An Alien Heat by Michael Moorcock

My first novel of 2022 is, predictably enough, by Michael Moorcock. Apologies for the fixation of late; I tend to go through phases with fiction, and it seems to be Moorcock at the moment. So, after a few weeks' detour into non-fiction, which I don't tend to blog, it's time for another Moorcock, this time the first instalment of his Dancers at the End of Time sequence, the rest of which I'm going to have to acquire.

This is an odd, surreal read, set amonst the decadent few inhabitants of the last few millennia of the univderse, who live lives of unchallenging ease and hence of empty decadence, where science has been perfected in order to become, as Atrthur C. Clarke so famously put it, "indistinguishable from magic", where the only kind of suffering is boredom, yet pleasure is shallow and empty, where culture is diluted through the endless gulf of time since it was last produced, where achievement is impossible. Moorcock, somehow, finds prose to understand such a world, and the minds of those who inhabit it.

And into this world he places a woman from Victorian Bromley, whose prim decorum is not mocked but certainly contrasted with the world in which she finds herself.

The experimental and wild ideas reminded me, to an extent, of The Final Programme. Yet there is a fascinating seriousness and coherence here, a maturity which points towards the later novels I have read. This is a novel that will stay in my mind for some time.