Michael Moorcock, Legends From The End Of Time: Pale Roses / White Stars / Ancient Shadows / Constant Fire / Elric At The End Of Time

Stories (two straddling the divide between novelette and novella, two definite novellas, and one very short novel) set during the events of the Dancers At The End Of Time books. Frankly, the Dancers trilogy is entertaining enough that just reiterating the same material with diminishing returns would still be preferable to dutifully trudging through yet another Elric story (not that there needs to be a choice between the two, as the last story of this volume indicates), but thankfully, Moorcock's ability to come up with entertaining prose riffs on pop culture's collapse in on itself (such as a description of a musical piece chronicling how "Casablanca Bogard, with his single eye in the middle of his forehead, wielded his magic spade, Sam, in his epic fight with that ferocious bird, the Malted Falcon, to save his love, the Acrilan Queen, from the power of Big Sleepy (a dwarf who had turned himself into a giant) and Mutinous Caine, who had been cast out of Hollywood (or paradise) for the killing of his sister, the Blue Angel") is seemingly limitless, and these stories have their own virtues to justify their existence.

This is no small feat, because there is a difficulty in telling actual stories about the inhabitants of the End of Time: there are no stakes for them because their immortality and omnipotence keep them from developing as characters [1]. They change, but whimsically (according to fashion) and not meaningfully -- anything they learn is understood as just more raw data to work with, and any alteration in their habits occurs at will and may be abandoned at any time. Their only constraints are self-imposed, their values are unexamined and not deeply held, and no peers of similar power levels exist, so Moorcock can't do what Banks does in the Culture books and examine the difference between his utopian society's expressed values and how it actually operates. The only major challenge that can be posed to the Dancers is a threat to their way of life -- the end of the universe. The only way for one of them to change meaningfully would be for one to leave the nest forever. Both of those concepts have been fully explored in the main trilogy. Here, the trilogy's stars, Jherek Carnelian and Amelia Underwood, are offscreen, but their presence looms heavily enough over these stories to make them (the stories) not so much standalone adventures as companion pieces meant to complement the main feature with more extensive explorations of certain themes and aspects of the worldbuilding. The trilogy mounted a defense of the Dancers' society, pitting them against characters motivated by the ethics of violent expansion, capitalism, pointless moralizing for its own sake, and fire-and-brimstone religion, and challenging the reader to find anything genuinely wrong with a life of limitless power (shared equally, mostly), frivolity and their constant reinvention; these stories, on the other hand, look more closely at cases in which the values of End of Time are genuinely tested: the exceptions to the equal sharing of power, the callous treatment of stranded time travelers, the damage the immortals can cause even with the best of intentions. These stories are about the rot at the core, and thus, shadow figures, inversions, and reflections for Jherek, Amelia, and Lord Jagged abound, with surface similarities which invite comparison only long enough to underscore key differences.

For example, Werther de Goethe, like Jherek and unlike the rest of the Dancers, has been gestated in a womb and born. In contrast to Jherek's resolve that love and the practice of virtue could provide meaning to an existence with absolute freedom and total control and no risk, Werther decides that only with permanent death and the possibility for committing sin -- something wrong and irreversible -- is it possible for actions to have significance. So begins "Pale Roses," where Werther chances by a young woman in distress (with the lovely name of Catherine Lily Marguerite Natasha Dolores Beatrice Machineshop-Seven Flambeau Gratitude, no less), and, seeing an opportunity to do something meaningful, he decides to become her new father. And mother. He enthusiastically throws himself into the roles of doting parent (creating for her a romantic fairytale idyll where playful gorillas nibble from her hands) and jealous parent (introducing her to his fellow immortals at a ball, he tries to shield her from their offers of what he considers hollow hedonistic thrills) but, naturally, he eventually commits a terrible crime against her (or what he sees as one) and kills himself in horror and despair. This isn't the end of the story, of course, as this is the End of Time; when Werther is revived, all of his friends applaud his performance and reveal the situation to have been a contrivance in order to allow him to feel genuine sin and guilt. Quite satisfied with the experience, he only wishes that his death could have been permanent, as this would have been the most dramatically appropriate conclusion. "If death," he is answered, "were permanent, how would we judge our successes and our failures?" The most tragic word in the English language is "again." [2]

