Rating: 
Summary: The Finest of the Eternal Champion Series
Review: In these three books, Michael Moorcock reaches farther and explores more ideas and concepts than most other authors - even SF/F authors, in their entire career.The characters will constantly shock you, at first, but the "reality" of their situation soon becomes clear, and fascinating. And if you ever wished to see "character development" made interesting, the experiences and responses of Jherek Cornelian in this epic is the Stairway to Heaven of personal growth and realization. Did you know that the author is one of the actual creators of "Cyberpunk"? It was his magazine, New Worlds, from which the founders of Cyberpunk sprang, at the behest of the quest for an expansion of the old mythic archetype. It is a similar fusion of myth and the modern technical world which made The Matrix so captivating. In this novel, though, he steps beyond even those boundaries. Technology is so transcendant that it no longer is even part of one's conscious world. Innocence and decadence become both the same and yet nothing at all. All in all, "You gotta see it to believe it". An easy read, but a captivating one.
Rating:
Summary: A fine work about art, religion, and the nature of love.
Review: Michael Moorcock has created an extremely complex work in The Dancers series, making serious comments about the natures of and differences between art, life, religion and love. In the far, far future, humanity is comprised all of artists and their society which is all surface. They have no self-consciouness of this, but live the lives of fin-de-siecle bohemians with the power of gods. Thrust deliberately into this mix are time travellers, space travellers, and coming end of the Universe. Manipulated into falling love, the last human born of a woman, Jherek Carnelian, seeks the English Victorian Christian Amelia Underwood. Jherek is a pure artist, and Amelia is the anti-artist. Still, Jherek pursues her across time, falls in love with her, and changes his nature to please her. By turns funny, moving, and thoughtful, these books are English at their deepest core, speculating on the Nature of the English Soul released from all inhibition, want, and sense of sin, and rediscovering them happily.
Rating:
Summary: Oscar Wilde would have loved it
Review: Michael Moorcock is one of the most literate and witty fantasists of the twentieth century. His Elric Saga took the sword and sorcery epic far beyond standard tropes and created a literary tour de force. The Dancers at the End of Time, which is a part of the Eternal Champions series, is full of the kind of wit and social satire that Oscar Wilde would have written. Jherek Carnelian is one of the glittering, amoral denizens who inhabit the world At The End of Time. Magic and technology are inseparable, and life, such as it were, goes on like there's no tomorrow...which of course, there won't be. Jherek meets and falls madly in love with Mrs. Amelia Underwood, a very prim and proper Victorian wife, who finds herself in his future. Thus ensues a comedy of manners, morals and philosophical leanings reminiscent of the social changes that rocked England in the late nineteenth-century. Not to mention that I loved the Thomas Canty cover art. If anything, buy the book just for that alone!
Rating:
Summary: Maybe my favorite Moorcock series
Review: Moorcock creates a very remarkable habitat in this series: a far future earth, where the inhabitants have almost unlimited power. They can create matter out of solid air, resurrect themselves, etc. The characters have become bored and suffer from a perpetual ennui, comparable to works of Wilde and Beardsley. It's like reading Saki set at the end of time. The plot is amusing: one of these almost omnipotent characters falls in love with woman from Victorian England. He decides to fall in love. Many adventures follow, all very amusing. Moorcock's prose is, for once, very crisp. I don't want to spoil the story for you, but it is definitely worth reading, and for the many readers who only know Moorcock through Elric, this will show a much lighter side of his personality.
Rating:
Summary: Delicious and original
Review: Most people don't know Moorcock invented the Multiverse. That is he invented the concept (along with the idea of black holes and a fair bit of Chaos Theory) around 1960 in the otherwise unremarkable The Sundered Worlds (The Blood Red Game). In fact Moorcock has contributed so many fundamental ideas to the fantasy and graphic novel genres, as well as to the general literary world and the scientific world that it's a wonder he isn't claiming copyright fees off half the stuff that's out there. This was probably the first fully-fledged space-time opera comedy and it's easy to see why Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett admired it so much. Some of these ideas even turned up in Douglas Adams's Doctor Who stories (check them out!). It has been Moorcock's lot to be a seminal force in our modern culture and to have other people get the credit! I doubt if this bothers him much since he is so inventive he probably doesn't have time to brood on it, but I have been reading him for a long time now and it really is astonishing how many ideas he's had which are now in common use and part of the language. This is one of his most joyous series, celebrating the styles of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley and as well as being outstanding science fiction (about the nature of time and identity) it is a loving homage to the fin-de-siecle.
Gosh, Moorcock, I wish I'd said that. You will, Adams. You will. Unreservedly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Delicious and original
Review: Most people don't know Moorcock invented the Multiverse. That is he invented the concept (along with the idea of black holes and a fair bit of Chaos Theory) around 1960 in the otherwise unremarkable The Sundered Worlds (The Blood Red Game). In fact Moorcock has contributed so many fundamental ideas to the fantasy and graphic novel genres, as well as to the general literary world and the scientific world that it's a wonder he isn't claiming copyright fees off half the stuff that's out there. This was probably the first fully-fledged space-time opera comedy and it's easy to see why Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett admired it so much. Some of these ideas even turned up in Douglas Adams's Doctor Who stories (check them out!). It has been Moorcock's lot to be a seminal force in our modern culture and to have other people get the credit! I doubt if this bothers him much since he is so inventive he probably doesn't have time to brood on it, but I have been reading him for a long time now and it really is astonishing how many ideas he's had which are now in common use and part of the language. This is one of his most joyous series, celebrating the styles of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley and as well as being outstanding science fiction (about the nature of time and identity) it is a loving homage to the fin-de-siecle.
