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December book club canceled. Short stories instead!
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Saw a post here that mentioned Michael Moorcock as an anarchist 😎
My man moorcock is unapologetic.
I recommend The Land Leviathan (Black Attila conquers racist America) and The Champion of Garathorm (Hero becomes a woman to fulfill destiny and save the day) not because they are good but because they broach taboo topics decades ahead of the curve.
I was asking about this author recently (in this post) because a number of people referred to “Stormbringer” as an obvious white-supremacist reference but I couldn’t confirm with a fair amount of digging what everyone else seemed to know off-hand.
Is this author associated with WS? Or is this just an unfortunate result of an easy assumption that anything “storm-x” is WS-adjacent? Since I haven’t read any Moorcock, I don’t yet know. I’m just curious because I try to be aware of such things.
Stormbringer is Elric’s famous sword. You can hear someone shout it in GoT when Joffrey is about to name his sword. It’s evil and drinks the souls of those it kills, passing some of the energy to Elric.
Anyways. Elric is a sickly inbred albino prince of a an ancient , evil, and decaying empire (aka Fantasy Britain). Without his evil sword he is a total weakling pushover.
And people think this is a white power character/symbol? Blows my mind.
Thank you!
And honestly I don’t know that they do, since that thread is the only example I have off-hand where it was implied, and no one took time to explain.
These days I’m not terribly surprised to find WS ideas lurking in high-fantasy and scifi of yesteryear. (I mean, beyond the most pedestrian forms invited by the very notion of differing races/species coexisting.) ETA: I just don’t want to “cancel” some author I don’t know about without knowing why.
FWIW, Moorcock discusses often in his forewords living the hellscape of post blitz London as a preteen. I highly doubt he would ever co-sign on another nazi regime.
Honestly I’d take that as pretty strong evidence against the idle talk from that thread. If only because kids who grew up during and shortly after the war grappled with these ideas earlier than most, and did so during a period where WS was suddenly condemned quite publicly.
Thank you!