Michael Moorcock


Michael John Moorcock is an English writer and musician, primarily of science fiction and fantasy, who has also published literary novels. He is best known for his novels about the character Elric of Melniboné, a seminal influence on the field of fantasy since the 1960s and '70s.
As editor of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds, from May 1964 until March 1971 and then again from 1976 to 1996, Moorcock fostered the development of the science fiction "New Wave" in the UK and indirectly in the United States, leading to the advent of cyberpunk. His publication of Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad as a serial novel was notorious; in Parliament some British MPs condemned the Arts Council for funding the magazine. He is also a successful recording musician, contributing to the bands Hawkwind, Blue Öyster Cult and his own project.
In 2008, The Times named Moorcock in its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Biography

Michael Moorcock was born in London in December 1939, and the landscape of London, particularly the area of Notting Hill Gate and Ladbroke Grove, is an important influence in some of his fiction.
Moorcock has mentioned The Mastermind of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw and The Constable of St. Nicholas by Edwin Lester Arnold as the first three non-juvenile books that he read before beginning primary school. The first book he bought was a secondhand copy of The Pilgrim's Progress.
Moorcock is the former husband of Hilary Bailey by whom he had three children: Sophie b.1963, Katherine b.1964, and Max b. 1972. He is also the former husband of Jill Riches, who later married Robert Calvert. She illustrated some of Moorcock's books, including covers, including the Gloriana dustjacket. In 1983, Linda Steele became Moorcock's third wife.
He was an original member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, a loose-knit group of eight heroic fantasy authors founded in the 1960s and led by Lin Carter, self-selected by fantasy credentials alone.
Moorcock is the subject of four book-length works, a monograph and an interview, by Colin Greenland. In 1983, Greenland published The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British 'New Wave' in Science Fiction. He followed this with Michael Moorcock: Death is No Obstacle, a book-length interview about technique, in 1992. "Michael Moorcock: Law of Chaos" by Jeff Gardiner and "Michael Moorcock: Fiction, Fantasy and the World's Pain" by Mark Scroggins were published more recently.
In the 1990s, Moorcock moved to Texas in the United States. His wife Linda is American. He spends half of the year in Texas, the other half in Paris.

Views on politics

Moorcock's works are noted for their political nature and content. In one interview, he states, "I am an anarchist and a pragmatist. My moral/philosophical position is that of an anarchist." Further, in describing how his writing relates to his political philosophy, Moorcock says, "My books frequently deal with aristocratic heroes, gods and so forth. All of them end on a note which often states quite directly that one should serve neither gods nor masters but become one's own master."
Besides using fiction to explore his politics, Moorcock also engages in political activism. In order to "marginalize stuff that works to objectify women and suggests women enjoy being beaten", he has encouraged W H Smiths to move John Norman's Gor series novels to the top shelf.

