“The Roads Between the Worlds”, by Michael Moorcock

 

 

390 pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1565041813

 

Over the course of the mid-to-late 90s, White Wolf Publishing produced this massive omnibus collection of Michael Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion” stories, a recurrent aspect in many of his tales. The Roads Between the Worlds was the sixth in this series featuring the characters Professor Faustaff, Alan Powys and Clovis Becker, and includes the tales The Wrecks of Time, The Winds of Limbo and The Shores of Death. None of these books are related to one another; rather, they are three independent novels written by Moorcock collected in this volume for that reason (I assume). The Wrecks of Time was first published in 1971 and solidified (as if he needed it) Moorcock’s status as a writer of unique breadth and creativity. What is this story about? Best let the man speak for himself:

 

There they lay, outside of space and time, each hanging in its separate limbo, each a planet called Earth. Fifteen globes, fifteen lumps of matter sharing a name. Once they might have looked the same, too, but now they were very different. One was comprised almost solely of desert and ocean with a few forests of gigantic, distorted trees growing in the northern hemisphere; another seemed to be in perpetual twilight, a planet of dark obsidian; yet another was a honeycomb of multicoloured crystal and another had a single continent that was a ring of land around a vast lagoon. The wrecks of Time, abandoned and dying, each with a decreasing number of human inhabitants for the most part unaware of the doom overhanging their worlds. These worlds existed in a kind of subspacial well created in furtherance of a series of drastic experiments…

 

There. But just who has done this? What being has the ability to create Earth after Earth as so many trifling playthings only to discard them in the backwaters of the space-time continuum? Why would any sentient creature maliciously create and then destroy these less-than-perfect worlds and their human inhabitants? To what end? Professor Faustus and the loyal men and women dispersed on these alternate Earths have dedicated their lives to eradicating the demolition teams and the Unstable Matter Situations the D-squads create. As they soon discover, much more is at stake, as they fight a seemingly losing battle with the very pattern of the Universe in the balance. Thought-provoking and full of surprises, The Wrecks of Time weds science, religion, myth and history into a page-turning narrative, a grand concept tale that has proven to be one of Moorcock’s most innovative science fiction works.

Next we have The Winds of Limbo (originally published in 1965 as The Fireclown), based in a future where the majority of the human population live underground. Alan Powys works at the transport department; his grandfather, Simon Powys, is the minister for space transport and is the presumptive nominee for his party to succeed the current president. Alan’s cousin Helen Curtis is leader of the Radical Liberal Movement, the government’s opposition. The arrival of the Fireclown in the lower levels of the underground city and his performances featuring fire captivate those who see it; he is thought by Simon Powys to be a dangerous rebel, his niece thinks conversely that the Fireclown is there to reignite people’s passion for democracy. But when a fire breaks out in the lower levels the Government shuts them off, and the people revolt and the Fireclown flees. Unconvinced by his grandfather’s, and the Government’s, assertion that the Fireclown is a terrorist, Alan sets off to find the Fireclown for an explanation. Helen accompanies him providing a ship and desperate to believe the Fireclown is a great healer. The Winds of Limbo covers many themes common to science fiction, such as Man’s relationship to and reliance on technology, the role of Government in regard to Truth (and the role of the media in distorting that Truth), along with other, various philosophical points, mainly by the Fireclown, regarding humans and their intelligence and whether that intelligence is really a necessity for survival. Again, more atypical and deep stuff by Moorcock that entertains as it provokes. 

Lastly we have The Shores of Death in which powerful aliens, searching for the end of the universe, happen upon the Earth and take from it what they need before moving on – only to cause the Earth to cease rotating on its axis. Oops. The human race now finds itself divided, with some living on the cold night side and some the sweltering day side, with yet others surviving in the thin twilight between the two regions. Living a life of pleasure and decadence in this middle region between light and dark, Valta Becker impregnates his daughter (!) who dies shortly after giving birth to Clovis, last of the Twilight Children. Neglected by his father, Clovis leaves home for the more technologically and philosophically sophisticated daylight region, where lifespans stretch to hundreds of years and the marvels of future science still flourish. He makes a name for himself in politics, rising to almost god-like stature but, when catastrophe strikes, rendering the daylight people sterile due to an after-effect of the aliens’ strange energies used in halting the planet’s rotation, Clovis Becker must find an answer or the human race will perish. Thus begins a taut adventure filled with warring political ideologies, End of the World parties, flower forests and floating carriages, shadowy figures attempting to shape mankind’s destiny for their own ends and a love story for the ages as Clovis and Fastina Cahmin (the last born of the daylight people) seek immortality…but at what cost to humanity?

