DarkWolfman,
Though I don't wish to impinge upon your beliefs, I still have to disagree with yours and others' stance and subsequently, the opinion of those commentators on Aldiss, which you have cleverly hijacked in order to shore up your position on this.
I would prefer to take the story into the correct context, showing the influences upon Mary Shelly, and the sources for the entire concept.
The idea of taking organs from the dead in grave robbing was quite well established in early Victorian England, with Madame de Staël's 'De l'Allemagne' already having proposed that a dead man could be brought back to life by scientists, itself based on Erasmus Darwin's experiments in electrophysiology.
Shelly used these as tools in her 'ghost story', bearing in mind that this goal became the primary focus of the enforced little get together of herself, Percy, Byron and Polidori.
The same night that prompted Mary Shelly, also produced The Vampyre, another seminal work of horror fiction. Shelly herself even states that she finally found inspiration from a nightmare after the events of that night.
"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away...hope that...this thing...would subside into dead matter...he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains."
This is probably a subconscious expression of her anger at not only the embarrassment by Byron, and perceived failure to produce a comparable story, but inflects many troubles of her recent past, such as the death of her child.
The purpose of the whole set of events was clearly an intention to create a horror fiction, for which she used existent knowledge of scientific concepts, intermingled with a scathing criticism of human nature, a point of view heavily influenced by her mother and Percy Shelly.
Even Aldiss himself explains that he "...hoped in a way to 'redeem' the book from such gross caricatures." (of horror), and that "She (Shelly) wants to deal with the 'secret fears of our nature.' I've always thought yes, that's one of the things that real science fiction does, is treat 'the secret fears of our nature. It's by no means only about the future.", which prompted him to write Frankenstein Unbound, a definite Science Fiction, but his justification can be argued down to the point that the story is intended as horror, even if the meaning of 'Science Fiction' may be interpreted in another context.
In modernity, it's clear that the current definition does not support Frankenstein as such, but instead as a horror fiction using the science of the times as a backdrop to the wider context of the failings of human nature, and the dangers of playing with unknown sciences (hence the alternative title of 'The Modern Prometheus').
