Michael Moorcock Books

This book was obviously written in the vein of Burrough's Barsoom mythos. And, as has been said by others, Moorcock's immaturity as an author is also obvious. John Carter was mysteriously transported to an alternate Mars. Kane is also transported. Carter meets and wins the incomparable Dejah Thoris. Kane woos Princess Shizala. Carter wars against green, six-armed Martians, while befriending one with mercy. Kane fights blue giants, and befriends one with mercy. The mythos of John Carter bears further examination, but Kane doesn't have the romantic dashingness (is that a word?) of Carter. In addition, the editing in this edition is appallinng! Typoes all over! Buy the John Carter series by Burroughs, and the Elric books by Moorcock. If you want this book, get a used copy, just for its literary place.

I picked this book up on a day when I was exhausted and did not want to read anything heavy. It is a lot of fun. An easy read and reminds me of Burroughs Barsoom. I am sold on the whole Planet Stories line and thank Erik for his love of books and his work to bring us these out of print classics. I look forward to reading them all.

I'm relatively new to Moorcock, having somehow missed the Elric novels in my youth. I set out to remedy that, and just completed the first Elric saga, which I enjoyed greatly. The next book I read was City of the Beast.

I enjoyed this book every bit as much as the Elric saga, and in some cases, more. Michael Kane is a fantastic hero, and Mr. Moorcock somehow really conveyed to me the beauty of Shizala and her city, so that I could sense Kane's willingness to sacrifice everything for them.

This book had it all: likable characters, interesting landscapes, high action, thrills and chills. There was one stretch where the description made me so claustrophobic that I actually began to sweat.

I'm dying to read the next installment. Fortunately, it comes out this month.

Moorcock has written an unapologetic, no holds barred, Burroughsian rip..errr.. riff. :) Complete with the same lack of wardrobe for the characters.

Michael Kane, a physicist, becomes involved with a project that can transport consciousness, it appears. Think Adam Strange sort of thing, complete with limited time of travel.

It also happens, than growing up, he lived near a French fencing master, who gave him many, many lessons.

Needless to say, he ends up projected to Mars, meets a princess, fights Blue Giant armies, has an evil raven haired sorceress femme fatale lust after and want to kill him, after seducing his princess' fiance, no less.

He also happens to rescue a relative, make friends with an enemy, and all that sort of thing.

Pure escapism, and a lot of fun.


3.5 out of 5

This is one of Michael Moorcock's Edgar Rice Burroughs imitations, printed decades ago under a nom de plume, and now back under his own name since the name is now a selling point. Be warned: this is Moorcock very early in his career, and if you didn't know this was the author of the "Elric" stories, you wouldn't come to that conclusion. To a degree it falls between two stools, lacking the somber charm of most of his
"Eternal Champion" stories and the cheery optimism of a good Burroughs Barsoom novel. It's a straightforward SF adventure novel by a young but talented hand, and if you've read SWORDS OF MARS three times, this may be what you're looking for.

There is a whole bunch more Jerry Cornelius weirdness here. He is still roaming around 1960s London, among other places, and in conflict with the villainous Bishop Beesley.

Some people are certainly going to find it too weird, or too impenetrable to enjoy, I think, as it is by no means straightforward, but this is part of JC's appeal.

Good artists may break the rules after proving they can create within them. We know Moorcock can write, so we can guess that he wrote "A Cure For Cancer" as an experiment in a chaotic, vague vein. Unfortunately, as with many experiments, wading through the results can be a chore.

Social satire? Sure. Interesting sci-fi vignettes? Absolutely. Incisive glances at the sounds, styles, and feel of a parallel world subjectively based on a late-1960s London? You bet. But be warned that if you're looking for more than the faintest shred of plot to capture your interest, look elsewhere in the Eternal Champion multiverse. Perhaps ACFC is Moorcock's idea of what happens to a novel dipped in the primordial Chaos described in his other works.

I can appreciate what Moorcock is trying to get across. I even get a kick out of the *idea* of the novel's structure, in theory, anyway. However, it's difficult to actually enjoy a work in which a) every stitch of dialogue is so vague that, if you had no grasp of Moorcock's other works, the book would seem a nearly interminable string of highly stylish non sequiturs, and b) characters that live and (suddenly) die so guided by random chance and urges from the id that the joke pales early on. The chapter headlines culled from sensational tabloids did give me a chuckle, though.