Writer

Fiction

Moorcock began writing while he was still at school, contributing to a magazine he entitled Outlaw's Own from 1950 on.
In 1957 at the age of 17, Moorcock became editor of Tarzan Adventures, where he published at least a dozen of his own "Sojan the Swordsman" stories during that year and the next. At age 18, he wrote the allegorical fantasy novel The Golden Barge. This remained unpublished until 1980, when it was issued by Savoy Books with an introduction by M. John Harrison. At 19 years of age Moorcock also edited Sexton Blake Library and returned to late Victorian London for some of his books. Writing ever since, he has produced a huge volume of work. His first story in New Worlds was "Going Home". "The Sundered Worlds", a 57-page novella published in the November 1962 number of Science Fiction Adventures, edited by John Carnell, became, with its sequel "The Blood Red Game" from the same magazine, the basis for his 190-page paperback debut novel three years later, The Sundered Worlds.
Moorcock replaced Carnell as New Worlds editor from the May–June 1964 number. Under his leadership the magazine became central to "New Wave" science fiction. This movement promoted literary style and an existential view of technological change, in contrast to "hard science fiction", which extrapolated on technological change itself. Some "New Wave" stories were not recognisable as traditional science fiction, and New Worlds remained controversial for as long as Moorcock edited it.
During that time, he occasionally wrote as "James Colvin", a "house pseudonym" that was also used by other New Worlds critics. A spoof obituary of Colvin appeared in New Worlds #197, written by Charles Platt as "William Barclay". Moorcock makes much use of the initials "JC"; these are also the initials of Jesus Christ, the subject of his 1967 Nebula award-winning novella Behold the Man, which tells the story of Karl Glogauer, a time-traveller who takes on the role of Christ. They are also the initials of various "Eternal Champion" Moorcock characters such as Jerry Cornelius, Jerry Cornell and Jherek Carnelian. In more recent years, Moorcock has taken to using "Warwick Colvin, Jr." as a pseudonym, particularly in his "Second Ether" fiction.
Moorcock talks about much of his writing in Death Is No Obstacle by Colin Greenland, which is a book-length transcription of interviews with Moorcock about the structures in his writing.
Moorcock has also published pastiches of writers for whom he felt affection as a boy, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, and Robert E. Howard. All his fantasy adventures have elements of satire and parody, while respecting what he considers the essentials of the form. Although his heroic fantasies have been his most consistently reprinted books in the United States, he achieved prominence in the UK as a literary author, with the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1977 for The Condition of Muzak, and with Mother London later shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize.
Novels and series such as the Cornelius Quartet, Mother London, King of the City, the Pyat Quartet and the short story collection London Bone have established him in the eyes of critics such as Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and Allan Massie in publications including The Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books as a major contemporary literary novelist. In 2008 Moorcock was named by a critics' panel in The Times as one of the fifty best British novelists since 1945. Virtually all of his stories are part of his overarching "Eternal Champion" theme or oeuvre, with characters moving from one storyline and fictional universe to another, all of them interconnected.
Most of Moorcock's earlier work consisted of short stories and relatively brief novels: he has mentioned that "I could write 15,000 words a day and gave myself three days a volume. That's how, for instance, the Hawkmoon books were written." Over the period of the New Worlds editorship and his publishing of the original fantasy novels Moorcock has maintained an interest in the craft of writing and a continuing interest in the semi-journalistic craft of "pulp" authorship. This is reflected in his development of interlocking cycles which hark back to the origins of fantasy in myth and medieval cycles. This also provides an implicit link with the episodic origins of literature in newspaper/magazine serials from Trollope and Dickens onwards. None of this should be surprising given Moorcock's background in magazine publishing.
Since the 1980s, Moorcock has tended to write longer, more literary "mainstream" novels, such as Mother London and Byzantium Endures, but he continues to revisit characters from his earlier works, such as Elric, with books such as The Dreamthief's Daughter or The Skrayling Tree. With the publication of the third and last book in this series, The White Wolf's Son, he announced that he was "retiring" from writing heroic fantasy fiction, though he continues to write Elric's adventures as graphic novels with his long-time collaborators Walter Simonson and the late James Cawthorn. Together, they produced the graphic novel, Elric: the Making of a Sorcerer, published by DC Comics in 2007. He has also completed his Colonel Pyat sequence, dealing with the Nazi Holocaust. This began in 1981 with Byzantium Endures, continued through The Laughter of Carthage and Jerusalem Commands, and culminated with The Vengeance of Rome.
Among other works by Moorcock are The Dancers at the End of Time, set on Earth millions of years in the future, Gloriana, or The Unfulfill'd Queen, set in an alternative Earth history and the 'Second Ether' sequence beginning with 'BLOOD'.
Moorcock is prone to revising his existing work, with the result that different editions of a given book may contain significant variations. The changes range from simple retitlings to character name changes, major textual alterations, and even complete restructurings.
A new, final revision of almost Moorcock's entire oeuvre, with the exception of his literary novels Mother London, King of the City and the Pyat quartet, is being issued by Gollancz and many of his titles are being reprinted in the United States and France. Many comics based on his work are being reprinted by Titan Books under the general title The Michael Moorcock Library, while in France a new adaptation of the Elric series has been translated into many languages, including English.