In "White Stars," the Iron Orchid and the Duke of Queens, on a stroll, come across Lord Shark, the most self-obsessed and isolated of the immortals (a reflection/contrast to Lord Mongrove from the main trilogy, who is also isolated and unpopular, but directs his energies towards the cultivation of misery and gloom in a performance he discovers is pointless without others to witness), dueling his exact duplicate (the servants he has created are all copies of himself, as he has no creativity). The Duke agrees to fight a duel with him to the permadeath (it's a lark for the Duke, while for Lord Shark it's a chance to display the futility of all existence), though first the Duke must prepare by learning how to duel, borrowing a Lord Shark double with whom to practice. Due to the interference of some fearful, distrustful, desperate soldiers (with echoes of the Lat and some other wayward Earth time travelers from the main trilogy) from Earth's future (well, *our* future) who want to get home (despite that not being possible -- time travel is one-way only, and there are no exceptions to the Morphail Effect here), the duel doesn't go off quite as planned. Here, Lord Shark's complex personal code of honor is incomprehensible and nonsensical, pointing towards the pointlessness of any arbitrary or personally arrived-upon system of morality (and perhaps the hollowness of any moral framework that's not objective and universal? Certainly a great deal of Moorcock's portrayal of good and evil suggests this position), and his example takes the lifestyle of the Dancers to its extreme: if immortality and essentially limitless creative power is coupled with anything less than infinite imagination, you end up with a bore dueling himself, pure masturbation.

"Ancient Shadows" is the strongest piece in this collection, creating genuinely affecting drama out of the caricatures and parodies of parodies inhabiting the End of Time. It begins when Dafnish Armatuce brings her son, Snuffles, to the End of Time, hoping to show him the future triumph of their civilization. Their society, the Armatuce, is structured along the principles of pure functionality and efficiency; all art must have a purpose, and abstention and self-sacrifice are the greatest virtues. Dafnish, of course, quickly finds her time machine incapable of return, and is confronted with the fact that her philosophy and the efforts of everyone she has ever known have come to nothing; the Armatuce is an incredibly minor footnote in history, one dull fun-hating totalitarian dictatorship out of millions. Dafnish's response is denial (she refuses to admit that with the eradication of scarcity, there is no longer a purpose for the rules she forces herself to live by) and a jealous adherence to her own value system; she quotes Maoist-style maxims about the importance of self-denial and decries the abundance and easy lives of the denizens of the End of Time as sinful luxury. Snuffles, meanwhile, despite Dafnish's warnings and protests, rejects his upbringing, gorging himself on food and pleasures.

As new arrivals, Dafnish and Snuffles attract the attentions of several individuals, most notably Mavis Ming, former inhabitant of 21st Century Iowa and one of the less popular time travelers to have wound up at the close of history; she has all of the unspeakably irritating chumminess of your squarest co-worker who loves to go on and on about the most unimportant things, offering nothing but shallow observations, meaningless gossip, constant criticism and griping, folksy "wisdom" from her old friends, tittering references to lesbian dalliances, and self-aggrandizing anecdotes that go nowhere. She starts out by becoming sexually fixated on Dafnish, but, after being rebuffed, she transfers her attentions to the more responsive Snuffles. As Mavis Ming encourages Snuffles' slide into hedonism, Dafnish debates with herself whether she should declare her son mature enough to become an adult and, in granting him that status, to "put an end to her own misery." Lord Jagged, seeing Dafnish's discontent and soul-sickness, tries to convince her that life can be worth living the way the Dancers live, and makes an impassioned (and entirely convincing) defense for individual freedoms, self-determination, and the value of having the option of multiple paths towards fulfillment. But no intellectual appeal is enough to sway Dafnish when Mavis Ming leads Snuffles to cross a line with what she sees as a truly unacceptable betrayal of core values; despairing, Dafnish make a doomed effort to return to her own time, alone, with results that are predictable for her and unexpected for her son when the inhabitants of the End of Time learn that some of what they (and the reader) were led to dismiss as Dafnish's melodramatic moaning and preaching ("Our children are precious. We exist for them.") should have been understood literally.

