The Best of Michael Moorcock

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

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.

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.

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.