Michael Moorcock

A surfeit of pleasures.

A modern Dickens, which it doesn't try to hide, it even makes a direct reference to [b: Bleak House |31242|Bleak House|Charles Dickens|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1280113147s/31242.jpg|2960365]. Wonderful descriptive writing, 5 or 6 big vivid set pieces that you'll never forget. The characters are hyper-real, like real people but just a bit more interesting than any real person has a right to be ;) .
The narrator has his own unique voice, with his own slang show more etc. this can be a little disconcerting at the start but you soon get used to it.

In similar fashion to [b: Mother London|60160|Mother London|Michael Moorcock|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347548766s/60160.jpg|1145243] we start off in present day (circa 1997) then jump back in time and get a biography of events until we catch up with ourselves again in the last chapter. Unlike Mother London, there is only one point-of-view character and the time jumps are kept to a minimum, so in that regard its far easier to follow.

Nevertheless, i still got a little confused at times as to the year or mixed up among some of the side characters. It doesn't help that some of the cast have nicknames or are sometimes referred to by their first or last names.
Its a very England and London specific book so there were a lot of references i didn't get. Some of the political and social elements went over my head too. But none of that mattered in the end.

Like most Dickens novels there is a plot but nobody pays much attention to it. You could say its a commentary on the rise of consumer culture and the 1% but its really about the development of the various characters. And as for those characters, this time around (see below) our incestuous triumvirate are three cousins, our POV character who is an ex-Rock n'Roll star turned photojournalist, a hyper-intelligent Angelina Jolie-esque aid organizer and a man i can best describe as a combination of Gordon Gekko and Charles Foster-Kane.

It wasn't always perfect, there where peaks and troughs but overall a very easy 5 stars to give. An incredibly dense feeling book, 110% of story.

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Ok this is so weird, Moorcock has now written the same story at least 3 times! First there was [b: Elric of Melniboné |30036|Elric of Melniboné (Elric, #1)|Michael Moorcock|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388345555s/30036.jpg|388812], then [b: Jerry Cornelius|2715615|The Final Programme|Michael Moorcock|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1367455525s/2715615.jpg|1978586] and now this. That's not to say the stories are similar, they're all incredibly different but its the difference between '10 things i hate about you' and the 'Taming of the Shrew', or perhaps a little further apart, like 'Sons of Anarchy' and 'Hamlet'.
With 'Jerry Cornelius' i dismissed the similarities as Moorcock just being short of an idea but by now it feels more deliberate. As if the author is working on some sort of Meta level, creating his own myth-cycle or something.
Anyway none of that actually matters, this is an entirely self-suffient book so i've reviewed it entirely on its own merits. show less

That was a helluva lot of fun. "Elric" is considered Moorcock's most famous avatar of his "Eternal Champion" theme. I can't really explain it without sounding insane - just read the Wikipedia article if you're curious (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Champion). To say Moorcock was prolific is putting it mildly. I was in a massive used bookstore today and he took up almost two rows himself in the fantasy paperbacks. Apparently the universes he spins in different novels and trilogies show more layer in on themselves and...yeah I've been nerding out today.

All that to say, "Elric" is damn fun - Moorcock's prose is lyrical, imaginative and it moves fast. The narrative is strong and it takes you to weird places but you're cool with it. Groom, the Earth King? Sure. The Ship That Moves Over Land And Water? I can dig it. The black rune-swords Stormbringer and Mournblade? Hell yeah. It hits the right spots to satisfy without overdoing it. I'll read the rest. show less

This omnibus volume of The Eternal Champion was published by White Wolf in 1994 as the first of fifteen books then codifying "The Tale of the Eternal Champion" at that point -- although the series excluded many related works such as The Brothel in Rosenstrasse and The Cornelius Chronicles. The four stories collected here are in various ways seminal for the enormous quantity of interconnected fictions the author has come to produce.

