11/18/4

Richard stopped by today to do his monthly (or around that often) swap of Moorcock books and Dr. Who and Simpsons videos. He's hung around and even lived with us a few times over the last dozen years, most recently this summer. My brother and I converted him to Dr. Who years ago, so he likes to dip into my collection off and on. Everybody around here is a Simpsons fan, and we've taped every episode ever since it went into syndication. Okay, the last two seasons have had some ommisions that have mostly been made up for, because working more erratic hours has caused me to flake on a few Sundays. As for the Michael Moorcock....

My wife reads a lot. I mean A LOT! It's something that I've vaguely envied, because in my youth I used to read like a madman. I was always way ahead in school (I read The Lord Of The Rings the first time in 5th grade) and on into college, right up until I started a family. Then work and child-care seemed to suck up my free time. What little I still had I invested into music: playing, recording, whatever.

So back in 98/99-ish, I tried to restart my reading habits. I started with some classics that I'd always felt I should have read by now but seemed to have missed. The Catcher In The Rye, my mother's favorite book, and then To Kill A Mockingbird, which I chose, oddly enough, because it was J. Rose Hale's favorite book. Who's that, you ask? Ironically, one reason I wasn't reading was the amount of time I spent here on the net, starting in mid-96. J. Rose Hale (if it's still there) was a blog I stumbled upon when randomly surfing, back before it was called a blog. I kept up with her intermittently for a few years, but she stopped doing much updating very soon after she moved herself to her self-titled domain.

As a complete tangent, I also mildy miss JenniCam. I followed her through two moves, from way back.

Anyhow, the point I am very slowly getting around to is that, now that I'd started rekindling my book-worm habits, my wife turned me on to the Elric Of Melnibone series by Michael Moorcock. I instantly devoured them. The second book (in the originally compiled series of 6: this gets complicated) is "The Sailor On The Seas Of Fate," and it's first third features Elric fighting alongside Prince Corum, Dorian Hawkmoon, and the mysterious Erekose. These others, it eludes, are other incarnations of the same hero in alternate planes of the "multiverse", a term Moorcock coined in the late 50's for his concept of the infinite alternate universes. Those familiar will find this elementary and simplified, but I soldier on for the uninitiated. Nearly all the heroes in all of Moorcock's books, fantasy and sci-fi alike (actually, the line is quite blurry for him), are alternate incarnations of The Eternal Champion, who fights endlessly for what he deems right, unaware that the battle will never end for him.

Gary Gygax borrowed heavily from all this in developing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Rather than good and evil, Moorcock's Champions fight in the endless war between Law and Chaos, both sides of which can fall into good or evil, dependent on circumstances and intentions. So, although these books are short pulp novels and quick reads, it turns out that there are quite a few books. The primary series' include: eight with Elric, seven with Hawkmoon, six with Corum, five with Jherek Carnelian, three with Oswald Bastable, at least two with Erekose, and three with the Von Bek family, all written in the 60's, 70's and early 80's. His two most recent books combine the latest generation of the Von Bek family and Elric being summoned to the WWII era of our world.

"The Sailor On The Seas Of Fate" only hinted at this, but later discoveries of Hawkmoon in a book store, and the recollection that this Corum was the same I'd read the first three books of back in 10th grade, slowly made me realize I was on the tip of a pulp-fiction iceberg. I spent the next few years digging up and reading whatever I could find, Arflane and "The Ice Schooner", Kane of old Mars, until I discovered that all these had been compiled and edited into large editions (three or four books and some additional short stories per volume) in the mid-90's. I managed to pick up a couple volumes, but they're out of print now, so I'll need to dig on Ebay when my meager funds permit such frivolity.

So this past summer, I discussed this in detail with Richard, and he got hooked even harder than I. Of course, he already had several books at his disposal in my collection, rather than needing the time to hunt things down as I had, so he's nearly caught me in under a year. Because (and here's the fact that brought me to the keyboard in the first place this evening) I've again stopped reading. The last book took me over six months to wade through, and it's follow-up, which had a haunted house, a dangerous storm, and our hero kidnapped within the first chapter (talk about starting off in high-gear) failed to capture my interest and has sat unread now for many months. I've come full-circle. My tight schedule, and exaustion and utter laziness during what free time I have, have me here on this keyboard for many pointless hours, rather than delving my mind into someone else's imagined world. It's quite sad, really, and I think the reason I've typed about now at such length is some subconscious effort to convince myself to get a book back in my hands.

My wife came home in the midst of this long-winded typing, and at the risk of being crude, if I get upstairs soon, I just may get some, so I'm going to sign off.

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