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| White Wolf 1998, Art: Tom Canty |
In the early 1970s, Michael Moorcock developed several major sequences, each of them exploring a different literary genre and style of approach (although astute readers could see that they were all still part of the ever-expanding Moorcock multiverse). These include the "Eternal Champion" cycle (comprised of the heroic fantasy epics of Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum and Erekosë), the "Cornelius Chronicles" (20th-century science-fantasy satires executed with an unconventional, fearless approach to narrative and structure), the "Nomad of Time" series (geopolitical fables served with romantic "steampunk" trimmings) and the beginnings of a series of somewhat brutal novels exploring the political "mishaps" of the first half of European 20th-century history (Breakfast in the Ruins, Byzantium Endures, etc.). However, this period also saw the creation of the "Dancers at the End of Time" series, one of Moorcock's most delightful and accessible creations. This series is a highly witty modern take on the satirical literature of the late Victorian era.
"This book, a particular favourite of mine, is my homage to the inspired dandyism of our fin-de-siècle, to The Savoy, The Yellow Book, Beardsley, Beerbohm, Dawson, Whistler, Harland and, of course, Oscar Wilde. I had a passion for Wilde and Firbank in my late teens."
- MM, Introduction to The Dancers at the End of Time Omnibus 1993
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| Harper & Row 1973, 1974, 1976, Art: Irving Freeman, Mark Rubin, Randall Richmond |
The main Dancers trilogy is comprised of the books An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands and The End of All Songs (although several short stories taking place in the same universe also appeared before the final volume's publication and were ultimately collected as Legends From the End of Time, described in the next chapter). Essentially a love story, these three books follow the exploits of a cheerful dilettante named Jherek Carnelian, who lives in a far future Earth where technology has given the remaining inhabitants of Earth (roughly a couple dozen people) immortality and near-omnipotence. Because this gift eliminates any need for "struggle", the only thing the residents of this utopia fear is boredom and ennui. Thus, the "Dancers" spend all of their time putting on attention-getting parties (usually in themes attempting to play on distorted memories of Earth's past) and taking on outlandish appearances in order to impress each other in games of one-upmanship.
This kind of fetishistic competition comes across somewhat as an exaggerated depiction of European "high society", but without the bitter snobbery. There is plenty of drama and artifice, but everything is given (and received) in good humor. The Dancers At the End of time are petty, melodramatic and jaded, but also very witty and endearing. Jherek in particular is a unique member of End of Time society in that of all the Dancers, he is the only one born out of sexual intercourse, rather than created through technology and/or whimsy. Perhaps for this reason, Jherek is especially good-hearted and even relatively sincere in his airs. In contrast, Jherek’s best friend the enigmatic Lord Jagged frequently seems to have ulterior motives behind his every move...
"The characters in Dancers at the End of Time are, in fact, the ultimate in transhumanism — they are immortal, pretty much omnipotent — and not unhappy. All such stories before were essentially dystopian, saying 'you can be immortal, without pain or hunger — but such conditions make you ultimately miserable.' I wanted to write a story in which such people were actually pretty cheerful. That does include Jherek, of course. Even the miserable characters are only pretending to suffer."
- H+ Magazine, 2013
In addition to the human characters, visitors from other periods of time and other
planets also circulate and, as "straight men", their differing viewpoints act
as foils to highlight the antics of the Dancers. Amusement also comes from the Dancers’ misinterpretation (or distorted recollection) of Earth’s historical past. For example, Jherek fuels his flying locomotive with diamonds rather than coal; “Queens, New York” is remembered as a resort area designed for the King of New York’s concubine; "Billy the Kid" is remembered as a half-man half-goat creature, etc. While the Bastable stories took a turn-of-the-century narrator and projected him into speculative “modern eras” (1941, 1971), the Dancers use faulty history to project backwards to roughly the same time period. Both approaches lead to interesting and amusing distortions.
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| Avon 1977-78, Art: Stanislaw Fernandes |
The main plot is triggered by the mysterious sudden appearance of Mrs. Amelia Underwood, a socially-upright, somewhat repressed Christian woman from the London of 1896. During the main trilogy, Jherek attempts to win Mrs. Underwood's affections, following her back through time to 1896 as well as to much more exotic time periods. Hanging above this character melodrama is an "apocalypse" threat in which mysterious forces (most notably Jherek's friend Lord Jagged) work behind the scenes, moving characters back and forth through time and space like chess pieces.
