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luana420 's review for:
Elric: Stormbringer!
by Michael Moorcock
By placing the Gollancz collection of Moorcock's Elric tales in chronological order, a new reader can't help but experience whiplash from careening to and fro between older, thoughtful Moorcock and young piss-and-vinegar Moorcock. Coming to the apocalyptic end of the saga, there is nothing but piss-and-vinegar Moorcock as all four novellas that make up the fix-up Stormbringer!* were originally published in 1962 and feature the king at his most doom-laden.
While there are moments of laugh-out-loud cheese in the pulpy dialogue ("Oh no! My soul!"), the prose has an urgency and inevitability to it that can't help but reel you in by sheer relentlessness. Chaos is on the march and by gum, you'll have known it! Perhaps Moorcock couldn't have anticipated this, but Elric's pyrrhic victory against the black tide certainly HIT DIFFERENT in climate disaster times where, like the albino prince, we can find victory in little more than making a clean slate for our successors. It reminded me a bit of LeGuin's apocalypse in The Farthest Shore (for maximum effect, I also read that while sick with what was likely covid), though a lot less subtle.
Do the best fantasy authors simply know what decay is all about? What the beauty is in letting go? As Sepiriz the black seer would say, certainties are madness.
*love the exclamation mark
While there are moments of laugh-out-loud cheese in the pulpy dialogue ("Oh no! My soul!"), the prose has an urgency and inevitability to it that can't help but reel you in by sheer relentlessness. Chaos is on the march and by gum, you'll have known it! Perhaps Moorcock couldn't have anticipated this, but Elric's pyrrhic victory against the black tide certainly HIT DIFFERENT in climate disaster times where, like the albino prince, we can find victory in little more than making a clean slate for our successors. It reminded me a bit of LeGuin's apocalypse in The Farthest Shore (for maximum effect, I also read that while sick with what was likely covid), though a lot less subtle.
Do the best fantasy authors simply know what decay is all about? What the beauty is in letting go? As Sepiriz the black seer would say, certainties are madness.
*love the exclamation mark