Dancers still there!

[L'Etranger]

Hi, for technical reasons my earlier thread concerning the DANCERS AT THE END OF TIME series was gobbled up by some time warp or so. These things happen, noone to blame, Berry's doing a tremendous job to create and make this site working.
In any case, we were gathering strength here, I seem to remember, in support of this enjoyable series that Mike has enriched our reading lives with.

Best wishes for a New Year propelling us further toward the End of Time ...


L'Etranger

[Anonymous]

Waddaya want with a bunch of old soft-brained buggers with no future and lost of time to spare ... at the End Of Time? Wheres the thrill? What have they to lose? :roll:

[elric]

thats one of the reasons they're interesting... :)

[Yisselda]

:twisted: The dancers at the end of time is good but deceptive. It s like dum da dum da dumm reading reading, he what! he slept with his mother? You have to go back to see if you accually read what you did.... Its cool clever, kinda sick, but not overly violent. Thee differences between the weird end of timers and the urgency ,normality of the rest is what makes it unique.

[L'Etranger]

:twisted: The dancers at the end of time is good but deceptive. It s like dum da dum da dumm reading reading, he what! he slept with his mother? You have to go back to see if you accually read what you did.... Its cool clever, kinda sick, but not overly violent. Thee differences between the weird end of timers and the urgency ,normality of the rest is what makes it unique.

THAT'S it! It had never occured to me to divide Michael Moorcocks in "violent" and "non-violent". But this probably doesn't work for a lot of other books, the Pyat-series, Brothel in Rosenstrasse, Behold the Man, Breakfast in the Ruins and many others. How about a "non-swords Moorcock" category?
I cherish the "lightness" of The Dancers coupled with an incredible multi-layeredness, among other appealing treats.

[Kinsley Castle]

That "what the hell?" moment came for me when Bastable turned up in his time machine. Before Dancers, the Bastable books starting with The Warlord of the Air were the only MM books I'd read. So that was my first real introduction to the Multiverse, where all of the EC storylines and characters intertwine.

[Grey Mouser]

Dancers at the End of Time is one of my favourite MM sequences. I just love the raw creativity, whacky characters, romance and contrasting time zones. The Dancers have consumed the universe itself in the pursuit of the fulfilment of their whims - and it brings them face to face with the End of all Songs. Superb stuff.

[DeeCrowSeer]

I loved the Bastable cameo. The stupid thing is I already knew that he was in the book, but I'm very good at forgetting things until they're glaringly obvious... so I was very happy to see him pop up again, and to learn that he was gainfully employed helping other "nomads" navigate the time streams. Awfully decent of him.

I think despite the light tone (which I rather enjoyed) there were some very interesting points made about how, even in Paradise, some people will always choose to be miserable. Without wishing to get too heavy I recently heard that 1 in 7 people in the world suffer from malnutrition, but many of us will still whine if we don't get the right flavour of crisps. I live in a relative Paradise, but I'm still not always smart enough to appreciate how lucky I am. Personally I would love to be more like Jherek, but I know in my heart that I am Amelia. It is all a question, as Jagged says, of attitude.

D...

[Anonymous]

I know exactly how the feeling of first discovering the Multiverse strikes you. You'll be carefully, pleasently reading one of the books and suddenly.

Oh, look, Elric's in a Hawkmoon story...
Three pags later
Wait a minute.
(Hurried flicking backward)
Missed it, Damn!
(Hurried flicking forawrd)
Ha! I knew it someone's made a typo. Shoddy publishing!!
(Tut, tut! Much shaking of head) Reading continues happily, until...
Hang on. He's there again,
(A few pages on)
And again.
(A couple more)
And again. Bloody Hell! The bastard didn't die!
This results in a six hour long headache, perpetuated by aspirin as you hurrilidly re-read all your Moorcock books. Slowly your brain melts under the enormity of the folly you have made and the number of books you have missed.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

[Jules]

I think I actually prefer Dancers to many of the epic fantasy EC books, not least because of the echoes of C19th literature; I can't think of many SF books that you could call 'a comedy of manners' (rather than satires).

[zakt]

.... and the comedy! The Lats are lovely and crude, entirely unexpected in all that lazy decadence; and the sequences in the Cafe Royal, etc when it all comes together, are great, you can feel a writer enjoying his creation there.

Not too many laughs in Elric, are there? :D Ferkit.

[Jules]

The Cafe Royal bit is perfect, I think I only laughed as much at the party scene in one of Pynchon's book which I can't remember a lot about other than something about white slaves and some out of it people wanting to be Blue Slaves. And possibly a tank being driven into a swimming pool.

[zakt]

Has anybody taken up L'Etranger's suggestion elsewhere of a thread dealing with non-EC books?

[Lord_Shark_the_Unknown]

The Dancers is a fantastically funny series and shock-full of some of Moorcock's best lack of characters. Also, in these queer times, they again and again show that morality and normality are illusions in the objective sense, nothing more than agreements between persons and societies, having no relevance beyond that which we choose to give them. The fact that they actually get away with it at the end is particularly subversive, and... Um, I don't really seem to have a point any longer... other than I love the Dancers.

And there is one really funny Elric story, Elric at the End of Time. Plenty laughs there.

[zakt]

ok, but is it an Elric story, or is it MM spoofing Elric? :?