“Legends from the End of Time”, by Michael Moorcock

347 pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1565041899

 

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. Legends from the End of Time was the thirteenth in this series featuring a variety of characters, and includes the tales Pale Roses, White Stars, Ancient Shadows, Constant Fire and Elric at the End of Time. Now, if you read Moorcock’s The Dancers at the End of Time (reviewed on July 30^th, 2024 – and shame on you if you didn’t), then I really can’t say what your reaction will be to this volume, seeing as it is mostly a continuation of that earlier work. While the stories work as stand-alone tales, you really lose something in their telling if you are not at least a little familiar with the backgrounds of these characters from Dancers.

 

Evidently taking time-off between grandiose Epics, Moorcock here offers a five-novella collection of stories that all take place in the oh-so-delightfully decadent End of Time that he introduced in his first collection, The Dancers at the End of Time. It pains me to say it, but getting through this collection was, most of the time, a trial, and I can’t put my finger on just why that is (it also explains why I haven’t individually reviewed the tales in question, like I did for Dancers; I just don’t have the heart, it would seem). These five stories all take place in the same time and setting that Dancers did and during the voyages undertaken by Jherek Carnelian and Amelia Underwood away from the same (thus, neither character really features in any of the tales, apart from one character or another referring to them now and then).

 

The stories themselves take some work, especially seeing that Mavis Ming – a very boring, very real (sadly) character that is difficult if not impossible to warm to – is at the center of so much; it’s as if she were the most-annoying character on a reality TV show who was then given her own spin-off show for no other reason than to desperately try to make her more relevant. It must be said that, in comparison with much of Moorcock’s work, Legends from the End of Time displays a lighter (dare I say, humorous?) touch; one reviewer even described this work as “Woodhouse crossed with Brecht”; don’t know about that, but anyway…sadly, the turgid writing style rather limits whatever lightness there may be, so that the farther you go in the collection the more you feel like you’re running a marathon through knee-deep mud in iron-banded shoes.

 

And all the while I kept reading and dragging myself through book after book, like the demented treasure-hunters on Oak Island, absolutely convinced that with the next book, the next page, the next paragraph I would strike gold – but sadly, all for naught; not even the Fireclown was a godsend, seeing as it was a distortion from the original series. The whole time I read on through some sense of obligation; I mean, Legends from the End of Time is book thirteen out of fifteen, and I’ve come this far, haven’t I? While the whole Eternal Champion mythos is present in a limited form in this work, this book is more of a side-hustle for Moorcock, a kind of literary attachment to his other, more grandiose books with their linked-but-separate stories and mythos. Many characters from those other works appear but, really, these stories really just feel like filler.

 

Except for Elric at the End of Time, which has the honor (?) of being the last Elric story written by Michael Moorcock (although we all know that isn’t true, don’t we?). In this story Elric arrives at the End of Time (having accidentally ejected himself from his native plane during a sorcerous battle; happens to us all, right?) and naturally assumes that he has ended up in the realm of Chaos. He has the misfortune of landing in the middle of a vast sculptural installation by Werther de Goethe, the Last Romantic: a giant skull in which a desert and a snowscape represent “Man’s Foolish Yearnings…His Greed, his Need for the Impossible, the Heat of his Passions, the Coldness which must Finally Overtake him” (the capitals are all Werther’s, which should give you an idea of how pretentious he is). Moorcock’s vivid imagining of the sybaritic society at the End of Time and the prose inflected with late Victorian aestheticism and comedy really works in this story, so different in tone from the other works found in this particular collection. It’s also fun to see Moorcock send up his own creations with genuine affection; the juxtaposition of Werther de Goethe’s innocent Sturm und Drang and Elric’s own heartfelt anguish is irresistible.