Much of the charm (and hilarity) found in the books is sparked by the interactions of Mrs. Underwood with the innocently-amoral denizens of the End of Time, as well as the reverse (as exemplified in the interactions of the fearlessly-naive Jherek with the socially-stratified citizens of late 19th-century England). Many of Moorcock's works comment on society's foibles to one degree or another, and the Dancers Trilogy is no exception. However, in this series neither the past nor the future are spared a good bit of poking. Although the End of Time is portrayed as a worry-free utopia, Mrs. Underwood's criticisms of their unproductive dalliances are never truly countered, and in fact the Dancers' "final fate" is essentially to live in a self-acknowledged "social rut", but one in which they are very comfortable in. On the other hand, Jherek's innocent questioning of some of the repressive, self-inhibiting practices of the late-Victorian era also forces Amelia to own up to the weakness and hypocrisy of her own society.
"What I did was to employ two forms I enjoy: the comedy of manners as written by George Meredith, say, or for that matter PG Wodehouse, where the emphasis is on human error and misunderstanding; combined with an ironic version of science fiction melodrama, in which the exaggerated images do what the thunderstorms do in Wuthering Heights. Actually, An Alien Heat is closer to Pride and Prejudice than it is to Wuthermg Heights. There are no big deaths, no melodramas— it can’t be proper melodrama because there’s nothing to lose. Nobody is going to die or even be seriously hurt…I was hugely occupied then with late Victorian and Edwardian writing — not just Wells, and Shaw, but minor writers like W. Pett Ridge, and magazines and newspapers…The Dancers at the End of Time is an homage, if you like, to Wells, but also to that whole period."
- MM, 1990 interview with Colin Greenland, Death Is No Obstacle (1992)
In the 1990s omnibus editions of The Dancers At the End of Time, Moorcock uses the introduction to make a dedication to Grant Allen, author of the 1895 novel The British Barbarians (a book
which Moorcock had read only after he had already completed writing the Dancers
sequence). Like Moorcock's own accounts of Jherek Carnelian's anachronism-twisted exploits
in London, Allen's novel is "surprisingly robust, an urbane fantasy
involving a visitor from the future encountering the baffling mores and
superstitions of its day."
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| Ace 1987-88, Art: Robert Gould |
In this first volume of the Dancers At the End of Time Trilogy, Jherek
Carnelian, a well-regarded connoisseur of ancient 19th-century history, becomes
smitten with Mrs. Amelia Underwood, a suburban housewife of 1896 mysteriously transported to
Jherek's far-future era. When Mrs. Underwood is sent back to her own time by
one of Jherek's rivals, Jherek follows and discovers that life in 1896 is
much more confusing than he had first assumed. Naturally, the most charming
parts of this book occur when Moorcock describes Mrs. Underwood's reactions to
the End of Time, and then Jherek's exploits amongst the Dickensian, socially-repressed world of 1896 London. However, the saga of Jherek and Amelia's
impossible romance is also delectable in its own way (and at the end the reader is
left wanting for more of Jherek and Amelia's interactions).
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| Mayflower 1974-76, Art: Bob Haberfield (1, 2), Rodney Matthews (3) |
In the second volume, Jherek returns to 1896 a second time in further pursuit
of his lost, ideal love, Mrs. Amelia Underwood (of Bromley in Kent). Along the way Jherek meets the real-life writer "H.G. Wells"
as well as Amelia's prissy husband Harold Underwood (who turns out to be even sterner and
more forbidding of a Christian that Amelia herself). Additionally, Jherek also
faces off with piratical alien musicians, a mad robot nursemaid, and a squad of
Britain's "finest" constables. In contrast to the first volume,
The Hollow Lands has Jherek and Amelia spending more time together, as they end up as "fugitives" from proper English society. It is at this point
that Amelia's preconceptions and programmed prejudices truly begin to
crack.
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| Vortex #1, 2 (Jan, Feb 1977), Art: James Cawthorn |
In the beginning of this final volume, Jherek and Amelia find themselves stranded in Earth's Paleozoic era, the only inhabitants of an unspoiled, trilobite-dominated planet. Fortunately, a few time travellers eventually appear and the action returns to the End of Time, just in time for an actual "end of time" to occur. Fortunately, Jherek's mysterious friend Lord Jagged manages to manipulate events so that some kind of future can survive, and the final third of the book is dedicated to resolving the final fate of Jherek and Mrs. Amelia Underwood in a domestic melodrama. Compared to the previous two books, The End of All Songs features quite a bit of character development for both Jherek Carnelian and Mrs. Underwood.
More detailed synopses/analyses of these three books can be accessed from the link at the bottom of this page.
