The Moorcock Project: The Dragon in the Sword: 1

Just a reminder, my reading plan is here, with links to reviews of the two and a half John Daker books I've already read. On with the show.

Let's get the cover out of the way first. It's a stunner by Mark Salwowski...

No. Let's not get the cover out of the way first. Let's go off on a tangent.

No. We'll get back to that later. Let's get to the book. By way of a brief tangent.

There are people who worry about consistency (or the lack of it) in their series fiction.

Me, I grew up reading Conan Doyle, who wasn't sure if Watson's first name was John or James or if his old war wound was in the shoulder or leg. I also loved the old Universal monster movies, like The Mummy's Ghost, wherein poor Kharis sinks into a bog in Massachusetts. Somehow when he emerges again in The Mummy's Curse, that bog has moved to Louisiana. Examples from film and books, TV and comics could be multiplied indefinitely. The point is that I remember a simpler time, before the lunatics (God bless them) took over the asylum, when the Star Wars novels (all seven of them) didn't have elaborate timelines in the front showing you where they fit in "continuity".

So when it comes to issues dear to the fanboy's heart like "Is it canon?" I just smile and remember a favorite passage from the Good Book. I'm pretty sure it's somewhere in Luke. The disciples ask Jesus if Barbara Gordon's time as a Congresswoman is still in continuity, and Jesus says The Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath. He who has ears, let him hear. You schmucks. Which is good enough for me.

When Moorcock settled on the idea of a Multiverse to organize his fiction he managed to bypass the issue very neatly, if he ever cared about it (doubtful). An uncountable number of worlds reflecting and intersecting, merging and diverging. Men and women who are reincarnated a myriad of times either serially or simultaneously or, Somehow, both. Try to slap a timeline on that. Given conflicting stories, ask What really happened? and you will hear, very faintly, the Lords of Chaos laughing their asses off.

So we won't ask that question, merely note that the beginning of Dragon revises the events of Swords of Heaven, Flowers of Hell somewhat. Which is only fair because the Von Bek character in Dragon will in turn be revised/reused in the much later Dreamthief's Daughter.

Dragon was included in the massive Von Bek omnibus from White Wolf, but it's John Daker/Erekosë's book, narrated by him and propelled by his possibly hopeless quest for Peace, the Love of Ermizhad, and Understanding of his curse. (and what's so funny about that?)

Daker's curse is to be the one aspect of the Eternal Champion who remembers/foresees all his other lives. The knowledge oppresses him. He is weary and desperate, nearly suicidal. Enigmatic visions tease and torment him. Here he speaks in a dream to the ominous being called the Knight in Black and Yellow.

- Can you help me return to Ermizhad?

- I have already explained that you must wait for the ship.

- When shall I have peace of mind?

- When all your tasks are done. Or before there are tasks for you to do.

- You are cruel, Knight in Black and Yellow, to answer me so vaguely.

- I assure you, John Daker, I have no clearer answers. You are not the only one to accuse me of cruelty...

He gestured and now I could see a cliff. On it, lined at the very edge, some on foot, some on mounts (not all by any means ordinary horses), were rank upon rank of fighters in battered armour. I was close enough, somehow, to observe their faces. They had blank eyes which had become used to too much agony. They could not see us, yet it seemed to me they prayed to us - or at least to the Knight in Black and Yellow.

I cried out to them: Who are you?

And they answered me, lifting their heads to chant a frightful litany. We are the lost. We are the last. We are the unkind. We are the Warriors at the Edge of Time. We are the ravaged, we are the despairing, we are the betrayed. We are the veterans of a thousand psychic wars.

If the Warriors' chant sounds familiar you must be an old prog rock fan. In another vision Daker boards the Dark Ship which will carry/has carried him and his various selves to their appointed tasks. He speaks to the ship's blind and unnamed Captain, who tells him they travel to a place called the Maaschanheem...

- It is a world not far removed from the one you knew as John Daker. Far closer, in fact, than any you've journeyed to so far. The people of Daker's world who understand such things say it is one of the realms of their Middle Marches, for frequently their world intersects with it, though only certain adepts can pass from one place to the other.

Certain adepts? Or members of a certain family? Perhaps one with links to the Holy Grail and a somewhat disturbing motto, Do You the Devil's Work.

Enter Ulrich von Bek, dissident subject of the Nazi regime and would-be assassin of Hitler, who has fled into the Middle Marches with the aid of an old map, a family heirloom. He befriends Daker almost before the Champion steps off the boat and into his new body, and becomes his companion and confidant.

If you write a fantasy novel and decide to bring Nazis into it, even tangentially, you'd better have more on your mind than adventure or escape. Moorcock almost always does, of course. And you'd better have the skills to bend genre materials to serious purposes without becoming ponderous, tendentious or just plain boring. I'm only halfway through the book, but I would say Moorcock pulls it off, so far, though sometimes just barely. Mind you, this was 23 years ago (impossible!) when he was only 47 years old, a child really.