It's certainly possible that you may find great enjoyment and provocative thoughts aplenty in ACFC. You certainly will in other Moorcock novels. And if you're looking for the pinnacle of social satire in an "unconventional" novel, check out the far superior "Catch-22" by Joe Heller. But unless you're the type who relishes flipping through TV channels for hours on end in an altered state of consciousness, or tends to convince yourself after reading a work such as ACFC that your time was well spent and the emperor is indeed wearing clothes, don't waste your time. This patient is terminal.

Quite an astonishing book. Unlike the previous Jerry Cornelius book (The final programme), the plot is significant to the book. Thats not to say its any easier to understand. It concerns Jerrys hunt for a mysterious device of his, and the attempts of others, particularly the grotesque Bishop Beesly, to get hold of the device for their own ends.

This book, though often humourous, has a far more serious tone than its predecessor, and some very harsh satire. Targets include the irrelevence of the popular press and corruption within the Catholic Church.

The title refers to both a literal cure (as described in the section headings), and more importantly, to "Social Cancer" which is cured by Ethnic Cleansing. The image of hoardes of NATO helicopters napalming London, screaming "BURN OUT THE CANCER" will stay with you a long time.

I think that the way that michael moorcock writes this book makes to the fact that yet again he has come up with a best selling book, even some of the less inteligent people in my school have read it and have been able to comment on it posititvely. well done.

And why a generation that avoided napalm, now is bombing the hell out of the Balkins? This book will not give a direct answer, but it can give you a rare deep look into the darker side of the countercluture at the time of its creation, not a cheesy, moralistic look back by some ultra-repentant, dew eyed hippy. You can hear the NATO copters with loudspeakers screaming LETS FIND A CURE FOR CANCER LETS FIND A CURE FOR CANCER LETS FIND A CURE FOR CANCER

Unfortunately, I have not read the Elric novels. However, I have read some fantasy and some comics. This comic ranks up there with the best of the titles by the masters of the comics medium. There's a philosophy expressed in every panel and every word balloon. There's also a lot of energy expressed and you can tell Russell loves the Elric stories.

Those of us who love comics will tell you the undisputed master was Jack Kirby. And his New Gods is his masterpiece. This book ranks up there with this work of the King. Every page astonishes.

This is a very good work of fantasy fiction. Russell has a beautiful and distinct drawing style and he's taken Gaiman's script (which sounds exactly like a Sandman voicover) and brought it to life with great skill. There are no deep or emotionally complex characters here, but it doesn't matter - this is a great adventure yarn and a fun read.

There's even a thematic story - something about the cyclical nature of the universe and the timeless conflict between chaos and law.. I actually think there's something to this story - it's a fantasy-extension of Nichomachean philosophy. In any case, it resonates as a moving and interesting fable.

Elric has been a fixture since he was dreamed up by Moorcock in the 1960's. I recommend this to anyone who has a yen for fantasy fiction and is sick of the LOTR already.

The drawings are very good, and I think that the author captured the gist of Elric's stories, and graphically interpreted the angst of Elric's torn soul. Elric is very similar as I'd have imagined. Only, poor Moonglum is very shabbily portrayed: maybe the authors didn't realize that Moonglum is an image of the author Michael Moorcock who is well bearded.
Anyway, I loved it. And the homophobes who did'nt like Neil Gaiman story can go look at ... bunnies.

This is a sumptuous feast for the eyes. Stormbringor has been adapted in a grand form by one of the comic industry's finest storytellers. P.Craig Russell has never delivered a more beautifully and well designed project in his entire career. Stormbringer is the last of the Elric tales, for the sake of continuity, and he's in fine, tragic form. This adaptation is very close to the novel and it's Russell's patience with the sequential form and his love of the source that shines through. The package is very well done. Good quality paper, cover stock (and awesomely rendered cover art) and wonderful coloring makes this book stand out among what's been passing for graphic novels. In short, this is what a graphic novel should be. I read Stormbringer in my 18th year and loved this ending of the tragic Elric saga. Russell's adaptation is a fine way to read it for the first time, or, the last. Enjoy this one. It's a rare package and well worth the price of admission. Books like this one are the reason I'm still reading comics in my middle age.