Elric of Melniboné

Moorcock's best-selling works have been the "Elric of Melniboné" stories. In these books, Elric is written as a deliberate reversal of what Moorcock saw as clichés commonly found in fantasy adventure novels inspired by the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, and a direct antithesis of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian.
Moorcock's work is complex and multilayered. Central to many of his fantasy novels is the concept of an "Eternal Champion", who has potentially multiple identities across multiple dimensions of reality and alternative universes. This cosmology is called the "Multiverse" within his novels and independently mirrors the concept which arose in particle physics in the 1960s and is still a current theory in high energy physics. The Multiverse deals with various primal polarities such as good and evil, law and chaos, and order and entropy.
The success of Elric has overshadowed his many other works, though he has worked a number of the themes of the Elric stories into his other works and Elric appears in the Jerry Cornelius and Dancers at the End of Time cycles. His Eternal Champion sequence has been collected in two different editions of omnibus volumes totalling 16 books containing several books per volume, by Victor Gollancz in the UK and by White Wolf Publishing in the US. There have been several uncompleted attempts to make an Elric film. Currently The Mythology Company have a film project in hand with a script by Glen Mazzara. In February 2019 BBC Studios announced that they had secured the rights to the Runestaff series of fantasy novels, which feature Hawkmoon as their hero.

Jerry Cornelius

Another of Moorcock's creations is Jerry Cornelius, a kind of hip urban adventurer of ambiguous gender; the same characters featured in each of several Cornelius books. These books were most obviously satirical of modern times, including the Vietnam War, and continue to feature as another variation of the Multiverse theme. The first Jerry Cornelius book, The Final Programme, was made into a feature film in 1973. Its story line is essentially identical to two of the Elric stories: The Dreaming City and The Dead Gods' Book. Since 1998, Moorcock has returned to Cornelius in a series of new stories: The Spencer Inheritance, The Camus Connection, Cheering for the Rockets, and Firing the Cathedral, which was concerned with 9/11. All four novellas were included in the 2003 edition of The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius. Moorcock's most recent Cornelius stories, "Modem Times", appeared in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume 2, published in 2008, this was expanded in 2011 as "Modem Times 2.0". Additionally, a version of Cornelius also appeared in Moorcock's 2010 Doctor Who novel The Coming of the Terraphiles. Pegging the President, The Fracking Factory are two recent novellas and further stories are forthcoming.
Since the 1990s he has worked on novels containing autobiography and fake autobiography mixed with fantasy and parody beginning with "Blood" and "The War Amongst the Angels". His most recent sequence began with "The Whispering Swarm", published to critical success in 2015. "The Woods of Arcady" is forthcoming. With "Kaboul" he continued to publish original work in France.

Views on fiction writing

Moorcock is a fervent supporter of the works of Mervyn Peake.
He cites Fritz Leiber, an important sword and sorcery pioneer, as an author who writes fantasy that is not escapist and contains meaningful themes. These views can be found in his study of epic fantasy, Wizardry and Wild Romance which was revised and reissued by MonkeyBrain Books in 2004—its first U.S. edition catalogued by ISFDB.
Moorcock is somewhat dismissive of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. He met both Tolkien and C. S. Lewis in his teens, and claims to have liked them personally even though he does not admire them on artistic grounds. Moorcock criticised works such as The Lord of the Rings for their "Merry England" point of view, famously equating Tolkien's novel to Winnie-the-Pooh in his essay Epic Pooh. Even so, James Cawthorn and Moorcock included The Lord of the Rings in Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, and their review is not dismissive.
Moorcock has also criticized writers for their political agendas. He included Robert A. Heinlein and H. P. Lovecraft among this group in a 1978 essay, "Starship Stormtroopers". There he criticised the production of "authoritarian" fiction by certain canonical writers, and Lovecraft for having antisemitic, misogynistic and extremely racist viewpoints that he weaved into his short stories.

