Legends from the End of Time by Michael Moorcock
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When Truth Meets Reality

There is a school of idealist philosophy which holds that truth is that which will be known just before the end of time. At that apocalyptic point, mind will have grasped all that is possible to understand. Religious folk call this point the eschaton, the end of the world at which God will be revealed, a view which has the same practical import: truth finally will coincide with reality.

Moorcock takes this business of the eschaton seriously. Well, seriously in a somewhat slapstick way. A time traveller and her young son undertake an educational jaunt as far into the future as their machine will take them, that is until it runs out of time. What they find there is simultaneously expected and disconcerting.

On the one hand, just as would be anticipated by any scientifically based society, the universe is clearly suffering its inevitable heat death. Entropy rules. And it is clear that the mere existence of human minds has accelerated this process. The energy differentials of even the most distant galaxies have been tapped relentlessly to maintain the physical requirements for thought.

But what the time travellers don’t expect is that truth has not emerged at all in the way they had expected. As quasi-Puritans whose lives are regulated by an encyclopaedia of maxims, they are shocked to find that the human beings at the end of time are engaged in a kind of free-for-all block party. The ‘neighbours’ are wildly diverse in the ‘truths’ they hold; but they are joyously united in their diversity. Reality, it turns out, has properly been a matter of opinion.

The most disturbing aspect of this diversity (or uncertainty, if one prefers) is the pervasive hedonism of the final world, particularly as it is represented in art. Eschatological tastes apparently run from the kitsch to the classical, from the banal to the bizarre. In fact what little energy differential that remains is expended on spectacular air shows and other ostentatious communal displays. Humanity (consciousness, thought, rationality, mind - whichever one prefers to call the phenomenon) is going out with a bang, as typically wasteful of its resources as it has ever been.

The implication is clear. This is the point of it all, of existence. The authentic eschatological vision is one of artistic fecundity, of wildly different interpretations of existence, just for the sake of it. By the time of the final Trump, as it were, we will all be artists, each with our own unique appreciation of reality. Truth will not converge to some tedious uniformity but rather explode into eccentric, ephemeral splendour.

In Moorcock’s vision humanity is finally at ease with itself and with its fate. There is no disease. There is no fear, even of the impending End. “Evil is a word, an idea, which has very little resonance at the End of Time,” says one of its chief residents (except of course the “pale imitation of art”). There is no violence, only a light-hearted tolerance of the inherent strangeness of others. As eschatological visions go, this one seems rather attractive. As one of the end-time characters says: “What a splendid ending,”

But for those unprepared: “Beware the Future.”

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