New Book of the Week: An Alien Heat

Our New Book of the Week is the first part of Michael Moorcock’s extraordinary The Dancers at the End of Time sequence: An Alien Heat. Of course, we recommend the entire trilogy, but we’ve only got one New Book of the Week slot so we’ve had to improvise on the Home Page. As we have no such restrictions on the blog, let us herewith commend unto you one of living legend Michael Moorcock’s most inventive creations, in which a glorious and exuberant fin de siecle world reaches its end . . .

‘What follows, then, is the story of Jherek Carnelian, who did not know the meaning of morality, and Mrs Amelia Underwood, who knew everything about it.’

In a decaying far, far future, where everything and anything is possible, the citizens of the End of Time while away their days in an exuberance of wild parties, outlandish competitions and emotionless affairs.

At the world’s end, all love is timeless and all age-old disputes irrelevant. However Jherek Carnelian, a bemused denizen of the End of Time, is in danger of taking reality too seriously, and grows tired of his pleasures.

So when love mysteriously blooms between Mrs Amelia Underwood, transported unwillingly from the nineteenth century, and Carnelian, only one question matters. Is his love true, or is it just another attempt to stave off the boredom that ultimate power and the End of Time bring?

The Dancers at the End of Time is available as a Gollancz paperback and the individual volumes – An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands and The End of All Songs – are all available as SF Gateway eBooks.

You can find more of Michael Moorcock’s work in paperback here and in eBook here, and read about him in his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.