Part of Series
The Sundered Worlds (retitled The Blood Red Game): The main attraction of this story is the ideas with which it's packed. The Shifter System of eleven planets orbiting around a sun traveling transversely thru the dimensions of the multiverse, phasing into normal space-time for brief periods over many years, a refuge for criminals & others who wish to escape; Roth, the ragged planet, part of the Shifter System, sections of which orbit thru the multiverse in different directions to the others; the Blood-Red Game, a ritual contest of sickness & self-revulsion, played for the highest stakes between humans & aliens of another dimension. Unfortunately the ideas tend to get slightly in the way of the story. At times the natural flow of the action is stopped completely to examine the implications of a situation. This tends to lead to overemphasis on certain parts of the plot, which otherwise, would have been less important. Nonetheless, this book sparkles with ideas & makes interesting reading. We see too that the multiverse of Moorcock has much in common with the inner world of Sellings' The Silent Speakers. These books both show that in sf, the macrocosm ultimately turns out to be identical to the microcosm. Inner space & outer space are in reality the same.—Langdon Jones, New Worlds (edited). 'Renark was born to wander under the diamond glare of a myriad suns. He was never alone because he sensed the power of unseen hands which guided the ebb & flow of the universe. Then, after two years of watching & waiting, he was ready for the great journey to the galactic rim & beyond. There he found himself in the arena of the Blood Red Game. Stakes were high. For the human race it meant extinction or rebirth.'
Author
Michael John Moorcock is an English writer primarily of science fiction and fantasy who has also published a number of literary novels. Moorcock has mentioned The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw and The Constable of St. Nicholas by Edward Lester Arnold as the first three books which captured his imagination. He became editor of Tarzan Adventures in 1956, at the age of sixteen, and later moved on to edit Sexton Blake Library. As editor of the controversial British science fiction magazine New Worlds, from May 1964 until March 1971 and then again from 1976 to 1996, Moorcock fostered the development of the science fiction "New Wave" in the UK and indirectly in the United States. His serialization of Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron was notorious for causing British MPs to condemn in Parliament the Arts Council's funding of the magazine. During this time, he occasionally wrote under the pseudonym of "James Colvin," a "house pseudonym" used by other critics on New Worlds. A spoof obituary of Colvin appeared in New Worlds #197 (January 1970), written by "William Barclay" (another Moorcock pseudonym). Moorcock, indeed, makes much use of the initials "JC", and not entirely coincidentally these are also the initials of Jesus Christ, the subject of his 1967 Nebula award-winning novella Behold the Man, which tells the story of Karl Glogauer, a time-traveller who takes on the role of Christ. They are also the initials of various "Eternal Champion" Moorcock characters such as Jerry Cornelius, Jerry Cornell and Jherek Carnelian. In more recent years, Moorcock has taken to using "Warwick Colvin, Jr." as yet another pseudonym, particularly in his Second Ether fiction.
