MOORCOCK, Michael
British novelist (born 1939)
In the 1960s Moorcock edited the science fiction magazine New Worlds, pioneering and encouraging New Wave writing, which attempted to give science fiction a new social and political relevance to the time. Moorcock’s own New Wave work is at its peak in his Jerry Cornelius books (including The English Assassin and The Final Programme), which are less straightforward novels than firework displays of ideas,magical mystery tours round one man’s overheated brain. In later books Moorcock returned to a more sober style, still crammed with ideas but much easier to read. Many of his novels offer alternative versions of the present (Warlord of the Air, for example, imagines a twentieth century where the First World War never happened and the old nineteenth-century empires, British, Austrian, Russian and German, are still jockeying for power). Others (Gloriana, The Jewel in the Skull) are satires about societies which are dark and decadent perversions of our own. All of Moorcock’s work, however, is interlinked at some level, a reflection of ‘the multiverse’ he has imagined, the interconnected, parallel universes through which his characters travel. Jerry Cornelius, Elric of Melnibone (doomed albino prince of a dying race in some of Moorcock’s best sword-and-sorcery titles), Corum, Hawkmoon, Von Bek and others are all avatars of the Eternal Champion, Moorcock’s Hero With a Thousand Faces.
DANCERS AT THE END OF TIME (1981) A good starting-point to Moorcock’s multifarious, dazzling work is the series Dancers at the End of Time (An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands, The End of All Songs and a cluster of less closely related novels). The time is the very last days of the universe. The few hundred surviving members of the human race control vast energies: anything desired can be obtained by twisting a 'power ring'. Jerek Cornelian (the last human being ever to be born, an avatar of Jerry Cornelius from the earlier novels) falls in love with a strait-laced Victorian time-traveller, Mrs Amelia Underwood. He follows her back in time, and is promptly stranded in the slums of Victorian London: a typical Moorcock idea, allowing him to collapse history, fantasy, social commitment and literary parody - Cornelian gives D H.G. Wells the idea for The Time Machine unpredictable experience.
Many of Moorcock’s novels are grouped in series: The Chronicles of the Black Sword, The High History of the Runestaff, The Chronicles of Castle Brass, The Books of Corum, The History of the Eternal Champion. Byzantium Endures, The Laughter of Carthage and Jerusalem Commands are three epic novels which follow the scheming Colonel Pyat through the story, real and imagined, of the twentieth century. Mother London and King of the City are non-science fiction novels, dazzling recreations of London lives past and present.
READ ON
Behold the Man (time traveller arrives in Judaea at the time of Christ)
The Jewel in the Skull
The Dancers at the End of Time
To Mother London : Iain Snclair, Downriver Maureen Duffy, Capital
to other New Wave SF writers : Brian Aldiss , Galaxies Like Grains of Sand J.G. Ballard, The Terminal Beach
J.G. Ballard, The Day of Creation Robert Heinlein, The Number of the Beast Robert Silverberg, Tom O'Bedlam Robert E. Vardeman Victor Milan, The War of Powers
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