Moorcock's Multiverse

The Multiverse is not one world but an endless lattice of them, worlds folded within worlds, each a variation on the last — and through every one of them walks a single conscripted soul. He wears a thousand faces and answers to a thousand names, yet he is always the same man: the Eternal Champion, drafted lifetime after lifetime to fight for the Cosmic Balance between Law and Chaos, a war he never chose, can never finish, and is forbidden to lay down. Michael Moorcock has spent a career writing that soul's many lives. The best known is Elric of Melniboné, the albino sorcerer-emperor who props up his failing body with drugs and the hungers of a howling black runeblade, Stormbringer, that drinks the souls of those he loves. Around him turn the other incarnations: melancholy Corum, last of a murdered elder race; Dorian Hawkmoon, whose History of the Runestaff carries the struggle across a ruined future Europe from Castle Brass; the languid immortals of the Dancers at the End of Time, playing at romance as the universe cools; the airship deserter Oswald Bastable, cast adrift among alternate histories. Recurring figures — the wry Companion Jhary-a-Conel, the Balance itself — thread the cycles into one fabric, and later hands have added homage tales of their own. The prose runs fevered and swift, baroque and doom-haunted, and its morality is genuinely grey: Law and Chaos are cosmic principles, not virtue and sin, and the Champion serves each by turns and trusts neither. This is the fiction that cracked sword-and-sorcery open and let the tragedy pour in. Newcomers should begin where the melancholy cuts sharpest — Elric of Melniboné — and follow the albino through The Sailor on the Seas of Fate to his end in Stormbringer before straying into the wider web. Moorcock has reshuffled his own chronology many times over, so no single decreed sequence rules it all; take the omnibus path and let the resonances find you.