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From: jagardner@watmath.UUCP (Jim Gardner)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: any moorcock fans out there?
Message-ID: <15944@watmath.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 30-Jul-85 10:19:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: watmath.15944
Posted: Tue Jul 30 10:19:31 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 31-Jul-85 04:20:34 EDT
References: <3329@decwrl.UUCP>
Reply-To: jagardner@watmath.UUCP (Jim Gardner)
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 39

[...]

The concept of the Eternal Champion shows up in a lot of unusual
places.  Moorcock almost certainly plucked his from Edgar Rice
Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series.  (Is anyone surprised?
Close to the start of the first John Carter book, Carter searches
his memory and can remember taking part in wars 200 years earlier;
he cannot, however, remember being born, nor going for any length
of time when he was not fighting some war.  He had the impression
that he had fought in "some very strange places".)  Moorcock's first
published writing was a trilogy of Martian stories that are HIGHLY
reminiscent of the John Carter series.

Other Eternal Champion stuff: Adrienne Martine-Barnes wrote a so-so
novel entitled "The Dragon Rises" in which the Dragon was clearly a
duplicate of the Eternal Champion.  The jist of the story is that
there are a few souls (known by animal names) who are constantly
summoned from another "plane" to earth in order to buy off some bad
karma those souls picked up somehow.  The Dragon is the war-like one
who must eventually find peace...although it's not as bad as that makes
it sound.

I'm just now reading The Summer Tree, an unremarkable book by Guy
Gavriel Kay (for University of Toronto students out there, you might
be pleased that the protagonists are five U. of T. students).  Just a
chapter ago, the author suggested that they would eventually meet the
Eternal Champion so maybe it will turn out to be a little interesting
after all.

By the way, once you have read sufficient heroic fantasy by Moorcock,
you are ready to read the Dancers at the End of Time trilogy in which
he mercilessly rips all his other books to comic shreds.  The hero is
the Eternal Champion again, but this time gone to decadence and being
shamelessly manipulated by yet another incarnation of the Eternal
Champion.  Lots of giggles, especially for those who can catch the
multitude of snide references to Moorcock's other work.

				Jim Gardner, University of Waterloo