From his beginnings as a writer of science fiction and heroic fantasy in the early 1960s through his long, idiosyncratic, unclassifiable novels of the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Moorcock has been compared, variously but rarely adversely, with Charles...

For forty years Michael Moorcock has been an influential presence in English fiction. As a writer, editor, and sponsor of new talent, he has had a great impact on popular writing and in channeling avant-garde ideas into the mainstream. Associated with,...

Michael Moorcock has established himself at the imaginative forefront of popular writing in the 1960s and 1970s. His editorial work and his own fiction together represent a titanic effort, often against great resistance from the establishments of...

[Gloriana, or the Unfulfill'd Queen] represents something of a new departure for Michael Moorcock. Those who admire his ingenuity and creativity but deplore the lax forms in which he has often indulged them will at the outset be favourably disposed towards a Moorcock work that claims to "have some relation to The Faerie Queene". It seems to offer a change from those interminable gothic or barbarian intrigue fantasies; taking a new start, perhaps, from Sprague de Camp's and Fletch...

'This was a gift-wrapped, throwaway age, Mr Cornelius. Now the gift-wrapping is off, it's being thrown away.' And through the debris stalks Jerry Cornelius: assassin, bon vivant, universal idiot genius, specialist in the resurrection gimmick, protagonist of many novels and stories by several hands and central character of the tetralogy now completed by The Condition of Muzak. His secret, though, is that he has no character at all in the normal sense of the word. He is a nomad of the ter...

The trouble with a first-person narrator is that once he is set in motion ('I am a child of my century and as old as the century') he chugs on under his own steam and both author and reader are stuck with his manufactured personality, however bumpy the ride it produces. Since [Byzantium Endures] only takes the narrator up to the age of 20 and we are promised further instalments [to] bring the story up to date, it is prudent to ask how roadworthy Colonel Pyat really is. Michael Moorcock has, in...