a palimpsest beneath which lurks an underworld of other texts, and many of these undertexts are palimpsests themselves, most of all Frankenstein. Both novels tell the stories of charismatic monsters and meta-referentially point to the inherent mad scientism of Shelley and Bester’s artistry as well as narrative itself. Bester adopts a Romantic ideal in the tradition of gothic literature that Shelley adopted for Frankenstein and that extends through Stars to New Wave and cyberpunk. He moderates an open discussion with Shelley through a multiplicity of narrative layers, including H. G. Wells’s scientific romance The Island of Dr. Moreau and the universal motif of the monomyth.