Books like The Eternal Champion

You are John Daker. You are a resident of 20th century Earth. You are a sophisticated, intelligent fellow - urbane, socially conscious, left-leaning. You do not believe in binary thinking; you do not believe in Good vs. Evil. You do not support war; you don't even know how to use a weapon.You are Erekosë. You have lived before, a hero amongst men, a great warrior and a fair one as well - there is a code of honor named after you. You have been reborn again, to do battle against humanity's mortal enemies. You were once John Daker; you were once many different people, many different heroes. You are the Eternal Champion. You are the Eldren. You mean humans no harm. You are elegant, wise, lovers of nature and poetry and finely crafted things. You are melancholy and magical. You are elf templates.You are Humanity. You are a petty, unreasonable, unfair, dictatorial, territorial, bloodthirsty, savage collection of liars and brutes. You thoroughly disgust me. Well, you should. You are the villains of this tale.You are Michael Moorcock. You are apparently one of the earliest popular writers to describe alternate dimensions, parallel realities, a multi-verse. In a phrase: you are a creative genius. Your stories and your series vary in style and motivation and attitude, depending on the tale being told. You have a regularly appearing theme, one that is sometimes subtle, other times overt: mankind will always be fucked, because mankind will always fuck itself. This is a nihilistic theme, true, but the breadth of your abilities and the elegance of your art does much to belie the darkness of that theme. Your creative seed is strong and motile, and you have planted it everywhere. So many writers owe you and so many writers fail to acknowledge that debt. You are one of my favorite authors and I have been enchanted by your genius since an early age.You are the novel The Eternal Champion. You left me cold. And annoyed. I appreciate your centrality to Moorcock's universe: you are a necessary book, one where Moorcock lays out his thesis in the most straightforward of terms. Everything is explained in prose that - for this outing at least - is relatively unadorned, straightforward, lucid to a fault. To a fault. There is something didactic about you. You lack mystery or nuance or vivacity. Your narrative is a kind of morality play. What comes around, goes around. What is a villain and what is a hero; are the heroes the villains? Mankind will always fuck itself, in the end. Humanity is its own most terrible antagonist. Yes, yes... I know.You are mark monday. You are revisiting your favorite authors of boyhood. This was the wrong Moorcock to start out with as it was a distinctly uninspiring experience. You found the tale to be both frustrating and curiously lifeless. You agreed with its central thesis (HUMANS OFF EARTH NOW)... but the dogmatic way in which that thesis was explored was simply too deterministic and too fatalistic for you to enjoy. Perhaps you are simply a weak-minded secret humanist (scratch a cynic, right?), one who does not appreciate tales in which all of humanity is unworthy of redemption.