Michael Moorcock's Multiverse [Paperback]

Michael Moorcock (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Vertigo (November 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1563895161
• ISBN-13: 978-1563895166
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 6.7 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #927,903 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born in London in 1939, Michael Moorcock now lives in Texas. A prolific and award-winning writer with more than eighty works of fiction and non-fiction to his name, he is the creator of Elric, Jerry Cornelius and Colonel Pyat, amongst many other memorable characters.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Moorcock the Merrier, May 25, 2001

By 

"academon" (Bangor, Maine) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Michael Moorcock's Multiverse (Paperback)

This is a classic Moorcock irony, to bury much of the core material of his multiverse theories in a graphic novel. Where another might have written a philosophical text, or at very least a novel, Moorcock decided that the place to set out the fundamentals of his multiverse theories was in a monthly comic book (collected here without the letters and features, which is a pity). The final sequences are faultlessly coherent as they move towards the central redemption, showing how, why and where the Cosmic Balance is at last restored. And there's some wonderfully off-beat humor -- the vast battles which involve different types of music (rock and roll versus Andrew Lloyd Webber) -- the London trams on which the aliens arrive for the Final Game -- the introduction of Moorcock himself (and Walter Simonson -- here with his best work to date -- though his current Orion work is also superb -- maybe even better) into the stories as the game within a game within a game is played out. This is RPG for keeps! Great, stuff. Moorcock will hide the key to a theme in a rock and roll song, a comic book or a throw-away newspaper piece but sooner or later, if you read for long enough, you'll come across it -- or it won't matter, because sometimes you didn't even know there WERE answers to those questions. Or that the questions were there to be asked! Check out the WW2 Lancaster bomber crewed entirely by existentialist philosophers (including Wrongway Heidegger); check out the rhyming couplets frequently found in the dialogue. Read in conjunction with The War Amongst the Angels and the books in that sequence, this is the work of a brilliantly original mind as able to draw characters as he is able to come up with stunning scientific notions! Brain candy, maybe. Addictive, maybe. A bizarre stimulant, maybe. But nourishing, through and through. A metaphysical meal at Mr Moorcock's Terminal Cafe always leaves the customers satisfied!

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Zeitjugo- the mythical game of time, November 16, 2003

By 

OAKSHAMAN "oakshaman" (Algoma, WI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Michael Moorcock's Multiverse (Paperback)

To call this an ambitious project would be an understatement. That is because this is an attempt to express the totality of Moorcock's conception of the multiverse in graphic novel form. In other words, it describes not only our somewhat familiar universe, but also all possible universes. Not only that, but it describes them all, over the entire range of time, because as the author points out, all of time exists simultaneously. It is only human consciousness that organizes it in a linear or cyclic fashion. In fact, that is what the main protagonists of the story, the Chaos Engineers, do- they range the entire multiverse, upscale and downscale, in their living organic vessels. They do this in the service of complexity and diversity. They do this in opposition to their sworn eternal enemies the lords of sterile, dead, and static Order.

Now, operating on the margins of this great eternal conflict between Chaos and Order are the Jugadors, who are the Great Players who play the multiverse as a game- or is it as an instrument? They maintain the great dynamic equilibrium between Order and Chaos. This is because one must never be allowed to totally triumph over the other- that would spell the end of the whole. It is the Balance, the perfect equilibrium, which is the ideal. Most of the sentient and nonsentient universe is rooted in this struggle. This includes a majority of Moorcock's major characters, from Elric to the Rose, to Begg, Von Bek, Keraquazian, Cornelius, Bastable, etc.

This is not an easy story to follow. The logic is complex, but it is consistent. You almost have to be a metatemporal detective like Sir Seaton Beggs to follow it. Indeed, the principle artist makes an appearance in the story proclaiming that he doesn't understand the rules! That is what makes fiction like this so enjoyable- it is so utterly challenging in the way that Moorcock has thrown away all the rules of conventional fiction. It is a grand jazz riff of metaphysics of flow of consciousness- or higher consciousness. It is no wonder that this has been described as the crowning achievement of all the decades of his work.

See you on the moonbeam roads....

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great introduction to Moorcock's multiverse, February 16, 2006

By 

Father Thyme (San Francisco, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Michael Moorcock's Multiverse (Paperback)

A range of familiar Moorcock characters from Elric , Cornelius to Jack Karaquazian of War Amongst the Angels and Blood, all merging together in a finale which is hard to beat. I can't agree that Moorcock is a lazy writer, though so many people have pinched his ideas, it might seem that he's 'borrowing' what in fact he created inthe first place -- DC alone owe him for ideas found in almost all their current lines. I find him a complex but engaging writer with maybe the broadest sweep of anyone alive today. This version of the comic lacks the departments (letters section, Rick Klaw's column and so on) but gains Moorcock's explanation of his Multiverse seen as a series of 'planes', like so many billions of Mandelbrot sets only varying in the slightest detail from set to set and only diverging markedly when they are millions of planes apart. It's one of the best models of a multiverse I know, borrowing from modern physics and math theory (Doughty and Mandelbrot) -- unless, of course, they're borrowing from him! Whatever, it's some of the most interest pure science fiction around, and coming from someone who says they write fantasy not sf. Reminds us what a good sf writer Moorcock can be when he wants to be (cf Dancers at the End of Time and The Black Corridor).