This is a story about the pain of cultural assimilation whose one-note characters function as emblems of the ideas under consideration, but resist being reduced to stereotypes; Dafnish is a prude whose strongly-held beliefs are irrational and indefensible, but her pain and conflicted feelings are real. It's a brutal critique of the lifestyle of the denizens of the End of Time that does not rely on finding fault with a life of ease, carelessness, and frivolity, but with what a powerful group does when it imposes its norms and values (consciously or not; it doesn't matter, since power makes it happen even as it pretends it's only offering a choice or an additional option) on people from different societies -- in other words, cultural imperialism. It's the Look To Windward to the trilogy's Consider Phlebas or The Player Of Games, interrogating the status quo previously established by the author to reveal the disturbing assumptions underneath.

Constant Fire is the novel-length work (it's certainly no shorter than some of the Hawkmoon books), taking place shortly after "Ancient Shadows" and focusing on Mavis Ming, her patron, Doctor Volospian (a schemer and reflection of Lord Jagged, though Volospian hasn't done a very good job of emulating the benevolent Jagged, his former idol; deep down, he's out for himself, and, though he tries to play the mastermind, the Doctor knows less than anyone about what's going on, swindled while believing himself to be the swindler), and Emmanuel Bloom, the Fireclown (from The Winds Of Limbo), in a crossover shocker. After setting the stage by exhibiting Mavis Ming in full-bore action at a party, the Fireclown's spaceship shows up (melting the chef's painstakingly crafted jellied dinosaurs in the process, sadly) and things take a turn for the CAPSLOCK. Bloom, who was entirely unconvincing when he was supposed to be inciting revolution and social upheaval with his rhetoric, is a comic figure here; he's a bombastic blowhard, singing, "For I am GOD -- and SATAN, too! PHOENIX, FAUST and FOOL! My MADNESS is DIVINE, and COOL my SENSE! I am your DOOM, your PROVIDENCE!," describing himself as "all things! Man and woman, god and beast, child and ancient," and announcing, "I have no respect for customs, manners, fashions, for I am Bloom the Eternal. I am Bloom, who has experienced all. I am Emmanuel Bloom, whom Time cannot touch, whom Space cannot suppress!" It's all very DJ Berkley.

Bloom comes to offer the "salvation" of destruction and rebirth in fire, denouncing the existence of the Dancers as hollow. As the inhabitants of the End of Time already have or can create anything and everything the Fireclown has to offer, they are bemused or bored by him. In addition to unsuccessfully hawking his own rendition of the Resurrection and the Life, Bloom instantly and inexplicably becomes obsessed with Mavis Ming, who is not impressed at all with his declarations of love and insistences that her soul pines for his. He's a minor curiosity, one of many unremarkable zealots who have visited the planet and have not found a receptive audience for their preaching, until he torches My Lady Charlotina's palace and burns other projects and menageries; he soon becomes notorious for spoiling social events, a noteworthy annoyance. Mavis Ming, meanwhile, is disturbed by his refusal to take "no" for an answer, and so she requests that Volospian cloister her away. This he does, until Bloom convinces Volospian that the Holy Grail in the Doctor's extensive collection of religious relics from throughout the ages is a fake -- that he has the real grail on his ship, and he'll trade it if he is permitted to leave forever with his love. Volospian makes a deal, betraying Mavis Ming for the grail (it's fake, of course -- the true grail is mystical and incorporeal) and the chance to get rid of the two worst bores on the planet in one stroke. This is the clever part. The real ending, however, is distasteful enough to eclipse the novel's good points.

