Well, I missed most of the fun this weekend (made it to the new Academy of Sciences too late to get in), but on the plus side, there was a pretty sweet haul from the library's big book sale (Joanna Russ, Mishima, Vollmann, Lorrie Moore, Kate Wilhelm, Guy Gavriel Kay, Emma Donoghue, and Elizabeth Bear were among the best finds), and I was able to pick up a load of Octavia Butler, David Wingrove, and shitty Dune prequels/sequels for Jeremy.

Michael Moorcock, Elric At The End Of Time

I haven't yet acquired the last two White Wolf / Millennium omnibuses (they are incredibly expensive, and I'm willing to wait for a deal), so it's about time I got to some of the other assorted Moorcock I have lying around. Where better to start than an odds-and-sods collection?

Apart from the title novella itself, which really needs to be read in the context of the End of Time setting (it looks at its hero from a distance, and I would imagine that if you read it for the Elric content, you'd be disappointed), there's very little of interest. "The Last Enchantment" is a very short and out-of-continuity Elric story (originally intended to be the "last Elric story") in which the hero is forced to entertain the Lords of Chaos by creating something they cannot envision. He succeeds by forming the stupid sort of "paradox" (I think the author misuses the word) that Moorcock seems to think is profound. "The Stone Thing" is a swords-and-sorcery parody whose one joke isn't funny. There are some utterly generic stories written in Moorcock's teens and starring a hero named Sojan; despite the thinly veiled Conan-y name ("I'm an original character, like Rickey Rouse or Monald Muck!"), he might bear a closer resemblance to John Carter of Mars. Sojan is a boringly honorable sword-wielding mercenary on a tedious planet of airships and spaceships, warring kingdoms, steaming jungles, fantastic beasts, psychics, and lots of guns.

On the non-fiction front, there's some talk on the genesis of the Elric stories (he says that Stormbringer symbolizes "my own and others [sic] tendency to rely on mental and physical crutches rather than cure the weakness at its source" -- fair enough, that's a part of it -- and that when Stormbringer finally turns to slay its master it is "meant to represent [...] how mankind's wish-fantasies can often bring about the destruction of [...] mankind." Um, I wouldn't say that.) and an essay on the Jerry Cornelius stories that mainly talks about what it was like to publish New Worlds. Not having read the Cornelius books (though I'd like to get to those soon), I can't say if the piece says anything worthwhile about them, but when Moorcock says, "Unfortunately many critics have missed the serious points of the stories [...]. Sexual ambiguity, for instance, is taken for granted in the JC stories -- a fact of life -- but critics continue to see that element, among others, as 'daring,'" I don't think I have to have read them to observe that he might be missing the point, that perhaps the critics of the period found the act of treating sexual ambiguity as a fact of life to be the "daring" part. Moorcock goes on to praise bohemian-types for being the only ones who can "get" what he's trying to do because they "by and large do take certain things for granted which are regarded as shocking by the average middle-class person," which is really a useless echo chamber mindset to get yourself into (Great! Only people who share your mindset are properly equipped to appreciate your work!). He's defensive about the literary merit of his work, and his constant self-effacement carries with it an element of self-aggrandizement. He puts up an aww-shucks veneer, stating that all he's ever wanted to do is tell fun stories and anyone who finds literary depth in his books is probably reading too hard into it but they're free to do so and it's flattering, but then he insists upon a single, correct interpretation for his work and mocks analyses that differ from his own. He also grouses about "the millionth novel about a young advertising executive in love with a deb and involved with a married woman." This doesn't make me want to dig deeper into his nonfiction. In conclusion, like most odds-and-sods collections, this is really for completists only.