The title of this book is a tad deceiving in the sense that in really big letters the cover trumpets "EARL AUBEC" and then in smaller letter smushed underneath the big title you have "and other stories" when really it should be the other way around. The title probably should have been "all the stories we didn't have room to fit in the other books" but that's not as catchy and probably wouldn't sell as well. I can't fault them for wanting to make money. You get the "Earl Aubec" part over with fast, it's the first story and not very long and I really didn't see the point of it other than it's somehow related to the Elric saga, if Mr Aubec is an Eternal Champion, he's not a very memorable one. So if you're buying the book purely for that story you're going to be in for some disappointment. However, the other stories do make up for that somewhat, the rest of the book (and it's hefty, almost six hundred pages) consists of a variety of short stories and longer stories that Moorcock's done over the last thirty years or so. I'm not sure what logic he used in picking these stories over others and they do try to arrange them to give lip service to some kind of overarching "concept" but it really doesn't matter. For the most part the stories are pretty decent, showcasing his imagination and penchant for odd ideas. Some stories are really short, only a few pages and they make their point and move on, while others are much longer and develop over the course of their lengths. There's no real duffers in the lot, though, and everyone could probably pick different favorites from the set, although the quality does tend to bounce up and down. Overall, it's a good collection, only tangentially related to the Eternal Champion concept (that I could tell at least) and not really a definitive collection by any stretch of the imagination, it's more of a clearinghouse for all those stories that really don't fit anywhere else. Which is just fine and the world is a better place for having had these available in one place like this, because Moorcock is worth reading. It's probably not worth paying the ridiculous used prices that I see for the White Wolf editions (what. the. heck?) although the cover painting by Jon Muth (formerly of Epic Comics' Moonshadow, he does the interior sketches as well) is really nice, but if you see it for a reasonable price, I'd say it's worth a shot. There's so many stories in here you'll have to like something, right? Nobody's that picky, eh?
