This was not at all the book I was expecting.  I read it in the hardcover collection, The Eternal Champion, first in the White Wolf series of collections of the same name.  The previous book in the collection, also called The Eternal Champion (yes, novel, collection & series with the same name…how charming) featured a character named John Daker or Erekosë, an incarnation of the titular Eternal Champion, who is aware or at least partially aware, of many of his various incarnations throughout the Multiverse.  That novel felt fairly wrapped up at the end, so I didn’t know where the story might progress.  Well, it didn’t.  The second book, The Sundered Worlds, is a totally different story, seemingly in a totally different universe within the Multiverse, and it is really really weird.  It’s certainly like nothing else I’ve read from Michael Moorcock to date.

I’m genuinely not sure who the incarnation of the Eternal Champion is in this book.  In fact, it may actually be some combination of as many as five different characters.  We start out by following Count Renark von Bek.  I know there is at least one other incarnation of the Eternal Champion with the surname von Bek, but I don’t know if it’s at all connected to this version.  Maybe I’ll get to those books at some point.  Anyway, von Bek has made a horrible discovery about the nature of the universe, and sets off on a personal quest to save Humanity.  Unlike a lot of other books from this cycle, this is a full-on Space Opera novel with spaceships, aliens, funky science, and a lot of trappings of classic Science Fiction tales like you might expect from Poul Anderson, Andre Norton, or even Larry Niven.

Von Bek searches for and finds The Shifter, an anomalous star system that seems to be on some weird, inter-reality/cross-Multiverse orbit.  When he arrives, he finds a whole lot of odd stuff going on.  Along the way, he teams up with some other strange characters, each of whom is on their own journey.  But perhaps…they’re all on the same journey?  Whatever the case, things get really weird, then they build to much, much weirder levels as the book goes on.  Somewhere around the midpoint, the focus shifts to a different protagonist, or even a bit of an ensemble of protagonists.  It all feels very non-Moorcock, going on my experiences reading the author’s work.  I’ll admit, he’s written so much that even having read probably two dozen of his novels, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.  Whatever the case, it feels like he’s stepping outside of his usual comfort zone.  And the book gives a very different look at some of his core ideas.  This is the Multiverse seen through the eyes of a technologically advanced civilization’s set of eyes, without a lot of the mystical or fanciful elements.

I liked the book a lot.  It felt like something of a breath of fresh air, even in its more upbeat and hopeful tone.  As I read it, especially as the stakes kept getting bigger and grander and more over the top as the story progressed, I kept thinking about E.E. “Doc” Smith’s first Lensman novel Triplanetary, and how disappointing I’d found the book.  Where Smith kept escalating things in a way that felt like a child on the playground trying to one-up his friend, Moorcock somehow makes a similarly nutty escalation feel right.  It’s a flippant way of putting it, I’ll admit, but it did feel like “what if the Lensmen, but good?”  Was this Moorcock’s response to Smith?  I don’t know.  

Whatever the case, it’s worth a read for sure.  Different.  Not something you’d think would have any conceptual connections to his Elric stories or what have you.  Yet, here it is.  

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