Sharing fictional universes with others

Moorcock has allowed a number of other writers to create stories in his fictional Jerry Cornelius universe. Brian Aldiss, M. John Harrison, Norman Spinrad, James Sallis, and Steve Aylett, among others, have written such stories. Many others have appeared on a Moorcock Facebook page. In an interview published in The Internet Review of Science Fiction, Moorcock explains the reason for sharing his character:
Two short stories by Keith Roberts, "Coranda" and "The Wreck of the Kissing Bitch", are set in the frozen Matto Grosso plateau of Moorcock's 1969 novel, The Ice Schooner.
Elric of Melnibone and Moonglum appear in Karl Edward Wagner's story "The Gothic Touch", where they meet with Kane, who borrows Elric for his ability to deal with demons.
He is a friend and fan of comic book writer Alan Moore, and allowed Moore the use of his own character, Michael Kane of Old Mars, mentioned in Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II. The two men appeared on stage at the Vanbrugh Theatre in London in January 2006 where they discussed Moorcock's work. The Green City from Warriors of Mars was also referenced in Larry Niven's Rainbow Mars. Moorcock's character Jerry Cornelius appeared in Moore's .
Cornelius also appeared in French artist Mœbius' comic series Le Garage Hermétique.
In 1995–96, Moorcock wrote a script for a computer game/film/novel by Origin Systems. When Electronic Arts bought Origins, the game was cancelled, but Moorcock's 40,000-word treatment was fleshed out by Storm Constantine, resulting in the novel Silverheart. The story is set in Karadur-Shriltasi, a city at the heart of the Multiverse. A second novel, Dragonskin, was described as being in preparation, with Constantine as the main writer, but has not yet been delivered. Moorcock abandoned a memoir about his friends Mervyn Peake and Maeve Gilmore because he felt it was too personal.
He wrote prose and verse for The Sunday Books first publication in French to accompany a set of unpublished Peake drawings. His book The Metatemporal Detective was published in 2007. His most recent book to be published first in French is Kaboul, in 2018.
In November 2009, Moorcock announced that he would be writing a Doctor Who novel for BBC Books in 2010, making it one of the few occasions when he has written stories set in other people's "shared universes". The novel The Coming of the Terraphiles was released in October 2010. The story merges Doctor Who with many of Moorcock's characters from the multiverse, notably Captain Cornelius and his pirates. In 2016 Moorcock published the first novel in what he terms a literary experiment, blending memoir and fantasy, The Whispering Swarm. In 2018 he announced his completion of the second volume The Woods of Arcady. His Jerry Cornelius novella Pegging the President was launched in 2018 at Shakespeare and Co, Paris, where he discussed his work with Hari Kunzru and reaffirmed his commitment to literary experiment.
Moorcock is a member of the College of Pataphysicians.

Audiobooks

The first of an audiobook series of unabridged Elric novels, with new work read by Moorcock, began appearing from AudioRealms; however, is no longer in business. The second audiobook in the series – The Sailor on the Seas of Fate – was published in 2007. There have been audio-books of Corum and others, several of which were unofficial and A Winter Admiral and Furniture are audio versions of short stories.

