Not all SF is good SF (Michael Moorcock)

[dragojustine]

Dancers at the Edge of Time (#1, An Alien Heat), Michael Moorcock

 

This is one of the all-time pioneers of the Dying Earth far-future genre, which I have adored in some of its later manifestations (Songs of Distant Earth, stuff in Hyperion, etc).  Our naïve childlike narrator is okay, and the actual time travel hijinks are relatively entertaining, but it’s a short book that reads more like a thought experiment than a developed novel of substance, and far future humanity is too foreign to be sympathetic or understandable without far better development, without letting us into their society and heads far better than he does.