Reviews for The opium general

The average rating for The opium general based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-09-17 00:00:00 Matt Boyce Sasha Luss, Una the Goddess The Opium General - outstanding Michael Moorcock collection including a Jerry Cornelius novella, four short stories and three essays. Here goes for my write-up on the novella (a Jerry Cornelius fan just can't help himself), the title short story and one of the essays. Enjoy! THE ALCHEMIST'S QUESTION Halfway through The Alchemist's Question, we come across these telling lines: "Between 1979 and 1984 something dreadful had happened to human morale. No amount of pep-talk could re-kindle the light of optimism. The world had given itself up to despair. It had even lost confidence in the power of its own greed." Published in 1984 (echoes of the date in the above quote), The Alchemist''s Question also appears in a quartet of short novels forming Michael Moorcock's A Corenlius Calendar. This to note our British author had oodles more to say about Jerry Cornelius & Company in the years following his mind-bending, genre blasting Cornelius Quartet (The Final Programme, The Cure for Cancer, The English Assassin, The Condition of Muzak). However, unlike his Cornelius Quartet novels with their slicing and dicing of time along with shifting narratives performing loop-the-loops, the shorter Alchemist's Question unfolds in straightforward linear progression as if the Mighty Moorcock's storytelling simmers down along with Jerry Cornelius in middle age. Oh, yes, gang, Jerry is now forty-years old (sigh). Oh, Jerry C, oh Michael Moorcock, time has finally caught up with you! In the opening pages, we read: "He ran quivering white fingers through his antique hair, engulfed by nostalgia for those years when he had been the epitome, the chief troubleshooter, for the Simple Answer." And further on, we come upon this exchange: Prince Lobkowitz asks Jerry: "You're pale. Have you been ill?" "Just the end of an era." Jerry was anxious to reassure him. "Nothing serious." "End of an era," refers to those swingin' sixties, a time to experiment, a time to sweep away rigidity and welcome in fluidity, a time to come together with the Fab Four and jump with Jumpin' Jack Flash and the Stones. Going, going, gone - we're now stuck with Margaret Thatcher and her right-wing conservatism. Woops. I meant to say Miss Brunner and her death-dealing fascism. What's to be done? For Michael Moorcock to tell, but here's a hint: "Una gasped aloud. Then she was laughing. She had accepted her Goddess. Herself." THE OPIUM GENERAL A tender tale of the relationship between a former rock 'n roll star by the name of Charlie and his girlfriend, age twenty-five, hunkered down in a London basement apartment. Charlie's wartime experience is about to drive him off the deep dark end, not to mention the fact he can't put his hands on any dope. We witness the interplay of at least four elements: codependency, addiction, madness and battle fatigue (to use an old-fashioned term). You get to choose which one of the four leads the list. And here's one of my favorite bits: "He lay in his red Windsor rocker. He wore nothing but army gear, with a big belt around his waist, a sure sign of his insecurity. He drew his reproduction Luger from its holster and checked its action with profound authority. She stared at the reddish hair on his thick writs, at the flaking spots on his fingers which resembled the early stages of a disease. His large flat cheekbones seemed inflamed; there were huge bags under his eyes. he was almost forty. He was fighting off mortality as ferociously as he fought off what he called 'the mundane world'." STARSHIP STORMTROOPERS Go get 'em, Michael Moorcock! In the essay first published in 1978, in the spirit of New Worlds magazine revolution, our British author takes aim at the likes of H.P. Lovecraft (misogynist racist), Robert Heinlein (authoritarian militarist), Any Rand (right wing anti-trade unionist), J.R.R. Tolkein (upholder of bourgeois virtues) and L. Ron Hubbard (Dianetics Scientology). I wonder how Michael's views have changed, if at all, in the past 40 years. British author Michael Moorcock, born 1939

Review # 2 was written on 2012-11-26 00:00:00 Derek Nixon Originally published on my blog here in July 2001. The immediately obvious strange fact about this collection is that three quarters of it is made up of a (short) novel length Jerry Cornelius story, and that The Alchemist's Question doesn't even provide the title. This comes from one of the other seven pieces, and is about a drug addict living in a dream world, and reads something like a bridge between the Jerry Cornelius stories and the novel Moorcock wrote a short while later celebrating the English capital, Mother London. The other fiction consists of three below standard stories from the point of view of a Russian agent caught up in a future war; more interesting are the three political essays which round off the collection. The most substantial of these is a discussion of right wing politics in science fiction and fantasy, genres in which some of the most famous writers are in Moorcock's (anarchist, left wing) view extremists - Heinlein and Rand, for example, and, more unusually, Tolkien. I am not convinced that these writers are as pernicious as Moorcock makes out, partly because I don't think my politics have been changed by reading them, no matter how insidiously their views are promoted in their fiction. One of the other essays is about censorship, and the kind of hypocrisy that destroys those who disagrees while pretending to tolerate disagreement (prosecutions of anarchist bookshops for obscenity), and that is part of the distaste Moorcock felt about Thatcher's Britain which is important in The Alchemist's Question, which is the last Jerry Cornelius story. The story also draws upon the idea of the battle between Law and Chaos which is important in several of Moorcock's fantasy series, notably those involving Corum. Miss Brunner, who appears throughout the Cornelius chronicles, represents Law, rigidity and authoritarianism - to the extent that the desires to bring on a nuclear winter and make the world more uniform. She has become a figure not at all unlike an exaggeration of Margaret Thatcher. It looks as though the free spirited friends of Jerry Cornelius are about to be defeated, especially as Jerry himself is living in a semi-catatonic state. The ability to move between alternate universes is denied them, and they are trapped into trying a desperate alchemical ritual. The story is much more pessimistic in tone than the earlier Jerry Cornelius novels; this has a great deal to do with the early eighties and how depressing Moorcock found Britain at that time. It is a savage attack on the pressure to conform, much stronger even then than fifteen years earlier when the quartet of novels was written. It ends up being less successful than its predecessors, mainly because Jerry, though always present, is rendered so ineffectual, so hopeless.