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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
Collection of Moorcock's earlier short stories,
This review is from: Dying for Tomorrow (Paperback)
`Dying for Tomorrow' (192 pp., DAW Book No. 282, 1978) first appeared in Britain in 1976 as `Moorcock's Book of Martyrs'. The striking cover illustration is by Michael Whelan.
`Dying' collects 7 short stories that appeared in print earlier in Moorcock's writing career, during the 60s, and 70s, in SF magazines such as 'New Worlds'. In the first story, `A Dead Singer', a burnt-out roadie named Mo drives the back roads of Britain in a camper van; his meanderings are spurred by a foreboding assortment of recreational drugs, and Mo's conviction that Jimi Hendrix, returned from the dead, is traveling alongside him in the van. The story perfectly captures the undertones of self-indulgence and self-destruction that accompanied much of the excess of the hippie era, and the advent of the early 70s and their disturbing hints of 'Clockwork Orange' culture. The next entry, `The Greater Conqueror', is a routine sword and sorcery tale about a mercenary named Simon caught up a battle between occult forces for good and evil in the era of Alexander the Great. Moorcock's best-known short story is `Behold the Man', in which a neurotic British Jew named Karl Glogauer travels in a time machine to the Palestine of 28 AD. To Glogauer's chagrin, no one has heard of a great prophet from Nazareth named Jesus. Trapped by his own subconscious desire, the man from the future finds himself cast as a Prophet in his own right....'Behold' remains a provocative and well-crafted examination of the intersection of history, myth and religion more than 40 years after its first appearance. `Good-bye, Miranda' is a short (three page) tale of a girl haunted by a rejected suitor. `Flux' is a sardonic retelling of the H. G. Wells classic tale `The Time Machine'. In a near-future European Union facing economic and social collapse, the multi-skilled genius Max File is sent 10 years into the future to try and divine where things went wrong, and how calamity may be prevented. Unfortunately time travel is a tricky business, and Max soon finds himself going farther in space and time than he ever expected.... `Islands' is an unconvincing story about a schizophrenic young man who seems to experience multiple possible existences simultaneously in time. Whatever thin plot the story possesses is lost under wordy speculation about the Nature of Reality. `Waiting for the End of Time' is a very New Wave-ish tale of the last pair of humans on the last city on the last planet in the galaxy, on the last day before the implosion of the galactic center eliminates all life and matter. There is much metaphysical prose. Like so many New Wave stories that tried to present existential angst as Art, it hasn't aged well. In summary, `Dying for Tomorrow' contains a few memorable tales, but on the whole, this collection confirms that Moorcock's best efforts at fiction tend to be in the novel-length format. For Moorcock completists only.
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