Taking Back Escapism

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Well, here we are—the final installment in Michael Moorcock's Kane of Old Mars trilogy. In City of the Beast, Moorcock first introduced us to the steely-eyed physicist and swordsman Michael Kane, a man catapulted across space and time by a chance invention, who hit the ground running and managed to make himself a prince of the violent, vibrant world that is ancient Mars. Moorcock himself has said that, in the early days of his career, he would sometimes only give himself a few days to write a book, and in that seminal Michael Kane tale, we felt that breathless pace—the prose light and quick, the images coming in fast succession as Kane fought blue giants, cities of thieves, and vast subterranean monsters. In its sequel, Lord of the Spiders, Michael Kane—yanked cruelly back to Earth by his fellow scientists—manages to return to his adopted world, only to find himself in a place (and perhaps time!) far removed from his beloved green city of Varnal and the gorgeous princess waiting there. With Lord of the Spiders, Moorcock keeps the same breakneck pace, but the story as a whole feels darker, as Kane's adventures become colored by his despair and deal with darker subject matter—genocide, revolution, and assassination.

In Masters of the Pit, Moorcock returns a final time to the familiar characters of Mars, who by this point feel like old friends—Hool Haji the blue giant, steadfast Princess Shizala, and of course Michael Kane. Yet rather than rehashing either of the book's predecessors, Moorcock takes the story in yet another new direction, this time with a more philosophical bent. While much of the story deals with Kane and Hool Haji traveling (and frequently battling their way) across the world in search of a cure for a deadly plague, the focus of the story seems to be not on the violent struggle, but on the moral one. By far the stars of the show in my mind are the citizens of Cend-Amrid, who in their attempt to survive through machine-like efficiency have succeeded in killing everything that made them human. Adding to the theme are the dog-men of Hahg, degenerate mutants that continue to cowardly serve the evil, winged First Masters even though freedom lies easily within their grasp. Or there's always the barbaric horde of Rokin the Gold—crude, lowbrow raiders who Kane nevertheless comes to respect for the sheer passion with which they live.

As with much of Robert E. Howard's work—and, honestly, most of the early pulp masters—it's this respect for the individual, the enshrining of action and free will as the ultimate good, that permeates Moorcock's last adventure in this series. It is, at its heart, a rebellion against the modern world where—much like the men of Cend-Amrid—many of us feel trapped as tiny cogs in a vast machine, one whose function we have little control over. And if there's anything that Moorcock's writing offers us, it's freedom. In a world where "escapist" is often a derogatory term, Moorcock stands up and wears the label proudly, and Masters of the Pit is a shining example.

I don't know about you, but I'm with him.

James Sutter
Planet Stories Editor