#StayAtHome: "The Revenge of the Rose"

I don't know whether Professor Barker read and enjoyed Michael Moorcock, but in spite of Phil frequently being called "the other Tolkien", there are aspects of his work that resonate more with the multiverse of Michael Moorcock.

Now don't get me wrong: Moorcock has never shown much interest in the kind of anthropological realism and sociological nuance that the Professor has built into Tekumel. One often gets the impression that the Young Kingdoms and most other settings in Moorcock's novels are just set pieces or backdrops where an Eternal Champion can have adventures and mishaps.

But a couple commonalities - at least on an aesthetic/thematic level - include science fantasy, interplanar travel, demons, and the weird. Oh, and Chaos. Or Change.

Both authors were also quite fond of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

As I started reading the second of the "late" Elric novels, The Revenge of the Rose (1991), I kept thinking of Tekumel from time-to-time. I read the novel in about a week. Like past Elric novels, there is plenty of the weird, and plenty of interplanar travel. There are also more female characters with agency than in the early Elric novels, including the Rose, who may be an incarnation of the Eternal Champion herself, and a creepy but beautiful young seeress named Charion Phatt, herself a distant descendant of Corum, an incarnation of the Eternal Champion from ancient Cornwall.

None of the women are Elric's love interest, nor do they show any interest in him. The women do scheme and work effectively with each other. In fact, Elric doesn't even fully understand the Rose's motivations, which really have nothing to do with him (he is just the Rose's instrument), until the last few pages of the novel.

The Revenge of the Rose is disjointed, and has some borrowings or parallels with The Dragon in the Sword (1987), an Erekose novel. The latter is a much more coherent novel, although Revenge has one of the most chilling examples of willful self-destruction and mass suicide that I have ever read. It is perfect reading for the pandemic.

Since finishing Revenge, I have started on the first of the late Elric novels, The Fortress of the Pearl (1989). I am about 60 pages in and it is a much more coherent, tighter narrative. I am looking forward to continuing with the Pearl before I tackle some of the LONG late Elric novels.

There are at least three more of those.

There Are Few Absolutes

On Tekumel, we see something better than "evil" races. The inimical races are classified as such (by some humans, and some non-humans) because they were either brutally displaced by humanity - and had the gall to resist - when "mankind" came to Tekumel, or had in the past contended with humanity for dominance among the stars.
There is nothing inherently evil or inherently inimical about them; the classification is entirely materialist and sociological-political rather than metaphysical.
Most or all of these aliens can be understood rationally and even negotiated with from time to time. In some places on the planet, humans even live in peace with them. All of this is possible, of course, because Tekumel was envisioned by someone who was familiar with other cultures, and traveled a bit. It also helps that Tekumel is science fictional at its roots.
So the friendly-neutral-inimical axis is not even a true alignment system; it's more of an historical anthropology.
Scholars and priests of the Five Empires however DO recognize two alignments: Stability and Change. These exist at the intersection of religious and other social institutions, and are frameworks for understanding the great interplanar intelligences that are recognized as the Gods and their Cohorts, and associated demons.
People tend to have an affinity for either Stability or Change, based on what deities are important to them personally, or to their clan or nation.
Also, anyone who studies the Aspects of the Gods, or the demons associated with particular gods, is aware that certain Aspects of a God or demon associated with Stability may have very specific characteristics associated with Change - and vice versa. Any theologian worth their salt understands that Stability and Change interpenetrate. There are few absolutes.