My reasons for buying this were fond memories of the Elric novels and the fact that Russell illustrated it. Russell's work is beautiful, A+++, and it complements the story well.

HOWEVER...

I also feel that there was too much story here. Elric reads well in novel form, but put illustrations to it, and you find out just how bland some of the stories can be (even the First Comics adaptations).

Also, the Topps Comics story "One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock", by Gaiman and Russell, is included. All I can say is, these guys must have had one heck of a childhood. I'm not sure what the point of this story was, other than to talk about homosexuality.

I have always greatly enjoyed the tragic saga of Elric of Melnibone, the doomed Champion Eternal and, because of this, had no problem picking up this book and devouring it. But, as I read on, I found that it was my interests in Elric as a character and not the actual plot that kept my attention. The plot was rather similar in nature to most of the others and, because of this, quite predictable. It also left little in the way of deep explaination for Elric's actions at the end. (you understood what was happening and why, but you just didn't feel it) This book does little to sour my tastes on the saga as a whole, but it was not my favorite installment of the series.

I have always greatly enjoyed the tragic saga of Elric of Melnibone, the doomed Champion Eternal and, because of this, had no problem picking up this book and devouring it. But, as I read on, I found that it was my interests in Elric as a character and not the actual plot that kept my attention. The plot was rather similar in nature to most of the others and, because of this, quite predictable. It also left little in the way of deep explaination for Elric's actions at the end. (you understood what was happening and why, but you just didn't feel it) This book does little to sour my tastes on the saga as a whole, but it was not my favorite installment of the series.

Interesting monster and magic users. Cool plot. Different from the pompous books of Terry brroks or the rambling of tolkien.
Strikes the perfect balance between fun and serious thought.
Adventure and plot.
Locations and personalities.
No boring social justice themes or about how hard life was etc.
Awesome action.
Monstrous summonings.
Great stuff, stear clear of anything with Von Bek or Erekose and Moorcock will treat you well. M favorite fantasy author bar none.

Michael Moorcock, The Bane of the Black Sword (DAW, 1977)

The fifth of the six classic Elric novels picks up, as is usual with these books, where the fourth leaves off. Moorcock sets the last pieces of the puzzle into place (and here, we get a chance to see how everything that has come before is building to the climactic novel, Stormbringer), introducing us to Zarozinia, the love of Elric's life (and most of his motivation for continuing on the path upon which he was set in The Vanishing Tower). Much of this is setup for Stormbringer, but that's in no way to say this isn't good stuff. Once again, Moorcock takes his already intriguing concepts that he's built up throughout the series (unique hero, solid motivation, the excellent concept of the Eternal Champion, et al) and adds a few more twists and turns, to make them even more intriguing than they already were. Unfortunately, the series' main problem-its penchant for not going into detail on some of the truly fun stuff mentioned (e.g., the Forest of Troos, in the barren land of Org, where Elric and Zarozinia meet, both trying like mad to avoid the denizens of the forest)-is here in spades. But there's enough detail for the reader to get the general gist of what's going on and eventually hope Moorcock will write some stories set in Elric's world that have to do with these ancillary details. This would not be unprecedented; a story with Elric's friend Rackhir as its main character is included as an epilogue to one of the books, for example.

There is one other annoying thing about the series I haven't yet touched on. It's ultimately annoying that Elric, no matter what he's faced with, has some form of supernatural ally who can help him with it. (You're attacked by lizardmen who are unaffected by normal weapons? Call on the god of the insects and get the help of millions of mosquitoes!) Never fails. This particular convention pops up in a number of places in the series, not just here.

Still, overall, the book is good, it's readable, and the payoff, in Stormbringer, is astounding. ****

I was not a fantasy fan before I read this series. Now I am hooked. Too bad they are not all this good. It has qualities that writers of any genre would envy. Read them all... you will not be disappointed. Very fluid delivery, crisp, entertaining, and engrossing.

Michael Moorcock turns out some of the best-realized short fiction in years in this collected analogy devoted to his time-tripping, homicidal genius hero Jerry Cornelius. "The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius: Stories of the Comic Apocalypse" is an excellent introduction to Moorcock's enduring character, even if you haven't read the four novels comprising the "Cornelius Quartet". Surprisingly, Moorcock's fine literary quality remains consistently quite good throughout, especially with his latest stories, which are hysterically funny alternate history takes on the Princess Diana phenomenon and the aftermath of the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks on the United States. Indeed, these latest stories merely prove just how enduring a creation Jerry Cornelius has been for both Moorcock and highly literate science fiction.