“Shipwreck! A Comprehensive Directory of over 3,700 Shipwrecks on the Great Lakes”, by David D. Swayze

 

260 pages, Harbor House Publishers, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0937360125

America’s Third Coast (otherwise known as the Great Lakes of North America) refers to HOMES – that would be Lakes Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior (any of you who were born and raised in the Great Lakes region knew this already). These interconnected bodies of water are the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth by total area and are second-largest by total volume, containing 21% of the world’s surface fresh water by volume with a total surface of 94,250 square miles and a total volume of 5,439 cubic miles. Because of their sea-like characteristics, such as rolling waves, sustained winds, strong currents, great depths and distant horizons, the five Great Lakes have long been known for their treacherousness, something that is brought home in David D. Swayze’s Shipwreck! A Comprehensive Directory of over 3700 Shipwrecks on the Great Lakes.

Le Griffon was a sailing vessel built by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, in 1679 and was the first European ship to sail in the Great Lakes – it was also the first European ship to sink in the Great Lakes, doing so in Lake Michigan sometime that same year. The Edmund Fitzgerald, meanwhile, was the last but largest freighter to sink on November 10^th, 1975, in Lake Superior with the loss of 29 men, while the Lady Elgin accounts for the largest loss of life on the lakes when she sunk in 1860 in Lake Michigan with 400 lives lost. Those are just three examples of the (as the title states) over 3700 ships that have sunk in these, truly, Inland Seas. We here in the Great American Midwest know all about these wonderful waters, but this reference guide is a one-of-a-kind resource for anyone wanting to know about this grand natural resource.

The set-up is as basic as can be: while containing a series of brief essays and historical sketches of the types of boats that have sailed these seas, the book lists each and every vessel alphabetically along with such details as type of ship, length, gross tonnage, when and where it was sunk, the circumstances of its sinking and how many lives were lost; there is even an accompanying silhouette of the boat in question. All pretty basic stuff, but just keep in mind that this is not an exhaustive study of these phantoms of the lakes but merely a record of loss; I, for one, after perusing this book found myself Googling the hell out of these ships, just to see if there was more info to be had (you know Google: sometimes yes, sometimes no). Overall, a fantastic resource for tragedy on the Lakes and an opening to search for more on these wrecks.

“The Beatles: The Days of Their Life”, by Richard Havers

 

320 pages, Chartwell Books, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0785835042

Say, shouldn’t the title of Richard Havers’ The Beatles: The Days of Their Life in fact be “Days of Their Lives”? I certainly think so, being as that is proper English, wot. Not that it matters, for this is a typical Chartwell Book in that it is chock-full of photographs (drawn from Mirropix, the library of “The Daily Mirror”) of everyone’s favorite Lads from Liverpool and a day-by-day account of what the Fab Four were up to from their formation, through their heyday at the height of Beatlemania until their dissolution. This is by no means an in-depth or piercing biography of The Beatles, but it is a visual feast for any fan who lived through their rollicking days or wish they had done. From officially-sanctioned events like record launches or movie premiers to holidays abroad and family events, The Days of Their Life covers the LIVES of the most successful pop band ever and gives a glimpse as to what it must have been like to be a Beatle.

“Archangel”, by Robert Harris

 

373 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0679428886

Archangel is the second Robert Harris novel I have reviewed (the other being Fatherland, reviewed on January 3^rd, 2024), and involves more speculative history, although of a different sort. British historian Christopher “Fluke” Kelso is met by an old man named Papu Rapava while attending a conference in Moscow; the old man claims to have been present at the death of Joseph Stalin and further states that, immediately after Stalin’s death, Lavrenty Beria – chief of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) – supposedly took measures to secure a certain black notebook which is believed to be Stalin’s secret diary. When Rapava wouldn’t divulge the location of the book, he was exiled to the Kolyma region of the USSR, but has steadfastly refused to reveal the book’s location, fearing that shadowy agents are still watching him in case he goes near the MacGuffin. From there it is a chase after the mysterious lost diary and its shrouded contents, and what all of it could mean for the fate of modern Russia and the world.

Overall, Archangel was a serviceable thriller with some interesting information on Stalinist Russia and those would-be Stalinists who still revere the sonovabitch. The prose is serviceable, the structure, plotting and characters were professionally and skillfully wrought and I was interested in the whole from beginning to end. I even learned a couple of Russian words, like taiga (a boreal forest) and verst (a unit of measurement equaling 3500 feet), along with some colloquial sayings, such as “We are born on a clear plain and die in a dark forest” or “Gratitude is a dog’s disease”, attributed to Stalin himself (figures). But perhaps its greatest achievement is to show how differently two of history’s greatest monsters – Hitler and Stalin – are perceived in their home countries: in Germany Hitler is rightly shunned and despised, while in Russia Stalin is inexplicably honored and praised (indeed, seeing how this novel exposes the Russian desire for a Strong Man to bring order and make everything right, Putin’s popularity should come as no surprise).

So while Archangel is technically a work of speculative fiction, in today’s cultural and political climate – especially in Russia – it is all too terrifyingly plausible.