No writer who lists 12 of his books and then accounts for the rest with a weary "etc. etc." can be all bad. In fact, Michael Moorcock has written far more than a dozen good books, ranging from entertaining to profound; in his native Britain, he's taken quite seriously. It's wonderful to see Moorcock grow from a genre writer into, simply, a writer, which he officially does with [Byzantium Endures[, the first of his books that's not science fiction or fantasy.

Here Moorcock has the audacious idea of telling—in this and further projected volumes—the story of the 20th century as it appears to one of its victims. The victim in question is Colonel Pyat, a charming, confused, and unscrupulous Ukrainian. (p. 42)

Pyat appeared earlier in Moorcock's four Jerry Cornelius novels as a diplomat, moving with world-weary skill through a globe in such disarray that the British Empire is under joint attack by Scotch rebels and Cossacks. Byzantium Endures is supposed to be his true story—his autobiography, in fact—and the scrupulously researched, vivid picture of Russian society collapsing during the Revolution and civil war turns out to be a more poignant image of the fall of the west than any of Moorcock's alternate or future worlds: a mainstream novel gives him far more scope to nourish the obsessions (and also the passion, zaniness, and eye for detail) that made his science fiction both fun and worthwhile. And there's no denying his literary skill, particularly when he describes a journey by train through the frozen Russian winter in oddly comforting imagery of deep black and cold white, reminiscent of Nabokov.

If Byzantium Endures has any problem, it's that the fantastic events of Pyat's life and the even more fantastic tone of his desperate commentary don't quite match. Moorcock's vision of our world's destruction may not be specific enough to ground the wild growth of his literary invention. (p. 43)