Rivals of Frankenstein
Mar. 27th, 2008 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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darkling_talesLJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)
The Rivals of Frankenstein is one of several similar anthologies edited by Michel Parry back in the 70s. There were also The Rivals of Dracula and The Rivals of King Kong, although sadly I haven’t yet tracked down copies of those. The Rivals of Frankenstein feature a mix of old and new stories all dealing with themes that relate therm vaguely to Mary Shelley’s classic. Re-animation of the dead, artificial life, that sort of thing. And robots. Quite a few robot stories. I’d read most of this anthology a while back and thought it about time to finish it. So I’ve just read the last four stories from this volume, and although the quality is uneven it includes some nifty little tales. I have no idea who D. Scott-Moncrieff was, but Count Szolnok's Robots is a delightfully twisted tale of a brilliant engineer and his mysterious plantation staffed by robots, deep in the jungles of the Amazon Basin. Fritz Leiber’s The Dead Man deals with a mad scientist and a strange young man able to mimic any known illness who may allow science to unravel the mysteries of disease and death. The plot twists aren’t overly difficult to see coming, but they’re still effective. Manly Wade Wellman’s Pithecanthropus Rejectus tells of the misadventures of a scientifically modified ape boy raised as a human, and the pitfalls that confront scientists unable to resist the lure of greed for fame and money. Three highly entertaining an inventive stories. The other story I read, Arnold Harvey’s The Last of the Daubeny-FitzAlans, is just a little too predictable and at the same time under-developed. Still, three good stories out of four isn’t a bad average.
dfordoom)The Rivals of Frankenstein is one of several similar anthologies edited by Michel Parry back in the 70s. There were also The Rivals of Dracula and The Rivals of King Kong, although sadly I haven’t yet tracked down copies of those. The Rivals of Frankenstein feature a mix of old and new stories all dealing with themes that relate therm vaguely to Mary Shelley’s classic. Re-animation of the dead, artificial life, that sort of thing. And robots. Quite a few robot stories. I’d read most of this anthology a while back and thought it about time to finish it. So I’ve just read the last four stories from this volume, and although the quality is uneven it includes some nifty little tales. I have no idea who D. Scott-Moncrieff was, but Count Szolnok's Robots is a delightfully twisted tale of a brilliant engineer and his mysterious plantation staffed by robots, deep in the jungles of the Amazon Basin. Fritz Leiber’s The Dead Man deals with a mad scientist and a strange young man able to mimic any known illness who may allow science to unravel the mysteries of disease and death. The plot twists aren’t overly difficult to see coming, but they’re still effective. Manly Wade Wellman’s Pithecanthropus Rejectus tells of the misadventures of a scientifically modified ape boy raised as a human, and the pitfalls that confront scientists unable to resist the lure of greed for fame and money. Three highly entertaining an inventive stories. The other story I read, Arnold Harvey’s The Last of the Daubeny-FitzAlans, is just a little too predictable and at the same time under-developed. Still, three good stories out of four isn’t a bad average.
