This is the third and final book in the series The Dancers at the End of Time, by Michael Moorcock. Check out my thoughts on the first two books:
In this final volume of the trilogy, the citizens at the End of Time reach the actual end of the universe, which we learn their technology has greatly contributed to, as no other species makes use of the technology that enables our characters to bring to life their wildest imaginations, as well as extend their own lives indefinitely. It is implied that entire neighboring galaxies have been consumed by mankind, and that even the sun and the atmosphere are created by the ancient cities of Earth. Here are some highlights. Spoilers ahead (though not too many)!
The title comes from the 1899 poem “Dregs”, by Ernest Dowson.
The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof,
(This is the end of every song man sings!)
The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain,
Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain;
And health and hope have gone the way of love
Into the drear oblivion of lost things.
Ghosts go along with us until the end;
This was a mistress, this, perhaps, a friend.
With pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and wait
For the dropt curtain and the closing gate:
This is the end of all the songs man sings.
Aside from this epigraph from which the title of the book is drawn, we get a couple of quotes that also reference the title of the trilogy. In reference to Lord Jagged’s plan to preserve the people at the End of Time in a time loop, Lord Mongrove says:
A travesty of life. This will be a stagnant planet, forever circling a stagnant sun. A stagnant society, without progress or past. Can you not see it, Duke of Queens? Shall we have been spared death only to become the living dead, dancing forever to the same stale measures?
Of course, the irony in that quote is that the society at the End of Time is already stagnant. The Sun is long since dead, the planet is cold and barren, and the people live solely off their dreams, pleasuring themselves senselessly. The same theme of dancing is alluded to by Mrs Underwood when she says:
It is I who must change. I who must try to understand that things will remain as they are thoughout eternity, that the same dance will be danced over and over again and that only the partners will differ…
And then, looking at the revellers of a wedding party out of control:
Danse macabre. The damned, the dead, the doomed – they dance to forget their fate…
The rotting cities, which house the planet-wide mechanism by which the power rings enable the manipulation of life and matter, are described as being senile. This is an interesting idea as a reader during the AI boom of the 2020’s. We already know large language models are prone to hallucinations. Who’s to say that, if at some point mankind does create sentient machines, they won’t eventually decay just as a human mind would? When their memory banks hold the accumulated wealth of centuries, will they become confused and start giving false historical accounts, with fact and fiction becoming indistinguishable?
Further, the people of the End of Time don’t know how to read or write. They haven’t cared to learn for millennia. In our own time, we already see headlines of people relying on AI for basic tasks and forgetting how to do them, LLM’s are starting to replace search engines, and it would seem that people’s capacity to fact-check will only get worse in the future. Who’s to say we won’t end up being fed lies by an AI whose inner workings no one even understands anymore?
As a side note, this could be seen as a grim version of the city of Diaspar, from Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars.
Although most of the plot centers around Jherek Carnelian and Mrs. Underwood, the story of Lord Jagged of Canaria is perhaps the most interesting. We know he comes from the 21st century, and that he lived among the citizens of the End of Time until they experienced the actual End of Everything, at which point he devoted his travels through time to finding a way to save himself and his friends.
Throughout the novel, his leading attribute is a kind of prideful restraint, which is a result of his extreme rigour in keeping up his identities in the 19th century (and possibly elsewhere through history). We get the sense that he has had to excercise extreme discipline and self-denial in order to compartmentalize an incredibly complicated set of lives. Apparently in reference to him, Mrs. Underwood quotes the fictional poet Wheldrake:
So shall they dance till the end of time,
Each face a mask, each mark a sign
Of pride disguised as pain.
Yet pity him who must remain,
His flesh unflayed, his soul untried:
His pain disguised as pride.
Throughout the book, which I don’t remember from the previous two, there are a couple of exchanges where a word is misunderstood, and a character will seek to clarify with a synonym, to which the first speaker will reply with a synonym of the intended word, like:
‘But you, Jherek, are my only heir.’
‘A song?’
‘A son, my love.’
And:
‘It is based on a nightmare I once had.’
‘A horse?’
‘A dream.’
And finally:
‘You must persuade her to give us an air.’
‘A son?’
‘A song, my seed!’
Those were a nice touch.
At the behest of the Home Secretary in the 19th century, Mr. Underwood (Amelia’s husband) and a contingent of police travel to the End of Time to apprehend Jherek and Amelia, along with their “Latvian” co-conspirators (the Lat, a blundering group of aliens intent on pillaging the Earth). Upon arriving at the End of Time, the men become convinced that they have actually entered the domain of Hell. In order to return them to the 19th century without creating a major paradox, which would cause them to be spit back to the End of Time, Lord Jagged engineers a vision in which God tells them to go back and warn the English people to repent of their sins.
All three books contain fanciful references and ammalgamations of 19th and 20th century popular culture and historical events. Here are a few that I found noteworthy:
As the multiverse reorganizes itself, due to an excess of time travel paradoxes, the menageries of the citizens at the End of Time are beginning to disappear (whisked off to their own times, or perhaps into the future, at the start of another time cycle), which prompts Sweet Orb Mace to say:
Yet our time-travellers disappear – vanishing from our menageries at an astonishing rate. I lost four Adolf Hitlers alone, just recently. And one of them, I’m sure, was real. Though rather old, admittedly…
This would imply two things:
The Iron Orchid attends a party having replicated herself several times, so that each copy could wear a different costume. One of these copies is dressed as “Old Florence”, whose story she learned from one of the rotting cities, though the city, she says, had forgotten much.
‘It is the tale of Old Florence and the Night of Gales and of the Lady in the Lamp, who tended to the needs of five hundred soldiers in a sigle day! Imagine! Five hundred!’ She licked purple lips and grinned. ‘Those ancients!…’
The story is a corruption of the life of Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing and icon of Victorian Culture. Most likely her contributions as a nurse during the Crimean War are alluded to by her “tending to the needs” of 500 soldiers, though Orchid seems to think this refers to a huge gangbang. Doubtless the author saw this as a preposterous quantity of sexual partners; he had no foreknowledge of the current record of 742. Also, the lady of the lamp is a reference to the way Florence would walk amongst the wounded at night, holding a lamp.
One of the Iron Orchid replicates explains her costume thus:
I represent a great hero of Mrs Underwood’s time. A bandit king – a rogue loved by all – who came to rule a nation and was killed in his prime. It is a cycle of legend with wihich you must be familiar.
When asked the name of this character:
Ruby Jack Kennedy. Somewhere…you should find me as the treacherous woman who, in the end, betrayed him. Her name was Rosie Lee. She fell in love, you know, with an Italian called “The Mouser”, because of the clever way he trapped his victims…
This is all a corruption of the Kennedy assassination, which is several decades after Mrs Underwood’s time (she was taken from 1896). The Ruby Jack part refers to Jack Ruby, who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, who in turn killed President John F. Kennedy using a Mauser rifle.
During the wedding at the end of the novel, we get this bit:
…while intoning a reference to Sugriva, Jatayus and Disney the Destroyer…
The first two names are Hindu demigods, and the third is a prescient reference to Disney’s legacy of acquiring beloved franchises that should be left to rest in peace and resurrecting them as abhorrent travesties of what they once were.