Michael Moorcock

Moorcock's writing oscillates between excellence and bullshit so dramatically and with such frequency that it's dizzying. Nowhere is this better exemplified then with this book, which was promised as courtly intrigue that takes place in Spencer's Fairy Queene. There are few things that could mar such an outstanding premise. One of those things is a persistent misogyny built into the very foundation of the plot.
Moorcock is a well poisoner. No one can ever write an erotic romp through a show more Shakespearean fantasy setting ever again. The ur-text of such a tantalizing genre is inescapably rape apologia. show less

THE WARHOUND AND THE WORLD'S PAIN wasn't part of the Eternal Champion cycle when I first read them back in the '70s, not coming along until 1981, but Von Bek is most definitely a manifestion in the same ranks as Erekose,Elric, Corum and Hawkmoon despite being rooted in a historical rather than fantasy context, at least to begin with.

Von Bek is a typical tortured Moorcock hero, but less tortured than some, a battle hardened veteran, having come to terms with his base nature. After being shown show more the Hell that awaits his soul, he makes a deal with Lucifer to take on a quest, not in search of enlightenment, but to heal the pain of the World

Ostensibly this is the story of a grail quest, but it's classic Moorcock, so things are never simple. All of his trademark flourishes are in evidence here, with wild rides through shifting reality, musings on the nature of humanity and its place in the many facetted universe, and simpler matters, like the nature of comradeship, and the power of a man to make his own reality through force of will.

Reading this I was transported again to my first Moorcock readings in the very early '70s, and felt the same sense of awe and wonder at the force of his vision that I did back then.

This is sword and sorcery at its finest, and, by Arioch, I love it. show less

Blood: A Southern Fantasy was written in the early 1990s when Moorcock had been living for a short while in central Texas, and had recently traveled around the southern US. It is the first volume of the Second Ether trilogy. Despite a tone of straightforward exposition, it involves so much implicit worldbuilding (and multiversebuilding) that it can be confounding. A successful reader will likely just have to roll with it on many occasions. Chapter titles are polyglot, with Spanglish, Creole, show more and German accounting for many of them.

The initial setting is a North America in which racial privileges and biases are largely reversed from our own. As a result of greedy accident, there has been a corrosive failure of reality, and chance has come to dominate over law in the operation of nature. The protagonists of the tale are gambler adepts. Chief of these for the story's part is Jack Karaquasian, who is the Eternal Champion, or at least the Elric and Jerry Cornelius analogue of Blood. Gaming by means some sort of simulative technology never fully detailed, Mr. Karaquasian and his friend Sam Oakenhurst have made careers of this art. The upshot of the thing is a sort of Moorcockian psychedelic cyberpunk.

The Second Ether itself is another world differing in scale and fractally linked with the others in a multiverse roamed by "freescalers" and fought over by the Singularity and the Chaos Engineers. These are recognizable as the "Law and Chaos" teams of Moorcock's earlier fantasies, but they are also expressed in popular media available in Jack's world, recounting an interminable melodramatic space opera in short serial episodes by Warwick Colvin. The sort of porous relationship between these planes of existence reminded me somewhat of Grant Morrison's later comic book The Filth.

Karaquasian and Oakenhurst become connected with love interests who draw them into the Game of Time that transpires in the Second Ether, so that they take on roles in the sprawling conflict of that other world. Despite an overblown cartoonish aesthetic, the Game of Time has a great deal of philosophical meat to it. These later chapters of the book are full of pan-solipsist cosmogony and piquant reflections on fate and freedom, honor and guilt.

Within Moorcock's multiversal hyperwork, the Second Ether seems to have the strongest narrative ties to the von Bek books. Rose von Bek is Sam Oakenhurst's romantic other. This first volume of a trilogy does come to as much of a conclusion as one might reasonably expect. I enjoyed it and I will proceed with the next volume Fabulous Harbours, which I have in hand. show less

While promotional copy insists that this latest addition to Moorcock's tales of the last Emperor of Melniboné "takes place between the first and second books of the Elric Saga," that refers to their current packaging in the Saga Press edition. For those of us more familiar with the old mass market paperbacks and their omnibus collections, that makes it fall between "The Weird of the White Wolf" and "The Vanishing Tower." Elric's peregrinations with Moonglum in the Young Kingdoms are show more interrupted with a trip to "the underside of the world," where the moody kinslayer traces the origins of the Melnibonéan race and their relationship to the dragons with whom their culture is in symbiosis.

The first half of the book consists of two novellas previously published under other titles. I had read "How Elric Pursued His Weird into the Far World" when it was called "Red Pearls" in the 2010 collection Swords & Dark Magic. I liked it then, but it was too long ago for me to assess how "substantially revised" (per the appended note) this new version is. The story here is interesting, but often told at a somewhat chilly level of abstraction. The second novella is "How Elric Discovered an Unpleasant Kinship," published before revision as "Black Petals," serialized in Weird Tales (2008-9) and collected in Elric: Swords and Roses. Despite owning the latter volume, I had never read this story. It felt very much like a return to form, with a mood that matched "The Stealer of Souls" from 1962.

The second half of The Citadel of Forgotten Myths is centered on the citadel of the title, the stronghold of Kirinmoir. This polity in the World Below compares to Elric's own Imryrr as an age-old capital of his race. It is matriarchal, however, with an apiary-centered economy. The story starts with some adventuring, and it builds to a great military conflict driven by Melnibonéan grudges and the scheming of gods of Chaos.

Particularly in the final part, this book has many "Easter eggs" for longtime readers of Moorcock, and not merely of the crossover variety that tie this story into his multiversal hyperwork of the Eternal Champion, Cosmic Balance, and moonbeam roads. For example, he alludes to his own song lyric in mentioning "veterans of those dreadful psychic wars" (184) and to his recent autobio-fantasy in "a whispering swarm constantly reminding him of his own mortality" (185).

Some contemporary political sarcasm is evident in naming a throwaway character G'nilwab Sirob--an anagram of "Bawling Boris" (205). (I suspect that I failed to catch yet other references built into character names.) Moorcock also has deranged Chaos Queen Xiombarg extol herself as "Goddess made Great Again" (284), and Elric expresses his resentment that his countrymen wanted him to "make Melniboné great again" (314).

The inhuman Elric is veritably the apotheosis of the sword & sorcery murder hobo. As an inversion of Robert E. Howard's Conan, the point that stands out in these particular tales is the ineluctable net of dependencies and obligations that bind Elric to his race, his cursed sword, and his patron demon. Where Conan prizes his freedom and independence, Elric seems unable even to conceive of such a condition. I don't think this book would make an especially effective point of entry for the Elric stories, let alone the larger Eternal Champion quilt. Still, I enjoyed it, and it fueled my appetite for re-reading Moorcock's prince of ruins. show less