Powers and Blaylock are friends and have both critiqued each other and written together, so you may find Blaylock worth checking out even in non-steampunk mode, Wolfram.

Thanks, I'll do that.

What do y'all think of Lemony Snicket? I read A Bad Beginning, and found his style irritatingly arch, but I know he's well-regarded.

At first it seemed very too gimmicky, but he grows on you like a bad habit. Now I can't wait for the last three.

I've read embarassingly little Moorcock, Jim. I tried the first Elric book when I was *just* too old for it--old enough to be embarassed by the extravagance I'd have liked before, not old enough to fuck embarassment and give in away. And I read an odd obscure one called -- The Ice Schooner? The Land Whale? Weird menage a trois set in a postapocalyptic glacier-covered Earth? -- that put me off.

The more I hear about how all Moorcock connects to all other Moorcock, the more bewildered I feel about which book to pick up first.

Neil Gaiman had a pseudo auto-biographical short story about Moorcock and Elric in Smoke and Mirrors. That's all I know of his work.

I was wondering if that was the author referenced in that story. Yeah, that story never quite made sense to me.

Wasn't Moorcock in Hawkwind for a while?

Why do so few plays move in the other direction? We get lots of Moliere and Ibsen, of course, but what happened to Racine? I understand that he's one of the Big Important French Playwrights, but I hardly see his stuff performed. Is it untranslatable? And I have no idea who the corresponding German would be. Goethe, of course, but Faust is not so much with the performability.

As someone who produces and performs for a living (or is trying to), I see two problems with most 'foreign' plays. #1, getting your hands on a good translation. #2, audience familiarity. Even Chekov and Moliere have a hard time pulling audiences in, so what hope does your smaller playwright have? Oh, and #3, how well does the culture the play is set in translate over? (Our four methods are....)

Also, Shakespeare is so revered and is considered such an integral part of 'canon' that using his plays may be unfair to the rest of the languages. How many Arthur Miller plays are translated, and in how many languages? Or, to put it differently, how often are Ben Jonson's works performed?

Sorry, I'm not trying to sound didatic or pompous. And I'm very curious about the answers to my last two questions. I'll have to research in a mo'.

Also, Shakespeare is so revered and is considered such an integral part of 'canon' that using his plays may be unfair to the rest of the languages.

Yes, but the thing is, Racine is equally canonical in French, or so I understand. Why do we import French novels but not French plays?

Yes, Hawkwind. It is absolutely impossible to get a grip on teh totality of the Eternal Champion thing, but the links are more metaphorical than plot-based - characters recur in different guises as incarnations of themselves (it happens outside Moorcock - Buffy is the Eternal Champion to a T). I've never managed to get through Elric myself. But you should really try the bastable trilogy (starts with Warlord of the Air), the Cornelius Quartet and the Dancers at the End Of Time sequence.

oswald Bastable - possibly the grown-up hero of E Nesbit's books - is a cavalry soldier who, in "our" 1904, finds himslef transported to a variety of alternate 1974 - the first is where the Pax Brittanica still holds, another where prester John invades the USA - and gets involved with the League of Temporal Adventurers (yeah, Alan Moore is to Moorcock what Oasis are to the Beatles).

The Cornelius quartet is '60s psychedelic scifi, hugely influential on cyberpunk, utterly insane.

Dancers at the end of time is a weird fin-de-seicle fantasia, again massively influential, in which a decadent fop from the End of Time falls in love with a Victorian woman-about-town. It's beautiful.

Talking from a position of 'a long time ago I used to know a very little bit about French literature' my impression is that Racine is very very French. Moliere is broad comedy that translates well; Racine, not so much.

I also studied German, admittedly in a half-assed fashion, for 2 years in college and cannot think of a single German playwright, excepting whatsisname, Mr. Mack the Knife, and do musicals count? Maybe the Germans do not write plays.

cannot think of a single German playwright, excepting whatsisname, Mr. Mack the Knife

Kurt Weill.