Let me start out by saying that I am a huge fan of Mr. Moorcocks, going back to his Elric of Melinbone days. Unfortunately I have discovered evidence of Mr. Moorcocks weaker writing abilities. These short, scattered, stream of consciousness stories, held together by newspaper and magazine clippings are not worthy of Mr. Moorcock.
You have a music loving, switch hitting, physicist, poet, assassin, who tries to keep the world from slipping into the abyss through his sexual encounters, blackmail, murder, assasination, self mutilation, voodoo as well as math.
Its hard to describe this mess, except that as it gets closer and closer to the 2005 published dates it gets darker, meaner, more nonsensical and basically it sadly turns into an low brow anti american tirade on how we have ruined the world at all levels. If it had been well done with a clear focus, it may have been worth reading but it seems that Mr. Moorcock must have been on some happy herbs when he started the project back in the 1960's and he has kept that stash all these years for each chronological update of this character. Said herbs, which he dipped back into with each later addition when he sunk his pen in the ink well for this character, did not age well.
I was so stoked to read this when I picked it up and I am so glad I did not buy the "Quartet" as well as this since is so poorly written and ill conceived. An interesting character that could have been a modern Elric but is instead a flat concept from start to finish.

Seems best to have read the "Cornelius Quartet" first. The novels provide a good introduction to Jerry as well as other characters who appear in these stories: his brother Frank, sister Catherine, Miss Brunner, Bishop Beesley, Una Persson, Major Nye, Professor Hira,...

These short stories focus on commentary by Jerry and company against a backdrop of world events:

"I'm not interested in being right. I'm interested in what happens."

"This is the age of the lowest common denominator. I blame America."

Jerry here seemed more detached, more amoral than in the novels. Some of his coolness slipping into coldness. Perhaps because the world he protects himself against has become harsher. Moorcock's writing is at least as good as in the Quartet. It took some adjustment going from the novels to the short stories. Instead of going into Jerry's world, as the novels did, these short stories take Jerry into the world. Jerry's escape and our escape are over.

Toward the end of this first reading, I began to let go of my expectations based on the Quartet and accept the short story format. I'm looking forward to a second, fresh reading.

Jerry C. is a Mod gone mad: he is the ultimate manifestation of English 60's style. So anti-cool he's completely cool, so immoral he teaches by anti-example -- got that? -- as when he cheerfully kills a young boy who seems to be the earthly manifestation of the Buddha...shocking when he first appeared, even now he retains his appeal. In fact, in the post-James Bond era of Austin Powers, Jerry is more intriguing than ever...and Moorcock is simply one of the most important writers of fantasy, or writers period, up there with Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Doris Lessing.

Jerry Cornelius, a product of sixties hip when Moorcock's name never seemed to be out of the papers, died, was resurrected and died again, certainly in terms of his fashionability. Now here he is with a bunch of the best of his earliest adventures coupled with a quartet of his best new ones, dealing with Clinton's foreign policy, Lady Diana's death-cult, Middle Eastern Politics and, in what is probably the best story in the book, events around the catastrophe of 9/11. And, to this reader's surprise at least, he seems even more relevant today than he did when he first hit the pages of New Worlds, that magazine of early post-modernist senisbility, some forty years ago. Moorcock's fingers were definitely on the pulse of our times and this collection proves it. Elegant, fast and sardonic, these are tales that are, like Scott Fitzgerald's,
distinctly of their time and yet retain a universality lacking in most other contemporary fiction. This is the best value on the literary market. As he proves in his McSweeney's Mammoth
Treasury story, Moorcock is also provides great entertainment while making us think a lot deeper than, for instance, the Matrix's rabbit hole. Totally recommended!

A spinoff of Jerry Cornelius, if you like, where his sister features prominently, as does Una Persson, who pops up in several other places.

Jerry perhaps is well out of it, as their mother also shows here, and he would be well outnumbered in gender.

More wild antics, and of course some antics of the s*xual variety.

