hw mention in the NY times

[Arin Komins]

On Sun, 20 Jul 2008, Arin Komins wrote:

:Subject: Re: hw mention in the NY times
:
::Hi Arin,
::Is there a direct link, I got to The Times, but it seems all I got were
::advertisements, will try again.
::
:
:Hi Mary,
:
:This was a direct link earlier today:
:
:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/books/review/Itzkoff-t.html?_r=3&ref=books&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
:
:...but I see the nytimes has it under login protection now :-(
:

...but it's up again without protection.  I copied out the text and pasted 
it inline, so hopefully you should be able to read this.


Across the Universe
Amorality Tales

By DAVE ITZKOFF
Published: July 20, 2008

No matter how many of my remaining brain cells are eaten up by song lyrics 
or Simpsons catchphrases, there is one scene from a fantasy novel I shall 
never forget: Our hero has fallen in with a horde of savages as they 
ransack a town. To keep himself from getting caught up in their bloodshed, 
he takes refuge in a house that has so far avoided the slaughter-madness, 
only to have his sanctuary violated by a barbarian dragging a helpless 
female villager by her hair.

Rather than immediately leaping to the womans rescue, our protagonist 
tells the intruder to find a safe haven of his own. It is only when the 
barbarian refuses to leave that our hero draws his sword, attacking with 
such swiftness and ferocity that the would-be rapist is cleaved in two. 
Who said chivalry is dead?

Some readers  those with a complete collection of Hawkwind albums and 
possibly an old Phototron growing dust in the closet  will recognize this 
moment from one of the earliest tales of Elric, the brooding, amoral 
adventurer first set down on paper by Michael Moorcock more than 45 years 
ago. And to them I wont need to explain why a long-overdue reissue, titled 
Elric: The Stealer of Souls. Chronicles of the Last Emperor of Melnibon, 
Volume I (Del Rey/Ballantine, paper, $15), about the exploits of an aging 
swashbuckler whose heyday predates the Pentagon Papers, could not have 
arrived at a more opportune moment.

Those unfamiliar with Elric may, at first, find his journeys incomparably 
strange. Moorcocks hero is designed as a kind of anti-Conan: he is a thin, 
longhaired albino with a darkly cynical worldview, unmoved by the 
decadence and death that surround him  the living embodiment of Moorcocks 
axiom that Time is an agony of Now.

And oy, does Elric ever agonize. He draws his strength from mysterious 
drugs and an enchanted sword, called Stormbringer, that seems to possess 
an ominous agenda of its own; he betrays the allies who seek his 
assistance and occasionally slays the innocent captives who await his 
rescue; and he is prone to delivering such inspirational pronouncements as 
Aye, it is fitting that we should be wanderers, for we have no place in 
this world. Prince Hamlet, by comparison, is a paragon of courage and 
decisiveness.

What is stranger still is that the world Elric was born into did not 
necessarily need him. Moorcock was 21 years old when he introduced the 
character in the June 1961 issue of a British periodical called Science 
Fantasy. Ray guns and rocket ships were rapidly overtaking swords and 
sorcery as the preferred pulp subjects of the day, and many of Moorcocks 
lasting science fiction accomplishments  including his novella Behold the 
Man; his radical, satirical Jerry Cornelius novels; and his immensely 
influential editorship of the sci-fi magazine New Worlds  were several 
years away.

Since this is a science fiction column, perhaps the best way to understand 
Moorcocks past is to peer farther into his future. In the late 1970s, with 
the Tories preparing to take power and George Lucass Star Wars saga in 
ascendancy, he published his pioneering essay Starship Stormtroopers, a 
brilliant, bench-clearing diatribe that ought to be required reading for 
any speculative-fiction fan who is ready to put down his 20-sided dice and 
become an adult.

In Starship Stormtroopers, Moorcock takes a one-man stand against what he 
perceives as widespread reactionary politics in genre fiction, railing 
against not only monolithic science fiction writers like Robert A. 
Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and A. E. van Vogt (wild-eyed paternalists to a 
man, he declares them), but also C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien  titans 
of fantasy who seemed to be obvious influences on him.

Wielding his pen like Stormbringer, Moorcock writes, If I were sitting in 
a Tube train and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with 
obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldnt disturb me much more 
than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkien or Richard Adams. And then he 
takes off the kid gloves.

What the utopian fiction of such authors teaches its readers, Moorcock 
argues, is blind obedience to a romantic hero whose motives may be just as 
ambiguous or pernicious as those of his enemies. Heroes betray us, he 
writes. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves. Left unchecked 
and unexamined, our desire to believe in these infallible father figures 
yields Ronald Reagan, George Wallace and Joe McCarthy. And, Moorcock says, 
At its most spectacular it gives us Charlie Manson and Scientology.

Moorcock writes that the only true alternative to such figures is the 
anarchist: a mature, realistic adult imposing laws upon the self and 
modifying them according to an experience of life, an interpretation of 
the world.

Whether or not one fully buys into this line of thinking, its not hard to 
see how Elric was, for Moorcock, a formative attempt at a character who 
would transcend the problems the author saw in genre fiction and exist 
within this new framework  a hero who rarely won the treasure or the girl, 
and sometimes encouraged the girl to leap into a yawning chasm to her 
doom.

Through Elrics incipient adventures, as he contends with villains whose 
names suggest the sounds H. P. Lovecraft made when he cleared his throat  
the sorcerer Theleb Kaarna, Queen Yishana of Jharkor, a monster called 
Quaolnargn  the morality of these stories is rarely more sophisticated 
than your average heavy-metal album cover. Elrics quests, we are told, are 
just pantomimes of the continuing and unresolvable battle between Law and 
Chaos, and there is no Truth but that of Eternal struggle.

Yet by the end of The Stealer of Souls, the underpinning philosophy of the 
stories has grown considerably more mature and even a bit Nietzschean. 
Elric learns that he is destined to be a kind of bermensch figure, a 
prelude to history whose true purpose is to bring about the end of the 
world so that a new era of man can begin. He wrestles with the possibility 
of eternal recurrence, then accepts his fate in the torso-splittingly 
violent manner to which he is accustomed. (Sorry for the spoilers, folks, 
but who wouldnt appreciate a little advance notice when the Apocalypse 
rolls around?)

Before the author destroys the earth and makes it impossible for you to 
read his book, however, there is one other tale in The Stealer of Souls 
that stands as a perfect parable of the Moorcockian worldview. This story 
concerns a powerful wizard who has placed his soul in the body of a cat  a 
cat that has been captured by an evil tyrant, who can now make the 
spellcaster obey his every command. Elric tries to rescue the cat but of 
course loses it during a terrific battle; nonetheless, he tells the wizard 
that the tyrant can no longer threaten him, and that he is free.

But, the wizard asks, What if he recaptures the cat  what then?

There is no salvation that we cannot imagine to be another form of 
damnation, and our souls are never truly free as long as there are cats to 
hide them in and ill-intentioned men to master them. Its not a pleasant 
thought, but it sure has the ring of truth. Meow.  

Arin
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Arin Komins			       	      akomins at uchicago.edu
Assistant Director - Solutions Architecture
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