Born
in London in 1939, Michael Moorcock has been an important influence in
science fantasy and science fiction since the 1960's. He started out at the age
of fifteen as editor of the Tarzan Adventures magazine, eventually being
thrown off the magazine for trying to publish too much prose (it was
supposed to be a comic strip magazine). After this, he began selling
stories to the Science Fiction and Fantasy magazines of the time, coming
up with the Eternal Champion; a figure which has appeared throughout
most of his fiction. 
When
Moorcock was offered editorship of New Worlds he was already a successful
writer with the Elric character, his most famous creation, under his
belt. He took New Worlds, a traditional SF magazine filled with space
ships and sword fights, and turned it into a vehicle for the '60's alternative
culture as well as paving the way for modern contemporary fiction.
Publishing authors such as JG Ballard and Brian Aldiss who went on to
further mainstream success.
During
the New Worlds period, Moorcock created one of his most interesting and enigmatic
characters, Jerry Cornelius.
He became a modern myth figure, mirroring the culture that produced
him, a messiah for the technological age. The New Worlds authors at
the time, including Aldiss, M. John Harrison, Norman Spinrad & others,
wrote a series of stories based on this character which were released
in the anthology The Nature of the Catastrophe. Moorcock then used characters
from these stories when he went on to create the other Jerry Cornelius
novels, but taking the character to even greater heights, along with
the great supporting cast.
This
lead to a period during the 1980's where Moorcock concentrated on more
literary works and less on the more fantastic novels. That is not to
say that he ignored fantasy altogether, with brilliant works such as
The War Hound and the World's Pain. He wrote The Brothel in Rosenstrasse,
a novel of erotomania, and then plunged into the Between the Wars sequence
of novels, a series set in the earlier parts of this century looking
at the events that lead to the Holocaust, following the adventures of
an unreliable and untrustworthy Russian emigrate who stumbles from situation
to situation in an increasingly disturbing world.
Recently,
while creating the final volume of the "Between the Wars" sequence, Moorcock
has returned to writing more fantastic works, including two new Elric
volumes and the brilliant Second Ether trilogy, which combines both
a fantastic literary vision and a firm grasp of Chaos Theory.
Outrageously copied from Sweet Despise
©N.Richards - 02/2011