In these books - in most sword and sorcery books, actually - the traditional role of the Companion is to balance all the doom and gloom with a little humor and offer a ground-level viewpoint to counter the Champion's focus on the Big Picture.

Von Bek plays the part with a welcome twist. He is good-humored rather than humorous, and in place of an earthy pragmatism he possesses a somewhat cynical humanism. Wry, gallant, a bit formal, he has been disillusioned but not embittered by the rise of Hitler. As he and Daker make their way across the Maaschanheem and several other realms, encountering tyrants petty and otherwise, he offers frequent and pungent commentary on power, politics and human nature.

I haven't said anything about the actual plot of the novel and I'm not sure I'm going to. In one sense the plot of this kind of book is very much beside the point. It's a quest. Allies will help. Enemies will hinder. Wonders will be encountered along the way. But you already knew all that. So why fill in the details?

Especially since the details provide so much of the pleasure here. In your typical Tolkienoid fantasy figuring out what's what is mostly a matter of translating as you go along: Okay, these "Drogs" are the orcs, the ones they call the Mist Lords are elves but sexier, dwarves are called the Stonegrim, magic is magick, or Majik, or manna, or banana fana fofana, right, whatever, let's get this show on the road.

But Moorcock's stuff almost always rewards close attention. He has said that even in his lightest entertainments he tries to give good value, and a great deal of that value is in the details - details of landscape, architecture, dress, language, culture, ritual and, for lack of a better term, special effects. I've used the phrase profligacy of imagination once already in this series and if I'm really going to read almost every damn thing the guy has written I don't see how I'm going to avoid using it again and again. I'm tempted to call it- what the hell, I do call it the single most valuable resource he has at his command.

So more about the book in a few days, but without spoiling too many details. For now, here's that tangent.

Every used bookstore in the US has a scattering of British paperbacks. I mostly found UK cover art off-putting when I was younger. That's partly due to an unfamiliar aesthetic but mostly because when I first started reading sf every UK book seemed to have a cover (usually by Chris Foss) featuring some vast spaceship or monumental building looming over a landscape notably devoid of human beings or anything else I might actually give a damn about.

Not to rag on Foss. He does big machines and he does them like nobody else. When all the other spaceships were either silver torpedoes or gray bricks his colorful, oddly shaped ships were a welcome change. And obviously he's not responsible for his imitators or the decisions of art directors.

Megastructures. Robots. Spaceships. These are all an inescapable part of sf's iconography. But slapping a giant robot or a spaceship on every sf cover just contributes to the perception that sf is primarily about machines. Science fiction, like all fiction, is necessarily and always about people, though not always human people. And these covers became popular in Britain during the seventies, just at the tail end of sf's New Wave, a movement with its origins in the UK, reflecting a peculiarly English inwardness and pessimism. Spaceships were out. Inner space was in. So to speak. So what was with the technoporn?

Well, presumably it sold books, and not just in the UK, as this Ace edition of a Tiptree collection shows. The Foss art is pretty in its way but it hardly evokes the author's hard-nosed humanism. What good is a cover that sells the book, but guarantees that a good number of buyers will say WTF?! once they actually read the thing? Meanwhile people who would love the book turn up their noses at it because it looks like it's about large engineering projects on Mars.

Thanks to the invaluable and addictive Pop Sensation for the cover scan, by the way.

Back (finally) to the cover. The artist has a website with a generous gallery. The book cover section is sorted by author's name, which is handy. He's selling original art dirt cheap. Still out of my reach, but maybe not yours. He sells prints too, but if you're going to shell out for a high quality print why not spend a little more for some original art that will increase in value?

Salwowski is mighty fond of pinks and purples. He clearly prefers the Symbolists and Surrealists to, say, the Impressionists. He's done a handful of Moorcock's books. This incredible painting graced a Corum omnibus. I've never read the Corum books but he seems to be riding out of Paradise, down into some kind of gloomy, otherworldly exile. With a broken bridge behind him yet! Perfect. It seems unnecessary to mention the use of color but Wow!

Anyway, the cover of Dragon. Scroll back up and look at it again. Click on it to embiggen. I don't know if the vision of an enormous sword is actually in the book. It's not in the first half. It reminds me of a similar vision Elric experiences at a threshold moment in his life. I looked at the cover more than once before I saw the dragon's eye. Is the image inside it from Triumph of the Will? I'm damned if I'll watch it again to find out. I used to think everyone should be required to watch Triumph when they reach voting age, but I guess it's naive to think it might act as a kind of inoculation.

Bummer. I didn't mean to end with the Nazis.

This film clip always cheers me up. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, and everybody hates Illinois Nazis.