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The Sailor on the Seas of Fate

Holy crap! I, Mark Lawrence, have read an entire book in 4 hours! Admittedly I picked it up after discovering that it was only 24,000 words long, or 1/2oth of a George Martin epic.EDIT: over the long grind of this summer holiday I've been writing a "short" story that I'm being paid to write to inspire an Xbox game. It's nearing the end and has just passed 40,000 words :o Somebody stop me!Still, the copy I have is a hardback, 40 years old, and at 169 pages, not an exceptionally slim novel. Admittedly the font is HUGE!I gave this a 3* from memory and now I'm revising it down to a 2*. It's OK. There are good things in it, and bad things.The 33 Moorcock books on my fantasy shelf speak to the love I had for his work 30-40 years ago. I've been having trouble recapturing it on recent reads though. I have been avoiding my favourites ... so that might be it.http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tMqSP3wcsL4...Anyway, good and bad.Most of the good things are an irrepressible imagination and Stormbringer.The bad things ... are many. It's not much longer than a short story and even so is divided in to THREE books. The whole thing has a dreamy misty feel to it (and is literally described in those terms). It's full of people making vague doom-laden statements and refusing to explain anything "until the time is right". Everything is pre-ordained / fated, and it's basically three short stories with no connection, all of which are really about fights and magic rather than having anything to say.In the first story four aspects of the eternal champion are brought together, Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon, and Erekose. This proves to be bad idea as it leads you to suspect that the eternal champion is a handy excuse for writing the same character over and over, with the suspicion being that Moorcock is just better at weird fantasy stuff than characters...My son saw me picking the book up and said something along the lines of "But that's old, why are you bothering?" To which I responded with exasperation, "Fantasy doesn't have a sell by date! What ... are the swords going to be old fashioned? Will the enchantments be dated? Will the demons be wearing period dress?"And he said, "If you pick up any old book you'll find it's rubbish. The writing style has changed. They're too slow. The characters don't feel real.""Nonsense!" I said wittily, and walked off with my 40 year old book.But the thing is. He was right, a bit. Every Moorcock book I've tried in the past few years has seemed terribly dated. The characters really don't feel real. The conversations are always overly pompous/grand or just turning the handle on the plot.The only thing that struck me as quite 'modern' was the level of visceral violence on display. I don't think today's books that are accused of grimdark have any more blood or guts splattering the page than Moorcock did in the 70s.The other two stories were ... OK but really didn't shine, and over all I was disappointed. On the flip side, it's not a Moorcock book that I have fond memories of, so perhaps it was only ever OK and my fanboying was all from the individual Elric, Corum, and Hawkmoon tales. Join my 3-emails-a-year newsletter #prizes.....
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