Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What all science fantasy should be doing, 12 Jan 2002
By A Customer
This is first class literary, experimental work with a wild cast of characters, an obsession with popular English culture from highwaymen and rural romance to urban adventure and rock and roll. The richness of this stew might not appeal to the usual sci-fi fan, but if you want something as gorgeous as the finest Medici masque and as intelligent as the smartest modern philosophers, with the most knowing and ebullient use of Chaos Theory you've ever experienced, look no further. But mostly this is a warm, engaging and totally original novel of ideas. Moorcock has made the English novel of ideas his own for forty years and we still don't realise what a national treasure we have!
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
As always -- at least ten years ahead of its time, 10 April 2001
By A Customer
Moorcock is incredible. This is his take on Chaos Mathematics -- not a few half-digested notions about butterflies' wings -- but full strength riffs on Mandelbrot. It's some of the most profound science fiction you'll ever read, but it is totally outside of genre -- or incorporating all genres -- whatever -- it is crowded with ideas, images, stories, characters. I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy and I can't for the life of me understand why this hasn't been heralded by all SF people as the masterpiece it is. Hard to precis -- lady highway robbers stopping Leeds-bound trams on the Yorkshire moors and a plane that flies between the different worlds of the multiverse. This goes together with the Multiverse comic (which has more explanation) Blood (the first book in the sequence) and Fabulous Harbours, which, like Tales from the Texas Woods, is a wonderful mixture of nostalgia for pulp genres of all kinds and a commentary on the times which spawned them. This is like super-technicolour, super-DVD, super-sound -- everything turned up to 11 -- but under superb control. This is a man who truly deserves his Grand Master award -- he is a master in every old sense of the world -- with an extraordinary range of styles, tone and subject -- yet bringing it all together in one glorious whole! If you believe sf is all StarTrek and silly monsters, read this book and you will know that the spirit of Verne and Wells and Philip K. Dick is not dead.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mandelbrot made even cooler, 22 Jun 2002
By A Customer
I just watched a documentary on Benoit Mandelbrot and Chaos Theory and it gave me a really mind-bending understanding of what Michael Moorcock is up to in this book, which I reread recently.
His ideas of alternative worlds, each subtly different from the next, separated by scale rather than 'dimensions' is a very sophisticated bringing together of two current ideas in modern physics -- Chaos Theory on the one hand and the idea of alternative reality or 'branes' on the other. How much Moorcock took from Mandelbrot and how much the scientific community has taken from Moorcock is a subject I've discussed a fair bit with my friends. It wasn't a surprise to learn that he anticipated Black Holes and various other ideas which scientists came up with years later and yet he has never, as far as I know, claimed to be a 'science' science fiction writer, being more interested in the humanities and how science acts on character or society. This really is a stimulating boom, purporting to be Moorcock's autobiography, yet being the alleged autobiography of his alter ego Rose Moorcock (aka Rose von Bek) the heroine of both fantasy novels like Revenge of the Rose, science fiction novels like this one and 'straight' novels like King of the City, moving through a series of realities, just as he moves his Jerry Cornelius cast (see The Cornelius Chronicles and the Nature of the Catastrophe) through different realities -- often to show how circumstances work differently on individuals, how in one situation we can be, if you like, heroic, and in another something else. Because of the depth and expanse of his imagination it's sometimes hard to get your head round his best books at first reading, but every time you re-read one something new is revealed. War Amongst The Angels is a very rich book, with a very ambitious level of language as well as ideas. It takes a bit of following, but it is in now way incoherent. Different 'branches' of realities are shifted between sometimes between one paragraph and another and he throws away ideas in a line which most writers would give their right arms for -- and would make whole novels out of. This is our Modern Prometheus, a story teller who is often the equal of Dickens and a thousand times better than your average Booker
contender. You can start this series with the middle book Fabulous Harbours and continue either with War Amongst The Angels or Blood, it doesn't really matter. The cadences of Southern US language inform much of the writing, with a mixture of Latin and Anglo-Saxon which you only hear in places like New Orleans and the stories are both moving and inspiring. The end of this book has distinct and deliberate echoes of the literary novel King of the City, both of which have slightly sardonic utopian conclusions. Not all Moorcock's books are tragedies, even though some of them seem to be. The comic apocalypse of his earlier Jerry Cornelius books is echoed here, but for my money the Rose
von Bek stories are emotionally and even politically more mature.
Whether you are a sci-fi buff or love modern literary fiction, this book is for you!
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