An Alien Heat

Millions of years in the future, Earth seems to have become the equivalent of a small enclave for the super-rich, only in this case funds are superfluous. Everything in unlimited -- lifetimes, the ability to alter reality, to create new settings for your life, sexual partners. This is a playground in which one of the chief players, Jherek Carnelian, is a young man who considers himself an authority on the 19th century. First he decided to explore "virtue" as a role, but soon he decides to fall in love. Enter Mrs. Amelia Underwood, an unwilling time traveller who has been kidnapped from her comfortable life in Bromley, 1896. And there is a newly arrived alien who announces that the universe is contracting and all will be destroyed.

At times laugh-out-loud funny and endlessly inventive, this first volume of Dancers at the End of Time seems to be making me into a Moorcock fan. When Jherek follows Mrs. Underwood back to 19th century London, he cannot imagine that everything is anything more than a play set and he is delighted by all his new experiences, right up to the point that he is to be hanged for thievery. But this is a trilogy, so the story is just beginning.