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Fabulous Harbours
Michael Moorcock
Millennium hardback, 192 pages, £15.99
Gollancz paperback, 228 pages, £5.99

Review by Mike Don (1995)

Moorcock’s new hardback, claimed to be the sequel to Blood. Don’t believe everything you read. Linked novellas; and while the linking material relates to the novel, the stories themselves spread their net widely. It’s almost as if Moorcock, using his new interpretation of the Multiverse as a guide, has opted to go back to his favourite characters. Thus Elric has an episode (‘The Black Blade’s Summoning’), likewise Jerry Cornelius (‘The Enigma Windows’) and certain characters whose connection with Moorcock lies in the murky past frequented by rare book dealers; Sexton Blake (aka Sexton Begg), and Hank Janson (aka Hank Begg), in ‘The Girl Who Killed Sylvia Blade’ – as authentic a slice of fifties hardboiled hokum as you could wish for. Elric, or a fusion of Elric and Von Bek, recurs in several episodes. At this stage of his career, Moorcock's heroes are mingling more than ever. The Von Bek clan in particular has infiltrated everywhere.

And of course it’s not just the Moorcock heroes who infiltrate; in their various ways, all the stories are a wonderful end of the millennium tribute to the pop/pulp culture we’ve all grown up with, its sleazy music, its even sleazier, lurid fiction. You can if you so desire play games of spot the reference anywhere in this collection, to identify the particular tribute.

What Moorcock has done with Harbours is to create a coherent overview of this turbulent century of ours, a multiple viewpoint overview, using its most authentic and vital fiction, pulp adventure; and since he’s been a reliable contributor to that genre, what’s more appropriate than to use his own characters, especially those who’ve provided his fondest memories? There’s humour – especially in ‘The White Pirate’ – pathos, biting political satire, action, thrills and spills. Far more accessible than Blood.

Review by Steve Jeffery (1995)

Fabulous Harbours is billed as a sequel to Blood and is, again, a fix-up, a collection of stories which have appeared elsewhere. While Blood attempted an uneasy marriage of Moorcock’s stories from the New Worlds anthologies, both under his own name and the rather cartoonish space opera tales of the Second Ether as Warwick Colvin Jr, Fabulous Harbours uses a different framing device: travellers tales, reminiscences and tales of adventure, exchanged one pleasant evening between a group including Jack Karaquazian, Colinda Devero, Countess von Bek, and various members and friends of the Begg family at Sir Sexton Begg’s flat in Sporting Club Square. Tales, as Moorcock points out in his Introduction, of some imperfect world that is still somewhat better, and richer, than our own, and recounted to him at second hand, and thus to us at third hand.

That rich, imperfect world is, as we have come to expect from Moorcock, the Multiverse: that realm in which characters (or maybe only one character, repeated in an infinite variety of incarnations) are called to maintain the fine balance in the struggle between Law and Chaos, Entropy and Singularity; between the disorientation of infinite variety and the dead hand of stasis.

This sequence, starting with Blood and to conclude in The War Amongst The Angels, seems set to link the stories and characters which play their part in this struggle: Elric, the White Wolf, von Bek and Erekose, through the sequence of the Eternal Champion, to those of the jugaderos, the more knowing players in the Game of Time and Balance, who include Jack Karaquazian and the immortal Rose, Colinda Devero and, perhaps more selfishly and hedonistically, Jerry Cornelius. Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, the rhetoric and actions of opposing polarities become indistinguishable from each other. Freedom of choice, and indeed individuality, rest on a dynamic balance of forces, neither of which must be allowed to fully overcome the other. Although Moorcock does not use the terms, it is likely that he is quite aware of the new studies in complexity in maths and physics, where richness and creativity exist at the thin fractal boundary between chaos and order. Neither is it probably too far-fetched to suggest that Moorcock’s metaphor extends from the realms of thermodynamics and physics to both morality and politics. It is in ‘Lunching With The Antichrist’, where the slow deterioration of community proceeds apace with the despoliation of property developers that the latter comes most strongly to the fore.

Maybe it is a mellowing, or a disenchantment with radical politics at both ends of the spectrum, but the tone of many of these stories, and their linking passages, appear to hark back to an older world of lost elegance and manners, a kind of frayed nobility.

Against this background, it is the studied amorality of Jerry Cornelius rather than the often bewildered Elric that stands in greatest contrast. This wider canvas of the Multiverse allows Moorcock to place familiar characters in unfamiliar contexts, as the Game of Time unfolds on different frames of time and place. Characters, on both sides of the Game are fluid, mutable. Elric, in ‘The Black Blade’s Summoning’, is allied to the Chaos Lord, Arioch, but his actions, and his heart, tend more to serve the cause of Law. Elsewhere he reoccurs as the desert wanderer of Al Rik’h, Le Loup Blanc, or as Crimson Eyes. The irascible pirate, Captain Quelch, is a shapeshifter of a more devious sort, from a kindly old man, a lecherous privateer, to the monstrous Original Insect, champion of the crystalline stasis of the Singularity.

Linking several of these stories, particularly ‘The White Pirate’. ‘The Black Blade’s Summoning’ and ‘Lunching With The Antichrist’, comes the enigmatic vision of the Rose, who may prove to be one of the more important characters in the Moorcock pantheon as the sequence develops. I was deeply unconvinced by Blood and didn’t have much patience for, or really understand, the interspersed exploits of the Corsairs of the Second Ether. While several characters and settings from there recur in Fabulous Harbours, they seem much more embedded in the narrative and more coherent. I’m still not fully sure quite what Moorcock is working towards with this linking up of characters and stories into the web of worlds and possibilities that forms the Multiverse, but I am far more tempted to pursue it after this volume. Even if you have only a passing familiarity with Moorcock’s prestigious output, this stands alone as a rather fine collection of stories.

The Edge’s Michael Moorcock pages