Anti-Tolkien : an article about Moorcock

Interesting.
I forgot how much I loved the first six books as a teen.

I was totally hooked on Elric, Count Brass etc when I was younger. Since then, I've tried to keep up with Moorcock and love his surreal Dancers at the End of Time series amongst many others.

If you've never read Moorcock then you are definitely missing out.

Good article, thanks.

I still have my daw paperbacks of elric. I read them every few years to remind me that fantasy isn't a trite cliché.

ThirstyMan wrote: I was totally hooked on Elric, Count Brass etc when I was younger. Since then, I've tried to keep up with Moorcock and love his surreal Dancers at the End of Time series amongst many others.

If you've never read Moorcock then you are definitely missing out.

I've never read them! But I went with Donaldson as the anti tolkien and loved those. Well, of course he fucked the whole series up with the ill advised final quadrilogy recently completed.
I will look out for Moorcock

I've tried to read Donaldson's stuff but it's so fucking turgid. It's like wading through treacle. I got about halfway through the first book and then it went back on the shelf.

Also the antihero is a dick with no redeeming features.

I'm also always on the lookout for Moorcock

Tolkien and Moorcock have one thing in common: they both have a knack for coming up with good names. People, places, races, creatures, everything has good names.

Tolkien had a big impact on me at a crucial time, drawing me away from the Star Wars hoopla and setting me up for my first encounter with Dungeons & Dragons. But I haven't re-read The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings since I was 14, because even at the time I was impatient with the pacing of his books. In particular, I often found the long descriptions of meals and the elven poetry as reasons to skim ahead a few pages in search of something interesting. Ultimately, Tolkien tells a decent story with The Hobbit, but the rest of his writing reads more like it was written by a historian than a storyteller.

Moorcock did some amazing work, along with a lot of crap. The first six Elric books are epic-level amazing, and the next two are at least interesting. The von Bek books are generally very good, and so are the Corum books. The Hawkmoon books have some neat ideas, but they are fairly bad and were written very quickly just for some quick cash for Moorcock. The Jerry Cornelius books are wildly experimental, deeply weird, and not particularly enjoyable. Most of what Moorcock has written in the last 25 years has been slow-paced and more down to earth. Personally, I prefer the wild god-slaying and world-ending adventures of the Elric series over most other fantasy books.

In terms of legacy, Tolkien left us with a collection of fantasy stereotypes that are almost set in stone. Magic items, good vs evil, typical elves, typical dwarves, orcs, etc. Moorcock's lasting contribution was the idea of Law vs Chaos as a more interesting conflict than Good vs Evil. Elric should have gotten a movie or three by now, but maybe he is too tough a sell for average movie-goers. Elric is essentially the anti-Conan. Instead of a big, tan, macho barbarian who eventually takes the throne, Elric is a sickly albino sorceror from a degenerate elder race. Instead of taking a throne, he voluntarily gives it up to his worst enemy so he can wander off and do his own thing. Instead of saving the world, Elric purposefully destroys it. Oh, and he has a really cool magic sword. It's solid black, sentient, evil, encrusted with powerful mystic runes, and steals souls, converting them into strength and energy for Elric and the sword itself.

ThirstyMan wrote: I've tried to read Donaldson's stuff but it's so fucking turgid. It's like wading through treacle. I got about halfway through the first book and then it went back on the shelf.

Also the antihero is a dick with no redeeming features.

haha, maybe the redeeming features came in the final 5.5 of the 6 books

I know what you mean about his writing style though, he's an openly unapologetic thesauraus vomiter but I think you missed out by not pushing on with the 2nd and 3d book. The second trilogy was a real kick in the nuts and I didnt care for the fucking tired love angle bullshit but I still enjoyed them. The third trilogy which became 4 books is absolutely fucking abysmal.

I'm surprised the fact that the hero was a bit of a cynical dick wasn't listed as a plus point for you, for me, I thought it was great, of course then he teams up with the big gay bear of a giant as a counterpoint and they get along just dandy. Some fucking great characters in there though, the Bloodguard were basically Mr Spock crossed with Jason Bourne clones, the Lords were better dressed Gandalfs, the giants fucking rocked, the Urviles (Vain!), the sandgorgon Nom! and those fucking Ravers were tremendous, even if Lord Foul was a basically Sauron and the Ravers the ringwraiths, the Donaldson versions were a lot more badass. Also there was a fantastic allegorical parallel of his own experience of leprosy and his characters denial of the Land as real which of course the author later made unambiguous (error). Ah, I think you missed out on some awesome characters and a great story dude, I just got used to skipping over the stupid adjectives and looking them up later if I could be arsed and couldn't work out what they probably meant at the time

I read a lot of Donaldson when I still read fiction, and all his main characters are the same -- they refuse to act. They see themselves as victims, as impotent and afraid. It's not until you've endured 1200 pages of woe is me that you get some level of respite. Given that the author clearly states that he was a conciencious objector in each of his bios I started to get the feeling that he was writing to justify his own decisions earlier in life, and had real issues with them. I left one of his books on a train, three-fourths read because the heroine (rape victim of course) was still too timid to do something. I couldn't take it anymore.

