Customer Reviews

Frankenstein's Legions

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The author combines a wonderfully imaginative story with historical characters and witty humour. The adventure moves at a fast pace across Europe and resurrects and breathes life (literally) into famous and infamous historical characters. It's one of the first things I have read on Kindle so it's been a great introduction, although at times I laughed out loud - not always good on the train!

I don't know why nobody thought of this before - it's the logical "what if" of how Frankenstein's technology would get used. The original novel was set right around the time that slavery was abolished in Britain (though not in the USA) so of course, all those rich folks who no longer had slaves would jump at the chance to have an army of workers with no legal identity - that is, people created from the bodies of the dead. The author spins a great story that has all the famous figures of the day (some living, some resurrected) and keeps the action moving at a clip while exploring all the interesting ways that life is different in his alternate 19th century.

There have been several sequels to Frankenstein, but most of them just pick up the story of the creature and try to turn him into a sort of Byronic Hulk. Nothing so obvious from John Whitbourn, winner of the BBC's First Fantasy Award, an author with a string of highly innovative and critically-acclaimed novels to his name. Here we have War & Peace meets Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell... Or is it Blade Runner in the Napoleonic Wars? The fact is, you can't neatly parcel up an original talent like Whitbourn's in those terms. This is a heady cocktail of politics, treachery, secrets, lies, schemes, trust, passion, and brutality in velvet gloves. In keeping with Mary Shelley's original novel, it's a dark science fiction story that uses the concept of resurrection and life-creation to talk about freedom, morality and Man's place in the universe. And at the same time it's a compelling thriller in which Ada Lovelace investigates her own murder. A masterpiece of serious, grown-up fantasy literature.