“A Portrait in Ivory”,
“The Visible Men”,
“A Dead Singer”,
“Lunching with the Antichrist”,
“The Opium General”
“Behold the Man”,
“A Winter Admiral”,
“London Bone”,
“Colour”
“Going to Canada”,
“Leaving Pasadena”,
“Crossing into Cambodia”,
“Doves in the Circle”,
“The Deep Fix”,
“The Birds of the Moon”,
“The Cairene Purse”,
“A Slow Saturday Night at the Surrealist Sporting Club”

The editors mention a joke about Mr. Moorcock, that he "has written for so long in so many different genres that there's something for every reader to hate." Some truth to this, he clearly has range. Some of these stories worked better than others, but all are well done. YMMV. ( )

Meandering tales that bear little resemblance to science-fiction and just peter out without approaching anything resembling an actual story. This confirms my vague childhood memories of not caring for Moorcock's work. ( )

It's Elric I love, not Michael Moorcock

When I was a child craving escape I turned to stories of Sword and Sorcery – Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd, Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian, and others of the genre. I devoured every tale I could find. Of these, Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné was my favorite, to the point that I have a movie about him all laid out in my head, although the stars I chose in those days are a bit long in the tooth to play as written. Sigh, Timothy Dalton was gorgeously supernatural in his youth.

A couple of things happened, though. S&S got derailed by the move toward New Wave SF fiction forms ushered in by Dangerous Visions and the like. The Ballantine LOTR bootlegs pushed toward long form contemplative fantasy. While there are good S&S stories published in the 70s and on, they are nothing like the ones from the pulp days.

Something happened to Mr. Moorcock too – actually, three things. And they turned me away.

1) Mr. Moorcock embraced New Wave SF, leading the British and pushing the Yanks by writing, and also editing. He was the editor of "New Worlds" SF magazine for many years. I have seen little of his work from those days.

2) As did many artists of the era, Mr. Moorcock became increasingly political and his fiction became more polemical. The Elric stories didn't fit and I am not interested in Mr. Moorcock's British-anarchist tracts.

3) Mr. Moorcock became obsessed with his idea of the multiverse (Jerry Cornelius and all that), and his concept of the Eternal Hero. Mr. Moorcock revised his earlier fiction converting standalone characters, including Elric, into avatars of the Eternal Hero. The result was awful. You need to be careful about the dates of Mr. Moorcock's publications to avoid these reworks.

I am dismayed to find that there is only a taste of Elric in this story collection. One late story. The editors justify omission in two ways. First they suggest that the stylistic contrast between Mr. Moorcock early S&S and his later complex fictions is so sharp that readers would be put off. Second they refer to the Del Ray Elric reprints, saying that these should satisfy every reader. So be it.

I tried these other stories and I find (sorry editors ) that I simply am not interested.

I received a review copy of "The Best of Michael Moorcock" by Michael Moorcock, edited by John Davey, Jeff Vandermeer, and Ann Vandermeer (Tachyon) through NetGalley.com. ( )

i am surprised that there are no stories from his end of time series. i find of all his work, those two books , dancers at the end of time, and legends at the end of time are the best.