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Michael Moorcock

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Von Bek Paperback – 10 Oct. 2013

by Michael Moorcock (Author)

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This is the story of Ulrich von Bek, a cynical mercenary who sells his skills as a soldier in the wars taking place all over Europe. After the particularly horrific destruction of a city in which he played a role, von Bek decides to desert the military company he was working for and travel alone for awhile before seeking further employment.

On his solo journey, he happens upon a castle where he takes refuge with - and then falls in love with - the keeper of the castle, the beautiful Sabrina. It is in this castle that he meets Lucifer, the master of Hell, and finds out that his soul is already destined for Hell. And so, in exchange for his soul, von Bek agrees to go on a quest for Lucifer, namely to find the Cure for the World's Pain. This quest is also known as the Search for the Holy Grail.

As von Bek travels around Europe on his impossible quest, he will find himself caught up in wars, politics, intrigue and romance. But he can never forget his purpose - or the terrible bargain he has made with the devil...

Contains THE WARHOUND AND THE WORLD'S PAIN and THE CITY IN THE AUTUMN STARS.

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Book Description

Moorcock's Multiverse presents for the first time, definitive editions of Michael Moorcock's most influential work, fully revised and updated by the author.

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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Gollancz
Publication date ‏ : ‎ 10 Oct. 2013
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 608 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0575092459
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0575092457
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 420 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13 x 4.4 x 19.6 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 457,042 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 782 in Steam Punk
- 2,126 in Time Travel
- 4,630 in Military Fantasy (Books)

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Michael Moorcock

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Born in London in 1939, Michael Moorcock now lives in Texas. A prolific and award-winning writer with more than eighty works of fiction and non-fiction to his name, he is the creator of Elric, Jerry Cornelius and Colonel Pyat, amongst many other memorable characters.

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Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 November 2017
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Great value bad packaging

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Moorcock's finest mature fantasies - in a dreadful cover
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 February 2015
Format: Paperback
From the mid 1960s until the late 1980s, Moorcock was recognised by readers everywhere as one of the key Fantasy writers to precede the Sword and Sorcery boom that started with Terry Brooks' 'The Sword of Shannara' and that has continued almost unabated until today. Alongside Robert E. Howard, Poul Anderson, Tolkien (yawn), Fritz Leiber, C.L. Moore and Jack Vance, he was one of only a handful of writers who kept Sword and Sorcery alive. Before the Brooks floodgates opened (i.e. when publishers started encouraging writers to merely imitate Tolkien in order to make money from readers who slavishly wanted more of the same in huge quantity instead of quality and originality), it was impossible to fill a bay of shelves in a bookshef with heroic Fantasy novels. At any time, there might be three shelves-worth in print. By 1986, the money previously spent on publishers on SF publishing was being siphoned off for Tolkien rip-offs.

Moorcock used to be a best seller. Reading his Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon, Erekose and related books in his huge meta-series 'The Eternal Champion' (which comprises all of his pubvlished fiction, I'd say) was something you inevitably did if you read Fantasy - if you liked him, you probably preferred the original hard-and-fast, anti-heroic, lean and pulpy (and yet sometimes florid and romantic) school of swordplay and wizardry typified by Howard, Leiber, Anderson, Moore and Vance to the overblown fluffiness, pat moralising and cypher-characters of Tolkien. It's worth pointing out that this original strand of Fantasy writing - that emphasises grit, violence, angst and speed - has been in the ascendency for several years now, accoutning for the popularity of George R R Martin, Joe Abercrombie and other 'realists', who have peopled their stoires with characters with recognisable motivations and realistic shades-of-grey personalities. Sadly, many readers of these contemporary books have never read Moorcock and his peers and the reason is simple: poor and indifferent publishing.

Moorcock was well served when he was published by Mayflower/Panther/Granada/Grafton (all the same company, eventually coming under the HarperCollins aegis in the 1980s - HarperCollins Voyager is of course the name of the Collins SF/FAntasy imprint for the last 20 years). His books were everywhere, most of his mini-series were collected into handy omnibus volumes and if you were lucky, you'd bump into a dedicated genre bookseller (or another fan) in the bookshop who understood how his different series intertwined. Then, around 1990, Moorcock signed a new contract with Phoenix Orion and his books were reissued in the Millennium imprint, in awful quasi-manga jackets. Jumping ship for Gollancz (an imprint of Phoenix Orion), the books went out of print as he went into dispute with Gollancz editorial and generations of Fantasy readers came of age without ever reading his massively important work.

Then, circa 2013, Gollancz and Moorcock made up and a reissue programme started. But instead of putting his books into the handsome Fantasy Masterworks series, Gollancz instead issued his books in the worst covers they've ever had: dull, monotone covers, with tiny circular sigil illustrations (mostly from the dreadful Millennium editions) that just sit on bookshop shelfes without ever being picked up because they look so dull. Meanwhile, Gollancz now long-established Masterworks imprints for SF and Fantasy sell steadily, as new and experienced fans recognise the books as being the equivalent of Penguin Modern Classics for SF/Fantasy in genre form.

