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smiorganbaldhead's review against another edition
4.0
This is the weirdest novel I’ve ever read, confusing throughout, and somehow I still really enjoyed it. The setting feels like a dream (or hallucination), where everything is bizarre and mostly left unexplained. At first it appears to be an alternate history story, where the dominate group in America are the descendants of African people, while Europeans are oppressed. However the dreamlike nature of the story shows in details like the Black main characters having European-sounding names and often speaking in fragments of French and Spanish, despite one of them musing that all European languages sound the same to him. And that element is among the least weird in this story, which features the cyborg insectoid (I think) machinoix, something called “meat boats,” and riverboat gamblers who play games involving the manipulation of histories of simulated universes. The writing style also conveys this weirdness, as there some sometimes sudden shifts from third person to first person, past to tense to present, chapters set in another dimension written in a campy pulp style, and a chapter written like a play script. I’m still not really sure what happened, or why I liked it anyway. However, I wouldn’t recommend this book for readers new to Moorcock’s work.
arthurbdd's review
2.0
Moorcock seems to be under the impression that coming up with brand new quirks for the metaphysics and cosmology of his multiverse is enough to support a novel by itself. He is incorrect. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/2014/02/08/the-white-wolfs-rehash/
smcleish's review
3.0
Originally published on my blog here in August 2003.
When Moorcock began writing his vast collection of tales about multiple universes and the battle between Law and Chaos, there was no such discipline as chaos theory. Blood is the novel (first of a trilogy) in which he seeks to use ideas from the mathematics of chaos, particularly self-similarity and attractors, to add to his earlier ideas.
Blood purports to be part of a collection of manuscripts inherited by Moorcock, which (says the introduction) at first seemed disjointed and unconnected but whose overall coherence was eventually perceptible. The two main threads that Moorcock presents are a bizarre fantasy set in the American South and a parody of pulp-era space opera. The fantasy takes up by far the majority of the narrative, and is reminiscent of [a:J.G. Ballard|2889561|J.G. Ballard|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1254084247p2/2889561.jpg]'s apocalyptic science fiction. Civilisation as we know it has been changed dramatically by the appearance of pockets of physical chaos around the world; they can be used to provide power, and reckless drilling has spread their dangerous subversion of physical law. Most of the people who remain live as best they can, but there are some, the elite Gamblers, who spend their lives pitted against one another in complex games of chance and metaphysics.
The space opera sections are less serious, and are about a great struggle across the multiverse between two factions, the Chaos Engineers and the Singularity; most of the weapons and mechanisms of travel described have connections to fractals and chaos theory.
Most of Moorcock's writing seems influenced mainly by his ideas about the science fiction and fantasy genres as a whole, and by the writers he loved in his formative years. Blood is, as far as I know, unique in his output in seeming to show influences which are more individual and recent - [a:Morris|8127|William Morris|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1346602401p2/8127.jpg] rather than [a:Banks|7628|Iain Banks|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1304977070p2/7628.jpg] and [a:Howard|66700|Robert E. Howard|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1210954603p2/66700.jpg], [a:Banks|7628|Iain Banks|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1304977070p2/7628.jpg] rather than [a:Peake|22018|Mervyn Peake|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1341040504p2/22018.jpg]. The space opera sections have a more general influence. The style of the novel is opaque, quite difficult to see the meaning, similar to but more successful than John Clute's [b:Appleseed|1575722|Appleseed|John Clute|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1312030485s/1575722.jpg|2300287]. It doesn't all work, but Blood is an interesting experiment.
When Moorcock began writing his vast collection of tales about multiple universes and the battle between Law and Chaos, there was no such discipline as chaos theory. Blood is the novel (first of a trilogy) in which he seeks to use ideas from the mathematics of chaos, particularly self-similarity and attractors, to add to his earlier ideas.
Blood purports to be part of a collection of manuscripts inherited by Moorcock, which (says the introduction) at first seemed disjointed and unconnected but whose overall coherence was eventually perceptible. The two main threads that Moorcock presents are a bizarre fantasy set in the American South and a parody of pulp-era space opera. The fantasy takes up by far the majority of the narrative, and is reminiscent of [a:J.G. Ballard|2889561|J.G. Ballard|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1254084247p2/2889561.jpg]'s apocalyptic science fiction. Civilisation as we know it has been changed dramatically by the appearance of pockets of physical chaos around the world; they can be used to provide power, and reckless drilling has spread their dangerous subversion of physical law. Most of the people who remain live as best they can, but there are some, the elite Gamblers, who spend their lives pitted against one another in complex games of chance and metaphysics.
The space opera sections are less serious, and are about a great struggle across the multiverse between two factions, the Chaos Engineers and the Singularity; most of the weapons and mechanisms of travel described have connections to fractals and chaos theory.
Most of Moorcock's writing seems influenced mainly by his ideas about the science fiction and fantasy genres as a whole, and by the writers he loved in his formative years. Blood is, as far as I know, unique in his output in seeming to show influences which are more individual and recent - [a:Morris|8127|William Morris|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1346602401p2/8127.jpg] rather than [a:Banks|7628|Iain Banks|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1304977070p2/7628.jpg] and [a:Howard|66700|Robert E. Howard|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1210954603p2/66700.jpg], [a:Banks|7628|Iain Banks|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1304977070p2/7628.jpg] rather than [a:Peake|22018|Mervyn Peake|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1341040504p2/22018.jpg]. The space opera sections have a more general influence. The style of the novel is opaque, quite difficult to see the meaning, similar to but more successful than John Clute's [b:Appleseed|1575722|Appleseed|John Clute|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1312030485s/1575722.jpg|2300287]. It doesn't all work, but Blood is an interesting experiment.
red_dog's review
4.0
A wonderful book, but one difficult to review (and probably read), especially for those not already inculcated in Moorcock's multiverse.
Think I might just pitch straight into Fabulous Harbours next...
Think I might just pitch straight into Fabulous Harbours next...
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