Michael Moorcock Books

I purchased the MP3 version of this product. I'll leave the storytelling aspects to reviewers of the book because if you are interested in this audiobook you probably read the books years ago and already are a fan.

The audio MP3 version of the Sailor on the Seas of Fate is quality entertainment which I recommend.

The price is low enough to overcome some of the minor shortcomings. These include MP3 files that don't correspond with natural breaks or chapters, rare variations on sound tone of the reader probably due to overdubs and edits, a lower emphasis on background tracks & mood music (than it's predecessor: Elric of Melnibone AudioBook), and finally its lower volume mixing which makes it hard to listen to in a subway car even when the player's volume is turned up all the way.

However, these are minor and most are probably attributed to the MP3 version which as I said is already value priced. If you read these stories as a 10 year old boy and want to hear them again as you drive into work then this is something you should consider.

Huge fan of Elric and Micheal Moorcocks multiverse. I hope this translates well to the movie that is expected to come.

In my opinion the best Moorcock novels are the more crisp, sharp novels of the late sixties-early seventies. Here Mike's narrative talent sparkles. This novel, introducing the "Eternal Champion" concept, it's an example. John Daker, an ordinary person withan ordinary life, is called in a parallel Earth by the king of the united humans, who seek to recall a mythic hero, Erekose. As Erekose John Daker must fight the elfin "Eldren" who allegedly are menacing the human continents of invasion and destruction. The Eldren are evil, cruel, treacherous, blurts out King Rigenos, you, Erekose, are the Champion to save us! but Erekosè is plagued by strange dreams, the voices of other Eternal Champions, Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon and others torment his dreams, unless he fulfills blindly his role of Eldren's bane. He gets to know the Eldren, and that's enough to making him doubt the almost paranoid view of those humans towards the Eldrens, expecially when the the Eldren Prince's, the beautiful Ermizhad, is captured and given to his custody.He hears a different story, and soon finds himself torn between his betrothed, king Rigenos' daughter Iolinda and his eledren prisoner. Erekose suffers then an harrowing dilemma, who will bring him to a fateful oath and an unpredictable conclusion.
This is a disturbingly actual moral tale about war, peace, and predjudice, told in a maybe too overt manner, but with a narrative style that, unlike Moorcock's late convoluted stories, goes directly to the reader's heart and mind.

this is faust, yet again. Clovis Marca, the messiah like Fireclown is the beast that shouted love at the heart of the world. Moorcock's best science fiction novel. so lost and lonely here.

_If I could only have one volume of Moorcock in my library, I do believe that this would be it. I have heard this exquisite fantasy compared with Peake's Ghormanghast- except that an American will find Gloriana actually readable and enjoyable.

_I can't think of a richer fantasy world encompased in a single self-sufficient novel. And while it is fantasy, it is not sugar-sweet and naive, it is fantasy most worldly and sophisticated. This global Elizabethan empire is quite convincingly atmospheric, as is London and the great palace itself. You want it to exist, hell, you want to go there.

_You would not hesitate to pledge fealty to Gloriana the First, Queen of Albion, Empress of Asia and Virginia. You want to believe in the ideal she represents, in a world that would otherwise redescend into darkness and madness....

If I could only have one volume of Moorcock in my library, I do believe that this would be it. I have heard this exquisite fantasy compared with Peake's Ghormanghast- except that an American will find Gloriana actually readable and enjoyable.

I can't think of a richer fantasy world encompased in a single self-sufficient novel. And while it is fantasy, it is not sugar-sweet and naive, it is fantasy most worldly and sophisticated. This global Elizabethan empire is quite convincingly atmospheric, as is London and the great palace itself. You want it to exist, hell, you want to go there.

You would not hesitate to pledge fealty to Gloriana the First, Queen of Albion, Empress of Asia and Virginia. You want to believe in the ideal she represents, in a world that would otherwise redescend into darkness and madness....

The third novel of the Pyat Quartet finds Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski scheming his way from New York to Hollywood, Cairo to Marrakesh, from cult success to the utter limits of sexual degradation, leaving a trail of mechanical and human wreckage as he crashes towards an appointment with the worst nightmare of the twentieth century. This is the third volume in a sequence the Times Literary Supplement suggested was a modern 'Human Comedy', comparing the author with Balzac. Not a fantasy, scarcely an historical novel, in that, as with the other volumes, it moves back and forth between various periods of the real 20th century, including the present day.

In The Laughter of Carthage Moorcock takes his riotiously unreliable narrator from Civil War Russia and post-war France to America, the Ku Klux Klan (which, of course, he joins), corrupt Washington politicians, stunt flyers, gangsters, engineers, Hollywood and a lot more in between. This is a wonderfully readable series, a War and Peace for our own times, without doubt, and part of a sequence which must form one of the great Anglophone novels. This novel has never been in paperback in the US and Jerusalem Commands, perhaps even better than this, has never appeared at all. We are still waiting for The Vengeance of Rome which, by all accounts, Mr Moorcock has finished but is still polishing! If it is as good as I hope, we will have a great masterpiece on our hands!

This book is particularly interesting because it is probably the first book using what Sinclair later came to call 'psychogeography', an obsession he shares with his two close friends Michael Moorcock and Peter Ackroyd. Ackroyd made very free use of this book for his own splendid supernatural mystery story Hawkwsmoor and Moorcock introduces it, offering his own spin on the talented Mr Sinclair, as well as a few passing amiable swipes at half his famous contemporaries. Ackroyd's own riffs on Doctor Dee and a Platonic view of London (both from
Moorcock's own fantastic London novel Gloriana) find echoes in Sinclair's rich reflections on the underlying sense of a city's history reflected in her earth, stones and architecture, written when he was still working as a municipal gardener in London's East End. What Sinclair and Moorcock offer is the raw stuff of their own experience and observation whereas Ackroyd's views are slightly more academic, more enthusiastic at a distance than close-up. But all three writers should be read together to get a sense of another, very different, strand of English fiction which occasionally feeds the imaginations of people like Rushdie, Amis and Self but is hardly recognised in its own right as a vigorous and ultimately far richer canon. This kind of literature has little to do with the consumer age and is built solidly to last, I'd guess, a few centuries. Get this as an introduction to Sinclair and the school of writers he represents, but get Downriver to enjoy him at his finest.

A Michael Moorcock tale is always welcome and a treatfully delightful bit of weirdness. When it comes in the form of a graphic novel by Walt Simonson (assisted by Steve Oliffe), it's just so much more the pleasureful treasure. This isn't an adaptation of a pre-existing Elric story, but provides significant backstory to the whole lore of the albino from Melibone, taking place just prior to the beginning of ELRIC OF MELIBONE. The writing is the usual and expected Moorcock --- great descriptions; wildly imaginative concepts and concerns; strong, entertaining, and captivating characters; and intriguing, utterly engrossing plots. All hugely enhanced by lovely and vivacious art, capturing at once the grit and the glory of Elric's journeys along the Roads between Worlds of the Multiverse. An absolute essential for Elric, Moorcock, and sword-and sorcery fantasy; but a treat and a boon for any who love great stories told well, visually, as well as literally and a highly recommended purchase for all library collections.