Gosh, Moorcock, I wish I'd said that. You will, Adams. You will. Unreservedly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Filth Hounds of Hades, the man's a genius
Review: Not only one of Michael's finest moments, but quite simply a landmark in Science Fiction/Fantasy. I am not in any way exaggerating when I say that I had an out-of-body experience upon finishing The End Of All Songs (Book 3) - such is the level of transcendence that this epic work generates. The implications of Dancers are so vast and numerous that it makes your head spin, but even as a fairly linear allegory, it is right on the button. The main characters live in a far future world, where the level of technology borders on magic, allowing them to create virtually any reality with their power rings. Yet the technology is the product of earlier generations, of whom the remaining race are mostly unaware - recalling Prospero's line to Miranda (from The Tempest) "Canst thou remember a time before we came unto this cell?" Big Mike likens these artificially sustained beings to a collection of hothouse flowers, which are kept alive by "an alien heat" (Wratislaw?) The parallels with Earth Now and the direction in which post Industrial Revolution humanity has been heading are chilling, however humorously expressed. High entropy, energy-wasting civilizations have become so disconnected from the Earth Mother that it may only be a matter of time before some T2-style AI-triggered GigaDeath apocalypse sweeps the board clean. In his Moorcockian epic Finnegans Wake, James Joyce used paradoxically structured anarchic language in an attempt to overload the reader's dominant Left Brain and trigger Transcendence. Moorcock manages to achieve the same Above Time perspective by infinitely more conventional means, yet the effect is the same. Union. Oneness. Return. If this breathtakingly beautiful classic doesn't blow your mind, check your pulse... maybe you're already dead. Utterly majestic.
Rating:
Summary: If you only read Elric, then read this...
Review: The "Eternal Champion" series has proven to be a valuable addition to the Moorcock collection. If you never rummaged through used book stores, then you would have never read all Moorcock has to offer. In 'Dancers' you get a comedy that reads like a sit-com on LSD. As previously stated, the prose flows with wit and adds entertaining jabs at English arrogance and religious fanatics. The colorful cast of characters are kept very true thoughout the three stories. I found it immensely entertaining to try to anticipate how the cast of characters would reunite (as they always do.) I had a hard time getting started, but could not stop reading after the first story.
Rating: 
Summary: A fun and bizarre (even for Moorcock) set of stories
Review: The Dancers at the End of Time takes some effort to get into, but once you adapt to the lifestyle of the future (millions of years) it settles into another outstanding bit of writing. These stories are Moorcock's tribute to Wilde and other writers from the late 19th century. Our hero and time traveler visits this period, after falling in love with a woman from the 1890's who is inadvertantly brought through time. Dancers doesn't lack for plot. It starts as one man's desire to find out about the emotion of love, develops into a quest for the woman he loves, and ends up with the dissolution of the universe and the attempts of man to save earth from destruction. You can expect strange characters from Moorcock and there are plenty to sample from here. All in all very satisfying, and a nice look at the adaptability of humanity to conditions and emotions.
Rating:
Summary: Romantic Comedy
Review: There is no denying that Michael Moorcock is an inventive writer. I've only started to read his work recently, starting with that irreverent novel about Jesus "Behold the Man", the peripatetic adventures concerning Elric, and now "Dancers At the End of Time". This series of books is set in a future well beyond our own time. For Jherek Carnelian and the rest of his kind, our world is so far in the past (hundreds of thousands of millenia in the past) that history and Hollywood, fiction and fact have blurred together. Moorcock takes us so far into the future that "sand" on a beach is actually crushed bone, and characters behave in ways which would shock even the most open-minded people of our own society. In Jherek Carnelian's society it is impossible for anyone to feel shock. No one is encumbered with the conventions and standards which we in our own time feel obliged to live by. In the future life is one long game without rules, a fairground in which to indulge. Death is practically an obsolete notion. Sounds like heaven on Earth, doesn't it? As space and time are no longer barriers, it wouldn't surprise me if another time traveller like Karl Glogauer had gone into the past and "implanted" the concept of heaven - the misinterpreted promise that all the misery and suffering, the turmoil and deprivation, would eventually be rewarded with everlasting life and blissful harmony. All in exchange for clean living and a lot of faith. This would have been a cruel trick for a time traveller to play, even if it wasn't intentional. In the early 20th century Marcel Duchamp once declared that anyone can be an artist. In Jherek's time everyone is an artist, able to create their own environments to whatever specifications they desire, alter their bodily appearance whenever the whim takes them, and build menageries filled with specimans culled from anywhere and anywhen. Jherek has a fondness for anything associated with his favourite period the 19th century. When it comes to nostalgia past eras are best loved by those who never experienced them. It's like someone obsessed with Robin Hood holding a romantic view of the Middle Ages. One object of beauty coveted by Jherek is the elegant Mrs Amelia Underwood. Much of Moorcock's story concerns Jherek's attempts to win the heart of Amelia Underwood in a series of well-intentioned gestures and temporal wanderings. I don't want to say too much more than that, but rest assured, it's an eventful ride. Sometimes it's hard to keep track of what the characters look like as they keep changing their appearance, but just hang in there. When Jherek pursues Amelia in 1896 he's like the proverbial fish out of water. You won't be disappointed.
| 