...are all of Moorcock's books (except the Eternal Champion series) very, very bad? The writing feels like it is first written down, then processed through a book of synonyms.

The story itself is fun enough I guess, but the writing makes it hard to follow. Maybe if I had read of Una Persson or Catherine Cornelius before it would make more sense. This feels like the third volume in a five-volume series.

The erotic and exotic adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius. Friends, lovers, revolutionaries...Through the years and across the continents of real and imagined pasts, presents and futures...Enjoy this trip - it's a white knuckle ride...

This is one of my favorite Michael Moorcock books. Extending the themes and characters established in the Jerry Cornelius quartet, this follows the adventures (erotic and otherwise) of Jerry's sister Catherine and her sometime lover, the temporal adventuress Una Persson (first seen in Moorcock's Oswald Bastable books --- "Warlord of the Air", "Land Leviathan", "The Steel Tsar").

Like the Jerry Cornelius books, this one is freely structured, as our heroines jump back and forth in time, exploring the highs and lows of the 20th century. Jerry's formidable mother, Mrs. Cornelius, also emerges here as a major character. (Jerry puts in a cameo or two.)

Moorcock's writing here is several levels above his style in the Elric and Corum fantasies. The author has often stated his preference for his comedies over his SF and fantasy; this novel is a successful hybrid that fuses the best elements of Moorcock's dramatic and antic work.

I will concede that this is perhaps best appreciated by readers familiar with the Jerry Cornelius stories and may be more enjoyable if read in context. Still, this is one of the author's most sophisticated works, one that paves the way for his later, more serious literary work such as "Byzantium Endures" and "Mother London."

An amusing and exciting read; highly recommended.

The End of Time is a place that we would call decadent. To those that inhabit it, it is just normal. They are immortal, they can immense powers, and they can pretty much do anything they want. However, what they do mostly is get bored.

A time traveller from the late 19th century changes this, and Jherek Carnelian's relationship with this woman grow in ways he is not used to, or even sure he understands.

This series is not for everyone. In this first book, Jherek Carnelian comes back from the end of time to Victorian England to court Mrs. Amelia Underwood.

Unfortunately things have changed so much by the end of time that he does not understand courtship, marriage, the use of the toilet (a small adjustment would take care of that issue, but Amelia refuses to be tampered with). Carnelian skips back and forth through time and space doing strange and childish things in pursuit of love while almost everyone else rejects his reality in pursuit of their own. If you can follow his strange point of view the story grows from entertainment to a hint of something profound.

Millions of years from now Earths citizens can have whatever they wish whenever they wish. They can create and recreate matter at will, which has, in effect, destroyed their humanity. They value nothing and care for nothing. The words marriage, fidelity, shame, and morality mean nothing. Emotions are something that they attire themselves in to thrill their friends at dinner parties. Carnelian is a prince among princes in this future. A man who prides himself on his expertise in the area of 19th century history. A man who skips from one perfect day to the next. Until he meets Amelia, a time traveler from the 19th century who wants nothing to do with him and turns his whole world upside down.
I enjoyed this book on so many different levels. It is more than a `science fiction' novel.

Ok, this book is not as good as the 2nd two of the trilogy, but it is necessary in order to introduce you to the setting and characters. Once the introduction is over the story flies along on a breathtaking, hilarious and outrageous rollercoaster love story ride that is totally different to anything else I have ever read.

I discovered M.Moorcock in the mid-70s. This was the first book of his I picked up (purely at random) and as a consequence I have been hooked on MM ever since. None of his other books quite realized the entertainment of the 'Dancers' series, although he wrote several sequals that come close.

Don't be put off by the early chapters. If you don't know what to expect, you may find it tough to understand what is happening, but once you have accepted the main characters it is very difficult to put these down.

Be prepared for some loud chuckling in case reading in public.

Les.

This volume collects the second trilogy in the saga of Corum Jhaelen Irsei and consists of "The Bull and the Spear", "The Oak and the Ram", and "The Sword and the Stallion". Corum, for those of you who are not familiar with Moorcock, is an incarnation of the Eternal Champion. In this trilogy, Corum is called into the distant future to assist in the battle against the Fhoi Myore. While there, he learns some important lessons about love and belonging.

