“Earl Aubec and other stories” by Michael Moorcock

 

 

590 pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1565049864

 

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. Earl Aubec and other stories was the fourteenth in this series featuring the character Earl Aubec of Malador, and includes a collection of 33 short stories (only the first of which features Earl Aubec and was already in a previous Elric book). And just what are these stories? *sigh*…okay, here goes: Earl Aubec, Jesting with Chaos, The Greater Conqueror, Going Home, Hanging the Fool, Consuming Passion, Wolf, Environment Problem, The Opium General, A Dead Singer, The Lovebeast, The Ruins, The Golden Barge: A Fable, The Deep Fix, The Real Life Mr. Newman, Goodbye, Miranda, Islands, Some Reminiscences of the Third World War [Casablanca, Going to Canada, Leaving Pasadena, Crossing Into Cambodia], Mars, The Frozen Cardinal, Peace on Earth (with Barrington Bayley), The Mountain, The Time Dweller, Escape from Evening, Waiting for the End of Time…, The Stone Thing: A Tale of Strange Parts, The Last Call, My Life, The Museum of the Future and To Rescue Tanelorn…And I’m going to review each tale individually, too…wait, the hell I am…

 

To give an example of just how long Moorcock has been writing, some of the tales to be found in this particular collection were written by him when he was a precocious 15-year-old; as he admits in the Introduction, “Some are a little embarrassing, a bit loud, a bit coarse…”. To be fair, the same could be said some of his later stories, written when he was an adult, so maybe that’s just his thing. Naturally, the vast majority of these stories deal with aspects of the Eternal Champion; however, if you crack the spine on this thing expecting to see the likes of Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum or even Erekosë, you will be disappointed. These tales work more as attachments to those other, longer and better-known tales. The biggest problem I found with the stories contained herein is that, because they all appear to be a series of one-offs, little (if any) time is spent on character development or background and, thus, it is difficult to really give a damn about any of them, other than the fact that, as the protagonists, you feel obliged to do so; as one story ends and the character is done with, off you go onto the next tale and new character. Was this frustrating? Not really; these are, after all, self-contained short stories in which characters are introduced, a problem is encountered and then resolved by the end.

 

Some are forgettable, some are rather good and some other could even be described as great. Earl Aubec and other stories does what is supposed to do: gather together the tales of the Eternal Champion for the gratification of the reader. Mission accomplished.