The Frankenstein Papers

This novel picks up where Mary Shelley's classic tale left off, continuing the narrative from the monster's point of view. Through flashbacks in the monster's journal, Saberhagen also rescrambles the original story in such a way that the monster is absolved of the murders of Victor Frankenstein's brother William and fiancee Elizabeth. The monster sets off on a quest for his own identity that takes him from the Arctic and his first sexual experience with an "Esquimeaux" to a meeting in Paris with Ben Franklin, whose experiments with electricity led Frankenstein to attempt the monster's initial animation. Throughout, the irrationality of the monster's sheer existence is set against the values and science of Enlightenment Europe. In the tour-de-force ending, rationality triumphs by means of a neat science-fiction twist.