When Mavis and Bloom are alone together at last, it becomes clear that she is actually rejecting him because of her poor self-image. She doesn't think she deserves the attention. "If you loved yourself," he tells her, "you would love me." She resigns herself to being raped when -- OMG! -- the true Holy Grail materializes to prove that, despite all of his buffoonery and cluelessness, he was actually completely right about everything. He scourges her with fire, she realizes her love for him, and there's rebirth imagery, physical and spiritual healing, and marriage to cap everything off. It's heartfelt, but you know what? I reserve the right to be creeped out by the things you think are genuine and important and beautiful. I don't think Mavis Ming is terrible enough to necessitate a forced redemption; in "Ancient Shadows," her monstrous selfishness leads her to acts of callousness and cruelty, but here? Yes, she thinks and speaks almost entirely in a mishmash of jargon and feel-good sloganeering. Yes, she's socially inept and not very intelligent and she doesn't realize that nobody around her cares what she has to say. Other than that, her sins seem mainly to consist of enjoying Tolkien, A.A. Milne, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, After all, those are all essentially equivalent and appeal only to shallow, stupid people!

The funny thing about rape and sexual assault: they have a tendency to overpower any metaphoric or symbolic significance you try to pile on top of them. It's not funny when she tells Bloom "no" over and over again and he doesn't accept her answer and she can't get him to leave her alone and she begs the authorities to protect her (because they won't give her the power to protect herself) and they don't and they hand her over to him and have a good laugh about it. It's not funny to suggest that she deserves this for being an irritating loser. It's not funny that the "twist" is that her stalker really did know what was best for her all along. Constant Fire fits thematically with the other stories, pointing towards something better and more satisfying than the world of the End of Time, but it really doesn't work for me.

Finally, there's "Elric At The End Of Time," which begins when Una Persson notices a disturbance in the Force time streams. Elric, in his wanderings shortly before "The Dreaming City," has been yanked through time and space to the End of Time, which he thinks is the realm of Chaos (and may not be too far off in his assessment). The novella alternates between the perspectives of the Dancers, who see Elric as a petulant child; Elric, who mistakes Una Persson for Xiombarg and the constantly shape-changing Dancers for the capricious Lords of Chaos; and the knowing, cynical perspective of Una Persson, who just wants to get Elric back to his own plane and knows that Lord Jagged would know how to set things right -- if only she could track him down.

As the immortals find that their guest is rather incapable of simply relaxing and having a good time with them, they try to entertain Elric by giving him what he wants (or expects): a generic adventure, with things to kill (they are attacked by deadly parrots, which the Dancers have conflated with pirates and pierrots) and a damsel to rescue ("Duke of Queens, what can we do? Those parrots will ransom her savagely and mishandle her objects of virtue!"). Una's mission succeeds and Jagged appears to Elric as Lord Arioch, claims his vassal's loyalty, and sends the champion home -- but is Jagged's imitation too perfect to be just an act? It's a cute idea [4], but not one that really adds anything to the whole extended multiverse or holds up to scrutiny (I'm sure you could come up with an explanation for what Jagged-as-Arioch might be up to in Corum's world, for example, but what would be the point?); the structure of the story itself works against this, since though Elric wildly misinterprets what is going on, the actions of the immortals are perfectly comprehensible. The novella is a bit of a strange note on which to say goodbye to the setting, as it's purely comical and unconcerned with the the ways the End of Time actually kind of sucks, but it does fit with the common theme of something that seemingly couldn't possibly be true turning out to be true.

[1] Not to say that you can't write a story about omnipotent immortals who do develop as characters. It's just that these immortals happen to stubbornly resist development.

[2] Quentin Compson, of course, is free to disagree on this point.

[3] In response to this elaborate introduction, Mavis Ming tosses off a particularly well-timed "funny -- he doesn't *look* Jewish." It would make Mel Brooks proud.

[4] Which is more than I can say for Captain Jack being the Face of Boe. God, that is so frustratingly dumb.