Ironically, the two excellent literary Fantasy novels contained in this omnibus ('The War Hound and the World's Pain' and 'City in the Autumn Stars') have been particular victims of these circumstances, as they both appeared in the eighties, so neither of them had long in paperback editions that were attractive enough to encourage buyers to pick them up. Consequently, they never sold as well as the long-established Elric, Hawkmoon and Corum books, even though they are - at least in terms of literary quality - much, much better novels. As much as I love the early Elric books, the Hawkmoon and Corum novels (and don't get me wrong, they're elegant, vivid, fast-moving and full of sophisticated messages despite their magazine origins and styles), I can understand why today's young Fantasy readers might find them thin stuff compared to the vast tomes by the likes of Martin, Abercrombie, Sanderson et al. However, I still think that despite their obviously fabular nature and written-for-late-teens approach, the prose tone colours, imagery, striking imagination and fleetness of these books leaves the plodding likes of most contemporary Fantasy writers standing.

The beauty of the Von Bek books is that they fall somewhere inbetween the short sharpness of Moorcock's earlier fantasies and the overblown gigantism of books like 'A Feast For Crows' (Martin) and 'Before They Are Hanged' (Abercrombie). I mention these novels because they seem to me to represent the problem with the renaissance in more 'realistic, gritty' fantasy - while Martin's early "Song of Ice and Fire" books were hard and fast despite their length, he soon became swayed by the description of him as "the American Tolkien" and started worldbuilding, making his cast and setting huge, plodding and unweildy, losing pace and tension to no good effect (and he's now well and truly bogged down, of course). As for Abercrombie, after a superb start with 'The Blade Itself', he felt he had to do a trilogy and of course this meant a tedious quest volume, when what we really wanted was more of the indolent, drunken, perverse visceral characters he painted so well. In short, the artificial commercial demand that 'If you write Fantasy, then you have to do a trilogy because Tolkien did one,' makes good writers into dull ones. It's all work and no play when you have to adhere to a formula and there's a readership who confuse quantity with quality and mistake comfortable, familiar symbols and ideas with imagination and originality. Besides, 'The Lord of the Rings' was only published in three volumes because bookbinding/printing technology couldn't accomodate such a huge pagecount in one volume in the 1950s. The book isn't really a trilogy at all - it's not three separate novels in the way Peake's 'Gormenghast' books actually are.

I digress. The Von Bek books are excellent entry-point works for new readers of Moorcock as they move swiftly, but have richer, maturer prose than his earlier fantasies, have dark, satanic and alchemical mysteries at their core and troubled characters. While 'The Warhound and the World's Pain' is fairly conventional in plot, it's beautifully muscular and doomy, whereas 'The City in the Autumn Stars; is momentous, meaty and as multi-hued as a vintage tapestry. It's also witty, sophisticated (and for long-term Moorcock readers enjoyably references many other Moorcock works - especially the Cornelius novels -with great flourishes ...but don't woprry, newbies, you won't even notice this and you don't need to yet), full of airships, talking foxes who like reading French Enlightenment philosophers, blackhearted villains and louche, decadent antiheroes. It's a rich and flavoursome book, a plethora of tastes and smells and colours, spattered with incident and escapade. Not only that, it's well written enough to satisfy the literati too.

Another plus point is the fact that these books represent Moorcock at what I believe is the most accomplished phase of his career as a Fantasy writer- the balance is just right here between style, sophistication and energy and invention. Soon after this, his later Elric books became somewhat overblown, inconsistent, vague in their moral messages and at times too flowery and even politically correct in a manner that I've found trying (sorry, Mike, you know I love your stuff generally, but one must speak as one finds). For every striking 'Dragon in the Sword', there's a fuzzy cloud like 'The Fortress of the pearl' and for every refreshing 'White Wolf's Son', there's a similarly misty 'Dreamthief's Daughter'.

So, in short, ignore the dreadful cover and buy this book if you like great Fantasy. If you're new to Moorcock, but have enjoyed Martin and Abercrombie and want to get more sophisticated, this is a good place to start, or if you've only ever read Elric or Hawkmoon, try this more literary material. You won't be sorry.

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Pennington7
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 April 2020
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
I Don’t recommend like any of the series? Bought three but like garbage maybe? Seller good

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Bob T
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Reviewed in the United States on 14 February 2025
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Product as described, delivered when promised, would use seller again.

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Sabine Müller
Grosses Kino
Reviewed in Germany on 26 July 2021
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Ein gutes Buch in tip-top Zustand

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Jetpack
An interesting look at the Von Bek family
Reviewed in the United States on 22 October 2016
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Ulrich Von Bek is a classic Moorcock character. The start of the Von Bek family (at least as far as I know for the books), he's a great character who faces his damnation.

Manfred Von Bek is another great character, disenchanted by the French Revolution. Libussa, wow. Is there another female in a Moorcock book who can control an aspect of the Eternal Champion like her?

I love the look of the Gollancz books, so getting them all.

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