As a newcomer to Moorcock, this didn't entice me as much as I'd hoped. Somewhat dense & at times offputting, I still hope to find myself in the right state of mind to sit down with this & enjoy it.

As the afterword admits, a title like that was always going to be asking for an argument; starting out as a hack of the old school, Moorcock was insanely prolific for many years. Like my dad says, in the time most people write a bad chapter, Moorcock would have cranked out a bad trilogy (and crank is definitely the operative word for some of them). Still, unpolished and corny as it is, some of that work is essential to understanding his project. Whereas the selection here feels a little too much like the respectable Moorcock, just pulp enough but no pulpier – the larger-than-life figure who'll leave the litfic types ever so gently scandalised, but not too much so. Which is to say it concentrates on his later work, with even characters like Elric or Jerry Cornelius appearing in oblique revisits, rather than the more openly adventurous material which made their names and Moorcock's. Which is to say, there's a disproportionate amount of stuff with no overt genre elements, and yes A Winter Admiral is a beautiful story, with certain subterranean links to the Von Bek dynasty and thus the whole crazy edifice of the Eternal Champion and beyond. But for every Winter Admiral there's an Opium General, which may be well-regarded but nevertheless feels like an underpowered revisit of Roeg's Performance and Moorcock's own peak Cornelius. Hell, even the Shakey Mo solo story, while it has a certain rarity value, could almost pass for realism were it not for his resurrected passenger, and too often feels like a parody of the disappointed sixties survivor's lament (which, in fairness, may at least be deliberate); the full Burroughs homage of The Deep Fix is even more trying, and one of the longest pieces here to boot. To be fair, the magnificently blasphemous time travel story Behold the Man is present, in more or less its original form, and the tale of the Clapham Antichrist has a wonderful note of West London Arthur Machen. London Bone has its slightly clunky politics, but also a real Angela Carter music hall vigour; what would later become the opening to Blood - which I've had 20 years or more and never begun - recalls the modulation of his old mucker M John Harrison's style, and indeed the subject of a rip in space-time, in the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. And seeing so many different Moorcock worlds jumbled together was always going to help bring out the pattern in his multiversal carpet. But a less polite, more representative selection would have been a magnificent book indeed. But then perhaps I'm just sulking at the absence of my own favourite creations of his, those godlike, childlike, naive sophisticates from the End of Time.

(Netgalley ARC)

Michael Moorcock was, for me, an entry point into Science Fiction and Fantasy in the 1980's. This is a terrific collection showing the range of his work and clearly illustrates that Mike is so much more than Elric. There's humour, cutting satire, imagination and intelligence here from an author who is also an editor, social commentator and rock star. It's a great collection, though fans will no doubt quibble about what isn't included. Me, I just wanted more. If nothing else, this should be used as an introductory primer that will hopefully persuade readers to go out there and read more. Recommended.

It's Elric I love, not Michael Moorcock

When I was a child craving escape I turned to stories of Sword and Sorcery – Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd, Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian, and others of the genre. I devoured every tale I could find. Of these, Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné was my favorite, to the point that I have a movie about him all laid out in my head, although the stars I chose in those days are a bit long in the tooth to play as written. Sigh, Timothy Dalton was gorgeously supernatural in his youth.

A couple of things happened, though. S&S got derailed by the move toward New Wave SF fiction forms ushered in by Dangerous Visions and the like. The Ballantine LOTR bootlegs pushed toward long form contemplative fantasy. While there are good S&S stories published in the 70s and on, they are nothing like the ones from the pulp days.

Something happened to Mr. Moorcock too – actually, three things. And they turned me away from him.

1) Mr. Moorcock embraced New Wave SF, leading the British and pushing the Yanks by writing, and also editing. He was the editor of "New Worlds" SF magazine for many years. I have seen little of his work from those days.

2) As did many artists of the era, Mr. Moorcock became increasingly political and his fiction became more polemical. The Elric stories didn't fit and I am not interested in Mr. Moorcock's 1960s British anarchist tracts.

3) Mr. Moorcock became obsessed with his idea of the multiverse (Jerry Cornelius and all that), and his concept of the Eternal Hero. Mr. Moorcock revised his earlier fiction converting standalone characters, including Elric, into avatars of the Eternal Hero. The result was awful. You need to be careful about the dates of Mr. Moorcock's publications to avoid these reworks.

I am dismayed to find that there is only a taste of Elric in this story collection. One late story. The editors justify omission in two ways. First they suggest that the stylistic contrast between Mr. Moorcock early S&S and his later complex fictions is so sharp that readers would be put off. Second they refer to the Del Ray Elric reprints, saying that these should satisfy every reader. So be it.

I tried these other stories and I find (sorry editors ) that I simply am not interested.

Somehow, despite having read massive amounts of science fiction and fantasy, I never managed to break open a Michael Moorcock book. Not one. Well, that just changed and his work is nothing like what I expected.

This reissued anthology is a “best of” selection featuring nearly forty years worth of work originally written or published from the early 60’s to the late 90’s. If you are familiar with his work, this collection is a chance to revisit old friends like Elric. For us newbies, it is a smorgasbord of different offerings, often no more than a brief glimpse into the different characters and worlds Moorcock created. However, In some cases, the glimpses were just too brief to really connect with a character and their universe.

In many cases, I found the wonder was not always in the plot as in the complex and very descriptive worlds created. His writing is often dense prose that creates worlds and layers of experience and emotion. Surprisingly, much of Moorcock’s work is not hard science fiction so much as it is speculative fiction.

Within this collection, some of the real gems include the reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix, a time travel journey to meet Jesus and John the Baptist and experience their world, a love story played out across holes in the fabric of the universe in an alternate history of the United States with a restaurant at the vortex of time and space, and alternate histories as World War Three plays out with Cossacks on horseback galloping through Southeast Asia. There is an unexpected richness and depth to many of the stories.

Many thanks to the publisher for providing a copy for review.

The Best of Michael Moorcock- This must have been a difficult job. Michael Moorcock has been writing phenomenal fiction for almost sixty years. What we have here is a brief sampling of what has come to pass. Myself, I prefer his novels to the shorter works, but he is adept at getting his point across at any length. What we have here are seventeen stories, some fantastical, some grounded, but all high quality reads. There is an Elric story to start things off. Jerry Cornelius drops by. The von Beck family appears in different narratives. One of my favorite stories involves Shaky Mo, a roadie who travels with the recently deceased Jimi Hendrix on a road trip through Northern England and Scotland. No "Best of" collection of Moorcock would be complete with Behold The Man, a Nebula winning novella, here in its original form. Probably not for everyone, but a great, landmark story. I recommend this to anyone interested in discovering Michael Moorcock, or anyone, like myself, who enjoys revisiting classic first rate story telling.

You feel in awe of a giant of fantasy and it's not easy to review something written by them.
I can't say I read everything by Moorcock but I can surely say I loved this stories.
I found them engaging and entertaining, maybe not the most representative of his work but surely an amazing read.
It was a great reading experience, a book I wasn't able to put down even if I try to savour it reading one story per night.
A very good excursus, it made crave for more.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to Tachyon Publications and Netgalley for this ARC

Moorcock is certainly an accomplished author and well-deserving of all the accolades. I've always been more of a science fiction fan than a fan of fantasy, so this collection may be his best but not all are my favorites. That's OK, of course - that's what anthologies are for. Not sure if this is the place to start for newcomers to Moorcock's work but given that it's a new collection it may as well be. Enjoy the stories that suit you, pass over the ones that don't, and have fun wondering why certain stories were included.