Music

Michael Moorcock & The Deep Fix

Moorcock has his own music project, which records under the name Michael Moorcock & The Deep Fix. The Deep Fix was the title story of an obscure collection of short stories by James Colvin that was published in the 1960s. The Deep Fix was also the fictional band fronted by Moorcock's character Jerry Cornelius.
The first album New Worlds Fair was released in 1975. The album included Snowy White and a number of Hawkwind regulars in the credits. A second version of the New Worlds album was issued in 2004 under the album name Roller Coaster Holiday. A non-album single, "Starcruiser" coupled with "Dodgem Dude", was belatedly issued in 1980.
The Deep Fix band gave a rare live performance at the Roundhouse, London on 18 June 1978 at Nik Turner's Bohemian Love-In, headlined by Turner's band Sphynx and also featuring Tanz Der Youth with Brian James, Lightning Raiders, Steve Took's Horns, Roger Ruskin and others.
In 1982, as a trio with Pete Pavli and Drachen Theaker, some recordings were issued on Hawkwind, Friends and Relations and a limited-edition 7" single of "Brothel in Rosenstrasse" backed with "Time Centre".
In 2008, The Entropy Tango & Gloriana Demo Sessions by Michael Moorcock & The Deep Fix was released. These were sessions for planned albums based on two of Moorcock's novels, Gloriana, or The Unfulfill'd Queen and The Entropy Tango, which were never completed.
Working with Martin Stone, Moorcock began recording a new Deep Fix album in Paris, Live From the Terminal Cafe. Following Stone's death in 2016, Moorcock made plans to complete the album with producer Don Falcone. In 2019, Moorcock announced the completion of the album, and release date.
2020: Michael’s latest album - Live at the Terminal Cafe - is on Cleopatra Records.

with Hawkwind

Moorcock collaborated with the British rock band Hawkwind on many occasions: the Hawkwind track "The Black Corridor", for example, included verbatim quotes from Moorcock's novel of the same name, and he worked with the band on their album Warrior on the Edge of Time, for which he earned a gold disc. Moorcock also wrote the lyrics to "Sonic Attack", a Sci-Fi satire of the public information broadcast, that was part of Hawkwind's Space Ritual set. Hawkwind's album The Chronicle of the Black Sword was largely based on the Elric novels. Moorcock appeared on stage with the band on many occasions, including the Black Sword tour. His contributions were removed from the original release of the Live Chronicles album, recorded on this tour, for legal reasons, but have subsequently appeared on some double-CD versions. He can also be seen performing on the DVD version of Chronicle of the Black Sword.

with Robert Calvert

Moorcock also collaborated with former Hawkwind frontman and resident poet, Robert Calvert, on Calvert's albums Lucky Leif and the Longships and Hype, playing guitar and banjo and singing background vocals.

with Blue Öyster Cult

Moorcock wrote the lyrics to three album tracks by the American band Blue Öyster Cult: "Black Blade", referring to the sword Stormbringer in the Elric books, "Veteran of the Psychic Wars", showing us Elric's emotions at a critical point of his story, and "The Great Sun Jester", about his friend, the poet Bill Butler, who died of a drug overdose. Moorcock has performed live with BÖC.

with Spirits Burning

Moorcock contributed vocals and harmonica to the Spirits Burning & Michael Moorcock CD An Alien Heat, released in 2018. Most of the lyrics were lifted from or based on text in his novel An Alien Heat. The album includes contributions from Albert Bouchard and other members of Blue Öyster Cult, as well as former members of Hawkwind. Moorcock also appeared on five tracks on the Spirits Burning CD Alien Injection, released in 2008. He is credited with singing lead vocals and playing guitar and mandolin. The performances used on the CD were from The Entropy Tango & Gloriana Demo Sessions.

Awards and honours

Michael Moorcock has received great recognition for his career contributions as well as for particular works.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Moorcock in 2002, its seventh class of two deceased and two living writers. He also received life achievement awards at the World Fantasy Convention in 2000, at the Utopiales International Festival in 2004, from the Horror Writers Association in 2005, and from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2008.
He was "Co-Guest of Honor" at the 1976 World Fantasy Convention in New York City and one Guest of Honor at the 1997 55th World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio, Texas.
;Awards for particular works
and other stories in various anthologies
As well as a series of Best SF Stories from New Wolds and The Traps of Time, Moorcock has also edited other volumes, including two bringing together examples of invasion literature: