An Alien Heat by Michael Moorcock

This is the first book in the Dancers at the End of Time trilogy, though I read it (and read and re-read it numerous times as a teen and young adult) as a stand-alone book.

As the story begins, the universe is millions of years older than it is now and humanity has at last ceased to take itself seriously. It has also shrunk to a relative handful of individuals—but they are near-immortals with enormous amounts of power over their environment, their bodies, and, up to a point, matter itself. (Think of Q from Star Trek.) They use this tremendous power to sculpt fanciful landscapes and city-sized follies in which to throw parties and/or have sex, often at the same time. The point to all this being pleasure, and bonding, and to fight the one enemy left to them: boredom.

Into this ultimately decadent world arrives an alien, Yusharisp, from the far edge of the galaxy. He brings with him a dire warning: the universe is coming to an end. His own planet, in fact, has already been swallowed by the coming universal apocalypse, and he is traveling ahead of the wave of doom to warn as many planets as he can. 

What he has failed to predict (and could not have imagined) was that humanity was a species too fatally jaded to really believe his warning or to truly care if it is true—or perhaps too infantilized by millennia of any lack of real consequences for any action or event to truly understand the concept of finality. Also, humanity is, in this century, prone to keeping collections of captive aliens and time travelers. Yusharisp is snapped up by a colllector, preventing him (much to his baffled despair) from continuing his mission.

At about the same time, an inadvertent time traveler named Mrs. Ameila Underwood, from Victorian England, becomes part of someone else’s menagerie. Her captor brings her to a party to be shown off; there she’s spotted by our protagonist, Jherek Carnelian. His current obsession happens to be the 19th century, and he immediately becomes determined to fall in love with her.

Hijinks ensue, the plot thickens, and a Machiavellian individual’s machinations are slowly sensed by the reader—but not by poor Jherek, who ends up traveling to Victorian England, where he’s helpless as a newborn (though delighted by how friendly everyone is). Saying more would spoil the plot for you, so this is where I stop.

I don’t think anybody but Moorcock could have pulled this off. The wit, the vivid descriptions, the world-building--think Oscar Wilde meets Douglas Adams in the Q Continuum as painted by Salvador Dali. Like Q, these end-times humans have no concept of morality—how can they, when there are never any real consequences to anything, and what would be the point?  

With all their literally earth-shattering power, these people have created a surprisingly small world for themselves. Their only concerns are their own pleasure and the oddly conformist society they’ve created; they’ve lost their curiosity and turned inward to a remarkable degree, for a people with a historically unparalleled ability to satisfy their curiosity. And for all their access to knowledge, they’re shockingly ignorant about anything that doesn’t affect them directly (and much that does).

Jherek, meantime, is such an intriguing character--maybe the only truly interesting one on his planet. He’s the only person alive to have been actually born, in the old-fashioned sense, and maybe for that reason he’s a bit of a throwback. At the same time, he’s very much a creature of his time, an amoral, self-centered hedonist with no concept that there’s any other way to be. But Mrs. Underwood seems set to change that…

Well worth a read, especially as it’s both very much a period piece and oddly relevant to our times. It’s still my third-favorite Moorcock book (after Gloriana and The Warhound and the World’s Pain), and that still says a lot, even after all this time.