I have to confess that Corum is probably my least favorite of the incarnations of the Eternal Champion-- I like both Elric and Hawkmoon better. All the same, you have the general elements of Moorcock greatness-- brooding reluctant hero, the companion & his cat, and a strong tie in to historical myth and legend.

Start with the Swords Trilogy, and not here, if you have read no Corum before. The backstory is helpful to understand character motivation, if nothing else.

I first read the Chronicles of Corum when in high school over 25 years ago, and still re-read it every couple of years. It is a brutal sword-and-sorcery tale, but all the more real for its grinding, downbeat story. The exploration of the struggle for balance between chaos and law (allegorical at some level,I am sure) lends a sensibility to the story that is absent from far too many Sw&So tales. If you want gleaming knights in armor, the only one you will find is this book is not rescuing damesels in distress. A fine, disturbing tale.

Corum is the Eternal Champion, the last of a species destroyed by the gods (using the barbaric humans known as Mabden), he is doomed to fight against Chaos in different incarnations throughout time. I think Moorcock's melodramatic swords and sorcery tale is engrossing. Corum changes from a somewhat privileged member of a decadent, spiritual race into a battle-hardened tough survivor capable of defeating gods and arguing against "fate." Moorcock tells an old-fashioned tale very well. Not for everyone but I treasure my copy.

Michael Moorcock, The Chronicles of Corum (Berkley, 1973)

Moorcock returns to the world of the Eternal Champion, in the guise of Corum, then rips him out of it. Over a thousand years after the events of the last novels, Corum has become worshipped as a demigod. His followers summon him into their time to do battle with extraplanar beings of (at most) animal intelligence known as the Cold Gods. The Cold Gods are dying, slowly, but they have every intention of taking all of humanity with them.

Together with the last of the Sidhi, a race of magic-using nonhumans roughly akin to elves in most fantasy worlds, Corum and those who worship him go to do battle with another force bent on destroying the planet.

The plot may get old, especially when so many fantasy novels by so many authors revolve around it. But it's still fun to read and easy to deal with. As with the first part of Corum's epic (The Swords Trilogy), Moorcock doesn't take as many chances with fantasy conventions as he does in the Elric novels, and so these are slightly less challenging to the reader's conceptions of what's "supposed" to happen in fantasy novels. Still, they're quite a bit of fun, for all they they're predictable. *** ½

The Land Leviathan continues the story begun in The Warlord of the Air and concluded in The Steel Tsar.

Synopsis: Michael Moorcock's grandfather (Michael, also), goes searching for further word of the adventures of Oswald Bastable. He finds a beatiful valley in China where Una Persson, Bastable's ally from the first book, resides. Morning finds Moorcock abbandoned by Persson, left with a manuscript written by Bastable.

Bastable, it seems, has gone back to the Temple of the Future Buddha, and travelled the streams of time again. This time, he returns two years ahead of his own 1902, but in a world remarkably different from his own. A child prodigy in Chile has invented fantastic devices to make life easy and render poverty a thing of the past, but world war has broken out, made all the more deadly when these fantastic new technologies are applied to warfare.

Bastable's journeys take him aboard a pirate submarine, to a utopia in South Africa lead by Gandhi, and to the battle lines of the war between the Black Attila, the son of an American slave with a plan to conquer the world and his nemesis: the remnants of the USA and their allies: a federation of the Australians and Japanese.

I think: The political/racial dithering of Moorcock and his character's white guilt and slow witted outrage cost him a fifth star for this story. However, when you have this much action in just over 170 pages, and it is crafted by the brilliant Michael Moorcock, you're in for a fun, fast paced read. That is exactly what this book delivers. With takes on the apocalypse, utopia, and what might happen if somone reconstructed the Death Star on land in the year 1904, and then unleashed it on the racist Kennedy patriarch, this is a fun book.

