534
pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1565041837
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. Sailing to Utopia was the eighth
in this series featuring the characters Konrad Arflane, “Ryan”, Colonel Jerry
Cornelius (who seems to be a different character from Jerry Cornelius) and Max
von Bek, and includes the tales The Ice Schooner, The Black Corridor, The
Distant Suns and Flux. I
think that the editors over at White Wolf were in a quandary over these
stories, as bundling them all together is rather a stretch, seeing as they
basically have nothing to do with one another – except for ships, and traveling
hither and yon. So…there’s that. Anyway…
The first book is The Ice Schooner, a
stand-alone work published in 1969 that really has nothing to do with
Moorcock’s Multiverse…but oh well, here it is. It takes place on Earth sometime
in the far future after a nuclear war has caused temperatures around the globe
to plummet and coating the planet in a never-ending sheet of ice. Creatures
have adapted to the new climate, especially the whales who now prowl the
surface and have become the principle source of food and raw material for the sparse
and dwindling human population. Indeed, the existence of the eight cities of
the chasms where the story takes place depends on the hearty crews of these ice
schooners to do their job and hunt the terrible and elusive whales. The ice
schooners themselves are rather cool, too: sailing ships with fiberglass hulls
that glide about on massive metal skies, they were crafted long ago and the
method of their construction has been lost. I found The Ice Schooner to be rather cool (heh), with an interesting (though underdeveloped) world filled with
intriguing creatures and a different-though-familiar society. The protagonist, Konrad
Arflane, still has all the trappings of an Eternal Champion, what with his
being strong and clever and wise and willing to Fight the Good Fight, but in a
rather different twist, he is not a future-sighted revolutionary but rather a
traditionalist determined to preserve his world and its way of life; indeed, the novel’s central theme is the friction
caused by Arflane’s stubborn traditionalism butting against other characters
who are slowly departing from the time honored ways and the physical evidence
of the evolving world is. This is at heart a Sci-Fi action yarn and is
unapologetic about it, despite flashes of trying to be something more or say
something profound.
Next we have The Black Corridor, and
a book more different from the previous entry would be hard to find. Likewise
written in 1969 – this time coauthored with Moorcock’s wife at the time, Hilary
Bailey – this tale explores the effects of physical isolation – in the first
instance, a spaceship with a lone awake crewman hurtling across space (written
by Moorcock) and societal isolation – and in the second instance, a near-future
world plunging into fascism (written by Bailey). The two tales are parallel
narratives in which an astronaut, piloting a spaceship with a group of family
and friends towards their new home of Barnard’s Star, while Mr. Ryan, a successful
toy businessman, is compelled by the authorities to fire his Welsh staff and begin
manufacturing weapons; both stories converge at a distant point in space. I
promise, while both stories appear to have nothing in common, it all becomes
clear in the end. There is a deep political message running through the
stories, as well, one that states that warns against mankind’s tendency to
search for messiahs to solve their every problem rather than a pragmatic
politicians to fix everyday problems (a hopeless desire, if you ask me).
The
Distant Suns is the third book in
this volume and takes place on a 21st Century Earth (uh-oh)
that is overcrowded, underfed and teetering on the brink of worldwide chaos (I
repeat, uh-oh). But fear not, for Colonel Jerry Cornelius, hero and
adventurer extraordinaire, arrives as humanity’s last best hope to Save Us All
and, accompanied his wife Cathy and good friend Professor Frank Marek, undertakes
to brave the madness of space in order to find another world able to sustain
human life. But all is not what it seems on this New Earth, and Colonel
Cornelius finds himself in a race against time to uncover the hidden mysteries
of the planet in time for the rest of humanity to relocate and save itself. As
well being a straight-up Sci-Fi novel, The Distant Suns is a Jerry Cornelius
book, which may or may not mean anything, seeing as there is precious little to
connect his books with one another. What it does have in common with other Jerry
Cornelius tales is its pretentiousness, which wears thin in this book even
faster than usual. The characterizations in The Distant Suns, along with
the pace and overall style, are sadly typical of any work starring Jerry Cornelius
– well, maybe not, seeing as in this one, at least, Cornelius has been
extricated from his native Carnaby Street, London.
Lastly we come to Flux which, along with being the shortest tale in this volume (and written in conjunction with Barrington Bayley), is also the oldest, having been published in New Worlds #132 way the hell back in deepest, darkest 1963; is has also been retconned, with the original character, Max File, being replaced by Max von Bek, thus retrospectively making it a part of the Eternal Champion mythos. So here we go: on a future Earth, the European Economic Community (EEC) is nearing a critical mass of combined overpopulation and overdevelopment and a point of catastrophic entropy (you don’t say). To avert crisis, it quietly developed a means of time travel and selects Max File…er, Max von Bek, a government functionary who was socially engineered to possess a high degree of skill in the art of organizational management, to travel ten years into the future to find out what will happen and what will come about and then return to report his findings so that laws governing the sequence of time may be analyzed and a formula for human government may be developed that removes “the random element from human affairs”. Got it? Flux is nothing if not ambitious, and it’s a shame that Moorcock did not develop it into a full-scale novel, or more, and is more frustrating than intriguing because of it. While many Deep Thoughts emerge and the Multiverse makes a cameo, the tale is far too short to be really fulfilling. As for the Shyamalanesque twist at the end…