Hile Troy -- there's a character you can get behind. Wasn.t always right, wasn't always sure of himself, but he wasn't pathologically indecisive and timid.

As for Elric, great concept, a bit episodic in nature. It was a monthly-installment story so I suppose that makes sense. A lot of Elric's motivations are kind of presented as a list without solid justification in the stories. Worth a read but not on the scale of Tolkien or even Donaldson. Great concept though. I liked Una Perrson and Catherine Cornelius better, again because the concepts are just more intellectually interesting.

Tolkien's writing is richer than either of those two, and more technically correct. He's the only author I've read that got the phases of the Moon correct. He writes a 40 page meeting and makes it work. No one else has done that.

S.

Sagrilarus wrote: A lot of Elric's motivations are kind of presented as a list without solid justification in the stories.

Interesting observation, but it suits the character. Elric is more of a philosopher than a conventional adventurer. He is attracted to concepts, ideals, and abstractions, despite his cynicism. So he often commits extreme, even appalling acts because he is able to rationalize them. He is often cold when others would be warm, and yet can become passionate about a concept. And once his intellect has fixated on an idea, nothing is out of bounds. He will summon monsters, torture a prisoner, even betray his entire race, all out of his idiosyncratic sense of justice. His good friends tried to help him out of loyalty, but that black sword was a wicked influence. Moorcock's talent (aside from creating fantastic adventures of high fantasy) was to get the reader to like Elric and support his actions. And because the adventures revolved around battles between Law and Chaos, there was no easy recourse to a lesser evil defense of Elric's actions.

As for Stephen Donaldson, I suggest giving this show a chance:

www.fantasybedtimehour.com/

Fuck Michael Moorcock. Everything I've read about his criticisms on other writers tells me he's a wannabe asshole. He thinks he can be dismissive of J. R. R. Tolkien's and C. S. Lewis,' works, like he's even remotely close to their level of importance in the fantasy writing genre. This arrogant fuckface once compared The Lord of the Rings to Winnie-the-Pooh. He wrote his signature character Elric to be the antithesis of Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian. The difference is Conan is distilled manly awesomeness is Elric is an albino emo faggot.

I really can't hate on Michael Moorcock enough. I hope he gets anally raped by Gollum in the fires of Mt. Doom.

That's really not that deep of an article. All it basically says is Moorcock doesn't really like Tolkien, which isn't really all that illuminating if you've read anything by Moorcock. The first time I tried to read Elric, I really couldn't get into it. But I think it was because the books were organized by storyline chronology. I just finished reading the more recently published volume Stealer of Souls which holds to the publication chronology and includes several notes and letters by Moorcock.

I don't think you have to prefer one over the other. I enjoy both for different reasons. I agree Tolkien reads more like a historical account than fiction, but I kind of like that. I really enjoy The Silmarillion and how it feels like trying to pick up a book of Greek myths. But I don't really care much for Tolkien's elvish poetry in LOTR, but I think the songs in The Hobbit are great.

I really like where Moorcock is coming from with Elric though. When my group started getting interested in playing the DCC RPG I read through the rulebook and the include an appendix of non-Tolkien stuff that really influenced the game design and Gygax as well. I like Moorcock's 1960's rock n roll psychedelic rebellion fantasy. It's fun in it's own way.

Yeah I like both, I definitely prefer Tolkien and am more fonder of his works, but at the same time I wish LOTR wasn't the genre-defining piece of work that it is. I wish more authors were experimenting with fantasy like they were doing in the '60s and '70s rather than the homogenization fantasy became in the '80s.

Applejack wrote: albino emo faggot.

Is this supposed to be an insult?

Is being gay, albino and sensitive, now something to despise? Good luck with the homophobia dude, it relegates your other comments to worthlessness.

(Fucking WASPs, I hate 'em)

ThirstyMan wrote: Is this supposed to be an insult?

Is being gay, albino and sensitive, now something to despise? Good luck with the homophobia dude, it relegates your other comments to worthlessness.

(Fucking WASPs, I hate 'em)

I've said it before, I am gay. I have a boyfriend I kiss on the mouth and everything. And I still use the word 'faggot' as a general insult. I use Louis C. K.'s take on the word.



'Albino' and 'emo' are just descriptive.

So that justifies your use of, generally considered, homophobic words?

Brilliant. I always wondered why there is tediously slow progression of gay rights in the US. Now I know.

You keep using whatever offensive words you want because, hey, you're 'allowed to' because Louis CK says it's OK.