Moorcock originally wrote the Eternal Champion novella as a show more teenager in 1957, and it went through numerous expansions and revisions to reach this later version, which incorporates references to Elric, Corum, Jerry Cornelius and other principal characters of Moorcock's sprawling fantasy hyperwork. I read an earlier standalone novel version (maybe the 1970 edit) when I was a teenager, and the plot here is much as I remembered it. The narrator John Daker is an intellectual with a wife and children, and in the world to which he is transported he is the protagonist Erekosë, the "Eternal Champion of Humanity." The word "genocide" doesn't appear, but it's the central theme of the story, which is perhaps even more bracing now than when it was written, and certainly more somber than most readers will expect from what its author declares to be "escapist romance, written in more innocent days" (ix). Even in this "first book I ever planned to write" (introduction, viii), Moorcock already introduced his multiverse concept, although it was under the figure of "the ghost worlds."

It is in the next novel, first written as a pair of novellas appearing in 1962 and 1963, that Moorcock first introduced the word "multiverse." Here, it is simply a hyper-cosmological notion, without the implications for narrative linking that it acquired in his later work. The Sundered Worlds is a leveled-up space opera in which humanity needs to emigrate from a collapsing cosmos, and then comes into conflict with hostile natives in the destination universe. I could really see the stylistic through-line from this early work to elements in Moorcock's much later and more sophisticated Second Ether books. The two halves of the novel have different protagonists, thus dampening the "Eternal Champion" sensibility, although a vision-fugue elsewhere in this volume does call out the initial hero Renark von Bek as a manifestation of the Champion (331).

The third novel Phoenix in Obsidian was written and published in 1970, significantly later than the other contents of this collection, but it is a linear sequel to The Eternal Champion, picking up directly where the first novel left off and repeating much of its pattern. Just as John Daker had become Erekosë on the world that he eventually won for the Eldren, Erekosë in turn becomes Urlik Skarsol on an ice-bound dying Earth. I really appreciated the esthetic elements of the world-building in this story, and I thought it did a good job of coherently advancing the dilemma of Daker/Erekosë/Urlik, giving definition to the Black Sword and introducing the Chalice (i.e. Grail). To the pulp-era sword and sorcery influences, Moorcock adds a dose of James Branch Cabell along the lines of Jurgen or Something About Eve.

The collection concludes with the 1962 short story "To Rescue Tanelorn," which I had previously read as the epilogue to the Elric book The Bane of the Black Sword. It situates the city of Tanelorn in the geography of Elric's world, but Elric doesn't feature in the tale, which has for its principal hero Rakhir the Red Archer. In my current perspective, it strikes me that this brief piece is pretty easily the most Dunsanian of any Moorcock fantasy I have read.

In his 1994 introduction, Moorcock claims that this selection of stories forms the best point of entry to the larger body of "Eternal Champion" fantasies that he wrote, and which figured in the further volumes of the White Wolf edition. I'm not convinced as to their introductory character, but I can see how he looked back on these texts as cornerstones of the hyperwork. I enjoyed revisiting the two I had read before, and I found much to interest me in the two that I hadn't. show less

These shorts and novellas almost all revolve around Elric, the tormented anti-hero that sits in the palm of Chaos thanks to his intelligent and willful sword Stormbringer.

As sword and sorcery stories go, this one really stands out. It's not so much Conan as it is straddling the line between shifting realities and the world, wanting to be free of the fate of the Champion of Chaos while being the penultimate brooder with unimaginable powers, seeking peace at any cost.

Whenever I think of show more Elric, I think of the ultimate archetype, and there's a lot to point at to prove it. The writer walks the careful line of making him and his quest larger than life, full of magic and conquest, sea battles, monster battles, and even going so far as to open the book of life, as stolen by the greatest necromancer... only to have all answers crumble before him.

Chaos and Law are the maelstroms that Elric traverses, and even though the theme is very much done and done again even in this cycle, the quest is always the thing. We're always meant to come away with the same conclusions as Elric, the great and evil Elric, deciding to give the world the misery it so seems to desire.

Pretty powerful stuff, really, and these really should be placed in their proper time, the sixties and seventies, introducing us to the template to one of the greatest tragic heroes and sometimes horrendous villains. show less