An Alien Heat

Part 1 of the Dancers At The End Of Time trilogy which is in turn part of a larger cycle, The Eternal Champion about the same person - or rather, the same archetypical anti-hero - being reborn in different times and contexts. In this particular one, he lives millions of years into the future, in a time when humanity has evolved and devolved to the point where we can do absolutely anything and think of absolutely nothing new - everything's roleplaying, everything's a game, including when they find out that the Universe is about to die; Moorcock might have been shooting for a satire of 70s free love, but it really comes across more like Monty Python's take on Oscar Wilde. Then along comes a time traveller from 1896, and our hero decides, for lack of anything better to do, to fall in what the old stories call "love" with her... which messes things up quite a bit, especially when he has to follow her back to her time. (Which his friends in the future think is very romantic; "like Hitler to Eva", they cry, that story having become just another myth from the past.) Satirical SF is hard to pull off, and there are times when this is really just Crocodile Dundee In The 1,000,000th Century, but then again Moorcock lands enough clever little jabs and jokes that work and make me think of a rougher, craziers Neal Stephenson to make me want to read... well, maybe not all the 100 or so novels he's supposedly written, but I'll probably finish the trilogy at some point.