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Welcome to Moorcock's Miscellany
Dear reader,
Many people have given their valuable time to create a website for the pleasure of posing questions to Michael Moorcock, meeting people from around the world, and mining the site for information. Please follow one of the links above to learn more about the site.
A little notsolight reading on quantum mechanics and the multiverse
On a similar theme try Michio Kaku's "Parallel Worlds" & "Physics of the Impossible." I do like Brian Greene though he even makes String Theory seem understandable.
Sir John Barbican Begg came across this blog that discusses Brian Greene's book, but perhaps more interesting the reviewer, Paul Di Filippo, not only name-checks Mike but also reviews the sixth Del Rey volume, Elric: Swords and Roses, in the process:
Originally posted by Sir John Barbican Begg
"The Hidden Reality": The multiple universe, explained
Originally posted by Paul Di Filippo
But if one had to pick a single author who has done the most to portray the quirks and potentials of a functioning multiverse, that figure would undeniably be Michael Moorcock. First employing the concept almost five decades ago, Moorcock has since woven nearly all his copious output -- tightly or loosely, as circumstances allow -- into one vast braided multiverse of story. So identified is Moorcock with the multiverse, in fact, that upon his ascent to Science Fiction Writer's Association Grandmaster, I was able to easily evoke a humorous scenario involving the author and his doppelgنngers that any of his readers would instantly recognize.
Moorcock's latest, "Elric: Swords and Roses," is the sixth and concluding installment in his chronicle of the doomed, Byronic, albino swordsman who functions as a kind of template or seed character for so many other antiheroes in the Moorcock multiverse.
We open the omnibus (which also contains a previously unpublished screenplay, a novella and several essays, as well as pages of artwork) with its core component, a complete novel from 1991, "The Revenge of the Rose." Whereas many of Elric's early adventures dealt with the multiverse only implicitly, this late-period outing foregrounds the nature of creation in Moorcock's fiction. The multiverse nearly assumes the role of an actor in the adventure. For beneath the expected inventive sword-and-sorcery decadence (Elric, a woman warrior named Rose, and a poet named Wheldrake are all plucked from their separate timestreams for exploits in a strange world foreign to them all, as Elric hunts for the plot-coupon soul-in-a-box of his dead father), Elric must continually confront the senses-disturbing and mind-shattering -- yet also uplifting -- nature of parallel worlds.
Now Elric was caught up in a kind of intradimensional hurricane, in which a thousand reverses ocurred within his brain at once and he became a thousand other creatures for an instant, and where he lived through more than ten other lives; a fate only minimally different from the one that was familiar to him; and so vast did the multiverse become, so unthinkable, that he began to go mad as he attempted to make sense of just a fraction of what laid siege to his sanity.
But the upside is this vision, as recounted by a seer:
It is our firm belief that we shall one day learn the plan of the entire multiverse and travel at will from Sphere to Sphere, from realm to realm, from world to world, travel through the great clouds of shifting, multicoloured stars, the tumbling planets in all their millions, through galaxies that swarm like gnats in a summer garden, and rivers of light--glory beyond glory--pathways of moonbeams between the roaming stars.
And thus, through Moorcock's exuberant prose, is Brian Greene's carefully controlled and channeled mysticism -- the unnamed engine that powers his researches, yet which must be throttled in the name of science and hidden away -- given ultimate lyrical expression.
_"For an eternity Allard was alone in an icy limbo where all the colours were bright and sharp and comfortless. _For another eternity Allard swam through seas without end, all green and cool and deep, where distorted creatures drifted, sometimes attacking him. _And then, at last, he had reached the real world – the world he had created, where he was God and could create or destroy whatever he wished. _He was supremely powerful. He told planets to destroy themselves, and they did. He created suns. Beautiful women flocked to be his. Of all men, he was the mightiest. Of all gods, he was the greatest."
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