Moorcock's meditation on racism and nationalism is obvious and dull. His hero, the dimension-hopping Oswald Bastable, finds himself on an earth where technological advance has unleashed man's basest, most aggressive tendencies, leading to total war on a world-wide scale. The author has plenty of opinions, but hardly a clue as to how to wrap them in a coherent storyline. A few historical personages appear, such as Gandhi as the president of a pacifist country, but they are not used in a way that provides any insight into their characters beyond what everyone already knows (ie, Gandhi was a pacifist). White authors always court disaster when they attempt to write about black rage over slavery and discrimination, and Moorcock embarrasses himself by creating the Black Attila, who crusades to make the earth safe for his people. Finally, Moorcock has the bad habit of setting up a "mysterious situation" whose explanation should be as painfully obvious to his protagonist as it is to the reader. Yet he writes as if nobody can guess what he has planned. For example, during Attila's invasion of America with his irresistable weapons, the evil racists put black people into cages which are mounted atop the walls that encircle their position. What on earth, we are expected to wonder, could they have been placed there for? Then, when it is revealed by our suitably shocked narrator by they are to be used as a human barricade, we are expected to be surprised.

I know that Moorcock is capable of crafting a good story, but this isn't one of them

Following the premise of the Warlord of the Air, Michael Moorcock advances the tales of Capt. Oswald Bastable, trapped between timestreams. Making the basis of his story a character from E.S. Nesbit's children's books, Moorcock speculates about the fate of imperialism, technology, and racist cultures. Oswald Bastable is an unstable British officer full of Victorian ideals who faces a new world torn by a global war. The nations and people are familiar; Ghandi is President of Bantustan in south Africa where Al Capone is an airship pilot, and Joseph Conrad commands a submarine; Joe Kennedy and Herbert Hoover are desperate racists in a post-apocalyptic America. Moorcock follows every stream to its logical conclusion, and this book is powerful and disturbing in its depiction of an Earth where all nations are at war, and Bastable, who is product of the long, racist, imperial Pax Brittanica must come to terms with what racism has wrought, and must decide if he is on the side of his race, or the side of humanity as whole.

Don't fret that this book is out of print. It is included in the omnibus A Nomad of the Time Streams, currently available from White Wolf. This is the second in the trilogy of adventures centering around Oswald Bastable, an unwitting and unwilling time traveller who finds himself mysteriously drawn into worlds similar to our own, yet with wildly strange differences, and always in the midst of some terrible conflict. The first book in the series, Warlord of the Air, is actually more action-packed and exciting, but this novel has other merits. The vengeful Black Attila, the antagonist, gives some wonderful food for thought. Moorcock's flair for creating a sweeping landscape with a handful of words is near its apex in this novel, and his witty characterizations add spice to the work. The subject he tackles is a juicy one, probably better handled in Heinlein's novel Farnham's Freehold, but still worthy of a serious read. Recommended.

Hawkmoon again moves through the multiverse, taking on a different incarnation of the Eternal Champion, and with him again is Jhary-a-Conel, the Companion to Champions, in one of his own incarnations.

The Dark Empire Destroyer thinks that doing this, and helping in another fight will give him a clue to the whereabouts of his wife.

Michael Moorcock, The Champion of Garathorm (Berkley, 1973)

Moorcock continues the Chronicles of Castle Brass with this odd little novel, perhaps one of the riskiest novels of Moorcock's career. Dorian Hawkmoon, united with his old friends, has paid a deep price-the loss of his wife and children. Or did he ever have them in the first place? Many at Castle Brass say he's been mad for the past five years, inventing the marriage and children after the death of his betrothed at the Battle of Londra (in the novel The Runestaff). Brought back to what they consider sanity by the arrival of a guest, an old friend of Count Brass', Hawkmoon feels that adventuring may be the best thing for him, and goes off into what is certainly the eternal champion's oddest adventure yet.

The oddities begin about a third of the way into the book, and explaining them would be impossible without major plot spoilers. Suffice to say that originally, the oddities seem as if Moorcock has just spliced together-badly-a series of unrelated stories. Such is not the case. Everything ties together, and as strand after strand comes full circle, the reader will get the idea of what Moorcock is on about. Once the whole weave is in place, the picture is staggering. ****

Don't fret that this book is out of print. It will be included in an omnibus edition to be released by White Wolf sometime in the next year or two. This is one of the books of the second series dealing with Moorcock's post-apocalyptic hero, Hawkmoon (the first series is currently available in an omnibus edition from White Wolf entitled Hawkmoon). The second series is, on the whole, not quite as good as the first, as Moorcock struggled a bit to entertwine his hero into the Eternal Champion continuum, but it still shows the reader a good thrill ride. Recommended for anyone who loves swords and sorcery.