Scan barcode
psoglav's review
4.0
Great ending of Elric saga, 100% Moorcock gloomy style. Unlike Fortress of the Pearl and Revenge of the Rose, this novella is written more in the original Elric spirit, wit ha lot of sword and sorcery elements. Of course, twists of fate and Elric being just a pawn in some universe game are the spice that makes these stories different than the standard books of this genre.
After finishing the whole Elric book series, I have to agree with Moorcock saying that he has great ideas but not so good writing...
After finishing the whole Elric book series, I have to agree with Moorcock saying that he has great ideas but not so good writing...
luana420's review
5.0
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
sexton_blake's review
4.0
I’ve read Moorcock’s Eternal Champion novels multiple times in adulthood but, essentially, I associate them with my teens, which is when they made the greatest impression on me. Perhaps because Moorcock himself was barely out of his teens when he created Elric, the early stories of the series fizzle with unrestrained creativity and youthful energy. For sure, they lack the literary merit of the author’s later (astonishing) work, but they make up for it by immersing the reader in wildly exotic worlds, filled with mad gods possessed of inscrutable motives, and soaked through with a dark sense of unavoidable destinies. The “otherworldliness” is brilliantly realised. Where R. E. Howard’s Conan inhabits a bejewelled mythical past, Elric exists in what feels like a fluid manifestation of his own psyche. No part of his gloomy world is stable, and neither is he, occupying as he does a liminal position between good and evil, between Law and Chaos … and, of all his tales, his confused engagement with reality is best portrayed in STORMBRINGER, which brings his saga to a stunning conclusion (in retrospect, a premature one). It doesn’t surprise me at all that my first encounter with this novel was a pivotal moment of my rebellious youth. Now, halfway through my fifth decade, I don’t relate to Elric in the same way, but I can still appreciate his significance and the early incandescence of Moorcock’s talent. This edition from Gollancz makes the whole experience even better by supplementing the novel with plenty of extra material, essays, and a portfolio of art by Jim Cawthorn.
More...