Blood: A Southern Novel

This book represents a new departure for Moorcock. It is the first book in which he began to amplify and rationalize his ideas about the Multiverse, drawing on Chaos math as created by Mandelbrot. At the same time it looks backward to the entire Eternal Champion saga, further amplifying and resolving that! If you read this sequence beginning with FABULOUS HARBORS, going on to BLOOD and winding up with THE WAR AMONGST THE ANGELS (maybe take a peek at Moorcock's Multiverse graphic novel!) you will IMHO get a far more coherent picture of the multiverse. Given that Moorcock is telling a multitude of narratives (he once said that an ideal story contains as many narratives as words!) and exploring an extraordinary idea in a classic 'hard science' way, yet also, as in the Cornelius books, DEMONSTRATING the thought processes of the kind of people who would live in such an environment, how they would form relationships, achieve personal stability and so on. Another life lesson for the 21st century ? Urban life requires constant minor shifts of identity and perspective, just as work demands increasing response to immediate stimulii, just as good games do. Moorcock is one of the few writers to celebrate the coming age and isn't a bit scared by the prospect of conventional literacy being under threat. He is already discussing alternatives, as he did in the Cornelius books -- predicting what the technology does and predicting what the technology can do to make human life and love rich, profound and -- totally HUMAN. What always marks Moorcock, in his imaginative fiction as well as his social fiction, is his focus on humanity. Ultimately it is why he stands head and shoulders above most of his contemporaries and is doomed, like Leiber, Dick and Ballard, to name a few, to be forever ahead of his time. Get these books while they are still around. You might not completely understand them now, but you will!

Okay, it's not the Cornelius books (my personal favorite), it's not the Elric saga, it's not really even Corum, but hey's this is Michael Moorcock we're talking about here. What we seem to have here is Moorcock attempting something new with his tried and true concept of Law versus Chaos and the multiverse and spinning it into something different. So we're faced with a drastically different South where the war between those two opposing factions has basically spilled over onto Earth. Into this comes a bizarre cast of characters such as Jack K (not even attempting that last name), Sam Oakenherst and the Rose, who all wind up being sucked into the Game of Time, whether they want to or not. The book turns out to be highly confusing in parts and the beginning is quite slow, introducing the characters and barely moving the plot forward while doing so. However once everyone gets together and things start happening, the book takes on an almost breakneck pace, almost like it's trying to compensate for the sloth like start. Ideas fly fast and furious around here even in the slow moments, and it sometimes feels like Moorcock is trying to cram several books into one. Surprisingly, I found myself actually caring about the main characters, especially the driven and passionate Jack. Toward the end the book takes on a careening quality, not at all helped by the rather strange Corsairs of the Second Ether sections, which, while good at introducing situations and characters that will become important later in the book, are deeply weird and border on incoherent. The book is almost contradictory, on one hand his descriptions and situations (especially the Second Ether) are almost brilliant in conveying the strange nature of these places, but sometimes you can barely figure out what's going on because so many ideas are being thrown at you for what seems to be little reason. It's a readable, highly enjoyable book which seems to polarize fans something fierce, judging by reaction. Some of that might be because this is such a radical departure for the multiverse concept and something he would run with in other books, but with a little fine tuning, a pretty good book could become a near masterpiece. Give it your time though and you'll find many small rewards to be found.

"Blood" is a well written, somewhat contemporary view of Moorcock's Multiverse Mythos. The backdrop is an imaginative future America (patterned after the Post-Civil War U.S.) where the mining of a power source called "Color" has created a tear in the fabric of reality. Entropy runs rampant and we get an idea of what would happen if the War between Chaos and Law spilled over into OUR world. But the perspective is fresh and incorporates some modern physics such as "fractals" and "scale" to add a degree of science to the fantasy. Even the Gods of Moorcock's Pantheon have been recast as both players and characters in a hugely complex RPG called the "Game of Time." After a somewhat slow start, I found myself really sucked into this book. It's a tough read and can be confusing at times, although it pulls itself together nicely towards the end. It's basically a fresh spin on classic Moorcock. The sheer creativity of "Blood" shows why Moorcock was, and still is, one of the pioneers in Fantasy/Fiction.

MM's "Blood" is likely not everyone's cup of tea. The narrative is complex and demands the reader's full attention. But if you are willing to make the effort and do not demand that the story make sense immediately, I think you will find the experience of reading it enormously fun and rewarding.

Blood is a wonderfully complex, descriptive and at times confusing book. The confusion however is part of the ride, and by the end of the novel the confusion is washed away and everything makes sense. The plot revolves around one Jack Karaquazian, a gambler in the future of a world which is rather different to ours, and the people around him. Exploitation of a new energy source has caused reality to start breaking down. Allowing an access to another world, the second ether, where roles are assumed and the paticipants take part in the game of time. This is a very well written book, and the prose flows beautifully. A deceptively quiet start leads onto a riotous display of colour and imagination, as the novel is played out to its natural conclusion. Its originality may take a few by surprise, and it is difficult to find reference points in other fiction. It is classified a Science Fiction/Fantasy novel, but it has many elements of the literary, more naturalistic novel, whilst incorporating a great deal of chaos theory. Each part is broken up by short segments of an "ongoing tale", the story of Captain Billy Bob Begg and her Chaos Engineers. Very difficult to read, highly compressed fiction, supposedly by Warwick Colvin Jr (one of Moorcock's Pseudonyms). As Moorcock states, it is not necessary to read these to understand the rest of the novel; but, they do explain something of the characters that are so important in the latter stages of the book. It would be impossible to display all the nuances and complexities of the novel in a short review like this (or even a longer one).Overall a worthwhile book from a great, utterly modern, author.