“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?