“The Dancers at the End of Time”, by Michael Moorcock

 

 

534 pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1565041868

 

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 Dancers at the End of Time was the tenth in this and includes the tales An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands and The End of All Songs. This series of novels and short stories is set at…the End of Time, an era “where entropy is king and the universe has begun collapsing upon itself”. The inhabitants of this era are immortal decadents who create flights of fancy via the use of power rings that draw on energy devised and stored by their ancestors millions of years prior. Time travel is possible, and throughout the books various points in time are visited and revisited; space travelers are also common, but most residents of the End of Time find leaving the planet distasteful and clichéd. Amongst the main characters besides Jherek Carnelian (one of the few humans at the End of Time to have been born naturally, rather than created) are Mrs. Amelia Underwood, a time traveler from the late 19^th Century, the enigmatic Lord Jagged, Miss Mavis Ming – and, the Fireclown. Incidentally, the title of the series is itself taken from a poem by a fictitious 19^th Century poet, Ernest Wheldrake (a pseudonym used by Algernon Charles Swinburne, ahem), which Mrs. Amelia Underwood quotes in The End of All Songs.

 

An Alien Heat (the title comes from the poem Hothouse Flowers by Theodore Wratislaw) was first published in 1972 and concerns the alien Yusharisp who comes to Earth to warn its remaining inhabitants that the universe is coming to an end, his own planet having already having disappeared. But the Earthlings are unfazed by this revelation from the stars, as they believe him to be yet another doomsayer, the End of the Earth having been predicted for centuries. But the crux of the story revolves around Jherek Carnelian and one Mrs. Amelia Underwood, a time traveler from Victorian England, with whom he falls in love and pursues across time. And so on and so forth…Moorcock’s work is more comedy than Sci-Fi – although there’s a lot of that going on, make no mistake – and as usual it features his flair for extravagant prose and exotic settings. But there’s more going on here, for An Alien Heat is also a warning against excessive indulgences and the damage they cause to people on a profound level. Civilizational collapse at the End Times…who doesn’t want to read about that? But this work displays a wit that is unique in Sci-Fi in a future in which “inherited millennia of scientific and technological knowledge” allows the remaining inhabitants to “play immense imaginative games, to relax and create beautiful monstrosities” as they revel in their decadence.

The Hollow Lands (whose title comes from the poem The Last Word by Ernest Dowson) came out in 1974, and continues the tale of Jherek Carnelian who, along with the other inhabitants of the End of Time, have resumed their ways as if Nothing Had Happened – only to be interrupted by the Lat, an alien species of piratical musicians (you read that correctly). As with An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands features innumerable descriptions of the End of Time, the fascination Carnelian has with the Victorian Era and the satiric parallels with 20^th Century Western civilization – circa 1974, that is. It is a little lighter and more humorous than its predecessor but it is obviously the bridge book in the trilogy as so much of this work is more of the same, with no real advancement in the characters or the story overall. And, perhaps this is just me, but The Hollow Lands seemed rather more absurd than An Alien Heat, as if Moorcock was trying to outdo himself from one book to the next. Nevertheless this book is still a worthy continuation of the tale begun in its predecessor and is a fun, exciting, well-written adventure romp, filled with aliens, lascivious immortals, wonky time travel and a comedy of errors in Victorian England. Perhaps writing these works was what Moorcock needed after having written about albino sociopaths and what not, and while not all of the humor has withstood the passing of time, it is still a rather fun romp all the same.

Finally, The End of All Songs (whose title comes from the poem Dregs by Ernest Dowson) appeared in 1976, in which Jherek Carnelian and Amelia Underwood meet Una Persson and Captain Oswald Bastable, who introduce themselves as members of the Guild of Temporal Adventurers (any Moorcock fan worth their salt remembers this pair). They explain the notion of the multiverse as the combination of all simultaneously existing realities before sending Jherek and Amelia back to the End of Time. There, Jherek finds all his friends who had vanished from 1896 alive and well, except for Lord Jagged who has yet to return. Amelia is now more tolerant towards the people of the End of Time, though still occasionally revolted by their lack of morals. She and Jherek resume the life they led in An Alien Heat – which is interrupted by the sudden arrival of a shell shocked, crazed Mr. Underwood (that would be Amelia’s husband), Inspector Springer and a dozen policemen – oh, and the crazy Lat. This last book in the trilogy is much darker than the first two, and the description of the earth as the end approaches and things begin to fail is chilling. But while pessimistic, The End of All Songs does have its positive moments, and the way in which it displays late 20^th Century society is, if anything, more obvious than it was when originally published. As with most science fiction, The Dancers at the End of Time is a commentary on the era in which it was written, and a particularly successful example, too.