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Title: Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock ISBN: 0-441-78754-1 Publisher: Ace Books Pub. Date: December, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $5.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.41 (17 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Full throttle fantasy!
Comment: I'm moved to write this review after finishing "Stormbringer" again for the nth time. Actually, I read Stormbringer again after slogging through one of the Robert Jordan books, and it was like a bucket of cold water over my head. I realized just how bored and uninterested I have become with the Wheel of Time series.
Stormbringer and the other books about the brooding albino anti-hero Elric of Melnibone are full of apocalyptic energy, epic plots, and immense creativity.
Stormbringer is of course the demonic sword carried by Elric of Melnibone, the last of the Dragon Emperors. Elric is an aspect of the Eternal Champion (a character found in nost of Moorcock's fantasy work) doomed, in this world, to bring its destruction and in the process, restore the balance between Law and Chaos.
Stormbringer was written before a lot of the other stories in the Elric saga, so Moorcock really glories in the character he has created. In a series of short stories, Elric discovers his fate and seeks to carry it out.
I've had the Stormbringer book for years, and read it from time to time. After finishing it (in about a day) I started on again with another Elric omnibus edition and I'm halfway through it already. Moorcock's prose is fast and deadly and moves like greased lightning. Each scene pushes things further and faster ahead and there is no wandering around, looking at the flowers.
I've given up on Jordan and many of his contemporaries. There's just too much navel-gazing going on in current fantasy novels.
But Moorcock is one of the best there is and was. If you're stuck in the fantasy doldrums, tired of slogging through 700 pages with no payoff, all it will take is for you to read "Stormbringer" to be whipped away in its gale force winds.
Rating: 5
Summary: The saga concludes with one of fantasy's great novels
Comment: Michael Moorcock created the character of Elric, a doomed albino prince of a dying race who carries a cursed sword called Stormbringer in his wanderings throughout the Young Kingdoms of the humans, in the mid-sixties for "Science Fantasy Magazine." Elric starred in a series of novellas, the last four of which were gathered together to create this single novel, "Stormbringer." Although Moorcock has gone on to write many more novels featuring Elric, "Stormbringer is chronologically the last of the series; the albino prince meets his destiny and the world faces its fate in the eternal battle of law and chaos.
And the saga ends on its highest note; without a doubt, "Stormbringer" is one of the best of Michael Moorcock novels. Most fans consider this finale the best in the series. Even though it was originally published as four novellas, the parts flow together in one concentrated epic of sorcerery, horror, and war. The storyline has the the Theocrat of Pan Tang, Jagreed Lern, ally himself with the Dukes of Hell to spread Chaos across the Earth, warping it in nightmarish ways. Leading the seemingly hopeless struggle against the conquerors, Elric comes to understand finally the destiny appointed him, and that the fate of the entire world -- and the one that will follow it -- rests on his own, hideous sacrifice.
Moorcock's imagination here is feverish and grotesque, the battles sequences are epic and thrilling, and the language is poetic and deeply tragic. Everything that has come before in the saga of Elric (principally in the five earlier novellas that make up "The Werid of the White Wolf" and "The Bane of the Black Sword," as well as the 1972 prequel novel "Elric of Melniboné") crashes together for the cosmic, cathartic conclusion. This stands easily amongst the best fantasy novels ever written, and fine example of dark, philosophic fantasy filled with imagery that you will never forget.
Rating: 4
Summary: 6 of 6: The conclusion to the series maes it all worthwhile.
Comment: Michael Moorcock, Stormbringer (DAW, 1977)
Moorcock, in his acknowledgements, calls Stormbringer the first novel he ever wrote. (Much of what has come before in this series, in truth, is collections of shorter works.) It makes sense, in that Stormbringer, the last of the classic Elric novels, is a more coherent piece of work than those that have come before it, and is thus an easier read despite its being forty to seventy pages long than the other books in the series.
As the novel opens, Elric, Moonglum, and Zarozinia, with some other old friends and a large delegation from the southern and eastern continents, are trying to figure out what to do about Jagreen Lern, the sorceror king of the island nation of Pan Tang. Lern has allied himself with Elric's old masters, the Lords of Chaos, and Lern and his army are taking over the planet, piece by piece, with Chaos reshaping the planet into formless mass wherever it goes. The Lords of Law are stuck behind barriers raised by Chaos, and unable to communicate with earthbound folk; is the fate of the world sealed?
Of course not, this is fantasy literature.
Much of the pleasure of reading Stormbringer comes from seeing all the elements of the previous five books wrapped up into one neat package. I have mentioned before Moorcock's inability to foreshadow without hitting one in the face with a week-old herring with "FORESHADOWING" writ large in purple gothic script, but the effect of that is lessened greatly when the payoff is so much fun.
There are, once again, two factors which keep Stormbringer from a leap from the world of good, solid fantasy into the world of immortal literature. The first is the final battle between Elric and Jagreen Lern, which takes place over, essentially, the whole novel. The ability to draw such a thing out to almost two hundred pages is a rare quality in itself, but one cannot read of war on such an epic scale in a fantasy setting and not compare it to the final battle in Tolkein's The Return of the King; whereas much writing in any genre would be found wanting when compared to that scene, it seems more so when the subject matter is so parallel. Second, after it's all over, there is the inevitable denouement (as there must be in any classic tragedy). Again, Moorcock has set it up well, and with slight modifications it would have stood up to the rest of the novel; in fact, the rest of the series (and one of the tests of a truly great series is whether its last scene is a fitting, and well-scripted, ending to the whole schlemiel). Unfortunately, the last line of dialogue in the novel is unforgivably cheesy. All the more so because it's followed up with a perfect last sentence.
But the series ends, all is right with the world, and the reader must sit back and marvel at how well executed the whole thing is. Astounding, to say the least. ****
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Title: The Bane of the Black Sword (Elric Saga, Book 5) by Michael Moorcock ISBN: 0441048854 Publisher: Ace Books Pub. Date: May, 1994 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Vanishing Tower by Michael Moorcock ISBN: 0425064069 Publisher: Berkley Publishing Group Pub. Date: November, 1983 List Price(USD): $2.50 |
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Title: The Weird of the White Wolf by Michael Moorcock ISBN: 0441888054 Publisher: Ace Books Pub. Date: May, 1997 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Michael Moorcock ISBN: 0441748635 Publisher: Berkley Pub Group Pub. Date: November, 1990 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Elric of Melnibone by Michael Moorcock ISBN: 0441203981 Publisher: Ace Books Pub. Date: September, 1996 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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