Customer Reviews

An Alien Heat (Dancers at the End of Time : Book I)

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Ok, this book is not as good as the 2nd two of the trilogy, but it is necessary in order to introduce you to the setting and characters. Once the introduction is over the story flies along on a breathtaking, hilarious and outrageous rollercoaster love story ride that is totally different to anything else I have ever read.

I discovered M.Moorcock in the mid-70s. This was the first book of his I picked up (purely at random) and as a consequence I have been hooked on MM ever since. None of his other books quite realized the entertainment of the 'Dancers' series, although he wrote several sequals that come close.

Don't be put off by the early chapters. If you don't know what to expect, you may find it tough to understand what is happening, but once you have accepted the main characters it is very difficult to put these down.

Be prepared for some loud chuckling in case reading in public.

Les.

Millions of years from now Earths citizens can have whatever they wish whenever they wish. They can create and recreate matter at will, which has, in effect, destroyed their humanity. They value nothing and care for nothing. The words marriage, fidelity, shame, and morality mean nothing. Emotions are something that they attire themselves in to thrill their friends at dinner parties. Carnelian is a prince among princes in this future. A man who prides himself on his expertise in the area of 19th century history. A man who skips from one perfect day to the next. Until he meets Amelia, a time traveler from the 19th century who wants nothing to do with him and turns his whole world upside down.
I enjoyed this book on so many different levels. It is more than a `science fiction' novel.

I loved this story and found that reading it really got my imagination spinning. It's Moorcock, so it's not hard sf, and if you don't know what you're getting into (which I didn't), I can only let you know that this is an entertaining time travel story. The satire is on 19th century writing, I believe, and "what if" it were written in our age. So you get some really goofy dialog and conversations. Something I found interesting, is that this book was originally dedicated to the band Hawkwind...and lists each member including Lemmy! I've had limited exposure to steampunk, but I thought this might have been a precursor to it. Moorcock's "A Nomad of the Time Streams" is given more credit to steampunk. But what do I know. If you're looking for a fun, quick read...this is worth checking out. This is also sold as part of the complete "Dancers at the End of Time" trilogy.

This series is not for everyone. In this first book, Jherek Carnelian comes back from the end of time to Victorian England to court Mrs. Amelia Underwood.

Unfortunately things have changed so much by the end of time that he does not understand courtship, marriage, the use of the toilet (a small adjustment would take care of that issue, but Amelia refuses to be tampered with). Carnelian skips back and forth through time and space doing strange and childish things in pursuit of love while almost everyone else rejects his reality in pursuit of their own. If you can follow his strange point of view the story grows from entertainment to a hint of something profound.

Set during the twilight of history, when humanity has achieved a level of decadence that is scarcely comprehensible, Jherek Carnelian (a self-styled expert in ancient societies) decides to fall in love. Perversely, the object of his affections is a Mrs. Amelia Underwood, a woman who has unwittingly time-traveled there from 19th century Britain. That's the crux of this bizarre satiric fantasy. Much of the humor in this book involves the absurdities of this future human civilization and how these beings attempt to amuse themselves in a world where anything and everything is immediately at their disposal. And none of them have any hint of what is meant by "virtue". The most humorous parts of the book were those where Jerek displays his complete lack of understanding of the 19th century, all the while imagining that he's an expert on the subject, but if this is meant to be a satire of historians, it falls short.

Moorcock explains some of the science behind their "power rings" which enable them to process unlimited sources of broadcast energy to create or destroy anything they imagine, but it seems a stretch to call this a science fiction novel. The characters and the society they live in are all so foppish and decadent and yes, morally repugnant, that this reader found it impossible to care about them in the least. The second half of the book wasn't as bad as the first, but that first half was so tedious that this reviewer found wading through this 150-page novel extremely difficult; one found oneself making excuses not to go back to it. Moorcock has written further installments in this series, but someone would have to pay me to read them. This book actually put me off reading novels altogether for a while, but in the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that it was probably no worse than Tristam Shandy, which I couldn't stand either.

At the end of time, millions of years into our future, the people of planet Earth have changed. They have the ability to alter their environments at will, even the color of the sky, the weather, and geological formations. Their wardrobe consists of anything they want to conjure into existence or nothing at all. They can alter their appearance, to appear as an animal, an alien from another planet, or a human of the opposite sex. Speaking of sex, it is available at the drop of a hat, and your partner can be anyone who catches your fancy at the moment. Most shocking is the habit of the citizens of Earth to collect, not books, but sentient beings. Their favorites are space travelers and time travelers, whom they place in their menageries. Jherek Carnelian is one of these last surviving humans of Earth.
The book's title comes from a poem by Theodore Wratislaw, "Hothouse Flowers," "...flowers glass-hid from frosts and snows For whom an alien heat makes festival." Jherek is like a hothouse flower, so powerful and god-like in his own environment, yet innocent of the knowledge of right and wrong, evil and virtue, that could help him when he is faced with the world of his beloved Mrs. Amelia Underwood, unwilling time traveler from late 1800's England. I enjoyed this book.

The End of Time is a place that we would call decadent. To those that inhabit it, it is just normal. They are immortal, they can immense powers, and they can pretty much do anything they want. However, what they do mostly is get bored.

A time traveller from the late 19th century changes this, and Jherek Carnelian's relationship with this woman grow in ways he is not used to, or even sure he understands.