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| James Cawthorn (frontispiece) 1972 |
The final book also gives rise to an intersection with the Nomad of Time and Cornelius books. A couple key characters from those series (Oswald Bastable and Mrs. Una Persson) show up early on and help clear up a few things about the nature of time and the multiverse (although the End of Time series stands on its own, it's even more enjoyable after having read the Nomad volume The Steel Tsar, as Bastable and Una's adventures here continue from their exploits in that book). Some of Mrs. Persson's pronouncements also tie the events affecting the End of Time with Corum's world during the events of the "Conjunction of the Million Spheres" mentioned in the "Swords Trilogy".
In the Eternal Champion books, this Conjunction is portrayed as some kind of multiversal upheaval in which the barriers in between the various planes of the multiverse have thinned out, allowing characters from one series to meet characters from another. However, the exact nature of the Conjunction is never really explained. In the final Dancers book, (The End of All Songs), Una Persson proposes a theory in which the Conjunction of the Million Spheres is an event which occurs when the number of distinct planes comprising the multiverse reaches a maximum threshold, after which a Conjunction is required to "clean house", so to speak. Moorcock purposely leaves this "reorganization" as a metaphorical concept, but from a digital standpoint, I can conceptualize this multiverse Conjunction as a kind of hard drive "defragmentation" - that is, dead space is bunched together into connective territory so that storage can be made more efficient. More specifically to the multiverse concept, I imagine that "dead" universes (such as those that have degenerated in states of total entropy/chaos) are discarded to make room for new planes of possibility.
Although there's no direct evidence to support this, I like to think that the great battle between the four Eternal Champions with the extra-multiversal alien invaders Agak and Gagak in 1975's The Quest For Tanelorn may also be involved with the Conjunction, due to the drastic effects of that conflict on the multiverse as a whole (come to think of it, the apocalyptic ending to A Cure For Cancer also may be related...).
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| Gollancz 2003, Art: Steve Stone |
Here are a few other "tie-ins" to the greater Moorcock mythos:
- The time machine which Karl Glogauer used in Behold the Man is used here for a couple journeys. A "Sergeant Glogauer" also appears as a staff member at one of the Time Centres in the Paleozoic Era.
- Professor Faustaff (from The Wrecks of Time) is also mentioned as a member of the Guild of Temporal Adventurers.
- In The End of All Songs, an unnamed "Time Traveller" appears. His time machine is the one described in H.G. Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine. Since in Jherek and Amelia's reality H.G. Wells is an English writer and The Time Machine is a work of fiction, this incarnation of the fictional Time Traveller is explained as being from another plane of the multiverse (just as Oswald Bastable is likely from a different plane).
- A few chapter titles may or may not be word-plays on other Moorcock novel titles. For example, "The Quest For Bromley" (An Alien Heat) may be a play on The Quest For Tanelorn. "The Children of the Pit" (The Hollow Lands) may be a play on The Masters of the Pit. "Some Confusion Concerning the Exact Nature of the Catastrophe" (The End of All Songs) recalls the title of the Jerry Cornelius anthology The Nature of the Catastrophe.
- In The Hollow Lands, the robot Nurse describes some memories ("oceans of light", etc.) which echo the "Prologue" texts of the Corum books (both the "Swords" Trilogy and the "Chronicles" Trilogy)
- The verse of the fictional poet Ernest Wheldrake (a nom-de-plume of Swinburne's) is featured in these books, particularly in The End of All Songs, where Moorcock has Mrs. Underwood and Lord Jagged engage in a beautifully-crafted duel of literary inferences. Versions of Wheldrake himself appear in Moorcock's Gloriana (1978) and the later period Elric novel The Revenge of the Rose (1991).
- Doubtless, there are many more examples like the above to be discovered by the astute reader.
As mentioned earlier, these are often cited as some of Moorcock's most accessible works, and one can see these books appealing to a broader audience beyond the core heroic fantasy and science fiction crowd. The tone is light, but the wit is razor sharp. It's also worth mentioning that familiarity with H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and Moorcock's Nomads of Time trilogy adds another level to the enjoyment of this series (although in my first reading of this series I hadn't yet read those books, and that circumstance did not in any way blunt my enjoyment of these books).
This excellent review
of the Dancers At the End of Time series by Andrew Darlington (at Eight
Miles Higher) is also recommended reading for more analysis.
Next Chapter: Tales From the End of Time
Previous Chapter: Oswald Bastable: A Nomad of Time (1971-81)
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| MacGibbon & Kee 1972 (1st Printing) |
