Moorcock decided to start this first book with some mother-son incest, which caught me way off guard. The story follows Jherek Carnelian, the last human to be naturally born, as he falls in love with one Mrs. Amelia Underwood, a time traveller from 19th-century England. Spoilers ahead!
In the first chapter, Jherek informs his mother, the Iron Orchid, that he intends to live according to something he’s read about in old records, called “virtue”. They both express complete ignorance of the word, and proceed to make love. This very quickly communicates to the reader that the lifestyle these characters practice has very little to do with our current conception of virtuous behavior, or even common propriety. In subsequent chapters we meet the rest of the denizens of this Earth at the End of Time (henceforth the decadents), including Lord Jagged of Canaria, who is suspected of being Jherek’s father, as well as a secret time traveller. Jherek eventually has casual sex with Lord Jagged as well, so we get the impression that parenthood, to the people at the End of Time, is a mere factual situation, with no moral implications attached. These characters have abandoned all notions of Good and Evil, and are merely “along for the ride”, seeking pleasure, and sometimes even pain, out of mere ennui. They do not fear Death; in fact, some of them have already tried it for fun, being brought back to life by their friends.
We see later in the book that emotions have lost their meaning altogether, being replaced by sensations. The characters in the book talk about love and despair as we would talk about the performance of a play. Feelings only survive in this society as things to be acted out for one’s pleasure and the entertainment of others. There is nothing special about sexual intercourse either. When told by Mrs Underwood that sex must be preceded by marriage, Jherek assumes it’s just another word for sex, and affirms (to Mrs Underwood’s great dismay) that he has been married several times to different people, including his mother and several female and male friends.
The characters in this world are capable of transforming their surroundings at will (conjuring up food, or changing the sunset to a more appealing color), as well as changing their own bodies, as shown by the remark that Jherek is pleased to see his mother is “wearing” breasts. This transmutative power is enabled by the use of special rings, which allow them to manipulate the energy stored by their ancestors millions of years prior. To me this sounds a lot like the city of Diaspar in Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars. We get a main character who’s the odd one out of a population of immortals (Jherek is the last human to have been birthed naturally, while Alvin is the last person to have been produced from scratch by the memory banks of Diaspar), as well as an underground reserve of energy that no one understands anymore, but that allows everyone to lead a life of absolute indulgence.
Jherek is enthused about ancient history, particularly the 19th century, which he has studied through the very few surviving records. We find out from his descriptions of objects that the past has been misshapen by the aeons. For example, he drives a flying locomotive, with no train cars attached, which makes one think that perhaps he read somewhere about a person “flying” through a country on a locomotive. A reader from our time would know this flight to mean great speed, and that the person is most likely traveling in a passenger car, but without such context Jherek has presumably taken such a description at face value and made himself a flying train. Such misinterpretations of history abound in the Earth at the End of Time, as well as examples of the jumbling together of historical and fictional elements, as seen in the following examples:
This lake was, of course, Lake Billy the Kid. Lake Billy the Kid was named after the legendary American explorer, astronaut and bon-vivant, who had been crucified around the year 2000 because it was discovered that he possessed the hindquarters of a goat. In Billy the Kid’s time such permutations were apparently not fashionable.
He would have liked to have believed that Mrs Underwood was calling to him; some ancient love song like that of the Factory Siren who had once lured men to slavery in the plastic mines.
Jherek’s peers keep what they call menageries, collections of animals and people from outer space and from across time. Early on in the book, the decadents are visited by a space traveler, who is on a mission to spread some terrible news. He has discovered a destructive entity at the center of the Universe that threatens to bring the final death of all existence, etc. No one cares, however. In fact, the only person interested in the traveler is My Lady Charlotina, who disintegrates his spacecraft to prevent his leaving the planet, and immobilizes him in order to add him to her menagerie. It is here that Mrs Amelia Underwood also enters the narrative, appearing in the middle of the crowd of decadents seemingly out of nowhere, and demanding the space traveler be freed. Jherek immediately identifies her as coming from the 19th century, and takes an interest in her, later freeing her from Lord Mongrove’s menagerie, though not before sleeping with Lord Jagged.
I think the techniques I’ve grown to love in deep-future sci-fi are very skillfully wielded by Moorcock. The fusion of history and fiction down the ages was very creatively done and fun to read, and he does a great job of laying down the amorality of the society in the story within the first few paragraphs, which I came to appreciate after my initial shock at the casual incest. I also enjoyed the florid style. As Moorcock puts it:
This book…is my homage to the inspired dandyism of our fin-de-siècle…
I’m very much looking forward to the next book:
The Hollow Lands