Michael Moorcock

• 1. Introduction

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  Michael Moorcock was born on the 18th of December 1939 in Mitcham, Surrey, and before he ever entered primary school he had already read Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Bernard Shaw, and Edwin Lester Arnold. He grew up in wartime London, watching bombs reshape the city around him, and he absorbed those ruined landscapes into the fiction he would spend a lifetime producing. The questions this documentary sets out to answer are not small ones: how does a boy from a bombarded Surrey suburb become one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945? How does an editor of a science fiction magazine redirect an entire literary movement? And how does a single invented character named Elric reshape an entire genre?

• 2. A Boy Who Would Not Wait

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  From 1950 onward, while still at school, Moorcock contributed to a magazine he called Outlaw's Own. By 1957, at the age of seventeen, he had become editor of Tarzan Adventures, a national juvenile weekly, which had already published at least a dozen of his own "Sojan the Swordsman" stories during that year and the next. At eighteen he wrote the allegorical fantasy novel The Golden Barge, a work so far ahead of his commercial moment that it sat unpublished until 1980, when Savoy Books finally issued it with an introduction by M. John Harrison. At nineteen he worked on The Sexton Blake Library, a serial pulp fiction that The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction described as the poor man's Sherlock Holmes. The speed was not an accident. Moorcock later described his working method as being able to write fifteen thousand words a day, giving himself three days per volume; that is how the Hawkmoon books came into existence. What looked like prolific output was in fact a disciplined practice rooted in his deep respect for the episodic traditions of literature, the newspaper and magazine serials that stretched back through Trollope and Dickens.

• 3. The New Worlds Revolution

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  In May 1964, Moorcock took over as editor of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds and held that post until March 1971, then again from 1976 to 1996. What he built during those years was not simply a magazine but a movement. New Worlds championed what became known as the "New Wave" in science fiction: a tendency that promoted individual vision, literary style, and an existential engagement with technological change, in contrast to the extrapolation-focused "hard science fiction" that dominated the field. After 1967, Moorcock allied the magazine's policy explicitly with the British pop art movement, bringing in Eduardo Paolozzi as Aviation Editor. The publication of Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad as a serial in 1969 proved the most contentious moment; members of Parliament condemned the Arts Council of Great Britain for funding the magazine. That controversy was not incidental. New Worlds remained controversial for as long as Moorcock edited it, precisely because controversy was a signal that something genuinely challenging was being published. Moorcock's influence on American science fiction came indirectly, through writers who had absorbed the New Wave's methods, and those methods eventually fed into the emergence of cyberpunk.

• 4. Elric and the Eternal Champion

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  Elric of Melniboné is a deliberate reversal of every cliché that had accumulated in fantasy fiction in the wake of J. R. R. Tolkien. Moorcock designed this character as a challenge to what he dismissed as "Merry England" comfort fantasy, fiction he compared in his essay "Epic Pooh" to the reassuring tone of the BBC's Children's Hour. Elric is an albino emperor, morally compromised, dependent on a soul-drinking sword named Stormbringer, drawn from a civilization in ruin. The first Elric story, The Dreaming City, appeared in 1961, and the sequence has continued in one form or another through to 2022 and the novel The Citadel of Forgotten Myths, with Moorcock announcing in 2021 a final "straight" Elric novel for the character's 60th anniversary. Central to the Elric books, and to almost everything Moorcock has written, is the concept of the Eternal Champion: a single figure who recurs across alternate universes in multiple identities, navigating the fundamental polarity between Law and Chaos. This cosmological architecture, which Moorcock calls the Multiverse, links not just the Elric books but the Hawkmoon novels, the Corum series, the Erekosë sequence, and many more. The Eternal Champion sequence was collected in omnibus volumes by Victor Gollancz in the UK and by White Wolf Publishing in the US, with the two editions differing in content due to rights issues.

• 5. Jerry Cornelius and Open Fiction

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  Jerry Cornelius is described by Moorcock himself as a hip urban adventurer of ambiguous gender, and the character was designed from the outset as what Moorcock called "a technique as much as a character." The first Cornelius book, The Final Programme, appeared in 1968 and was adapted into a feature film in 1973. The novels satirized modern life including the Vietnam War, and Moorcock has returned to Cornelius repeatedly: new Cornelius stories appeared in 1998, and Firing the Cathedral, the novella concerned with the events of 9/11, was eventually collected in the 2003 edition of The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius. The most unusual aspect of the Cornelius universe is that Moorcock actively invited other writers to inhabit it. Brian Aldiss, Hilary Bailey, M. John Harrison, Norman Spinrad, James Sallis, and Steve Aylett have all written Cornelius stories. Moorcock explained his reasoning by saying he came out of popular fiction and that Jerry was always meant to be a kind of crystal ball for others to see their own visions in, a diving board from which to jump into the river. That generosity extended elsewhere: Alan Moore used Moorcock's own character Michael Kane of Old Mars in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II, and Jerry Cornelius appeared in Moore's Century. The French artist Mœbius featured Cornelius in his comic series Le Garage Hermétique. Since 1963 Moorcock has described himself as obsessed with creating what he calls a new mythology for the current age, a kind of Commedia dell'Arte troupe of characters capable of appearing in many guises.

• 6. Music and Collaboration

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  The first album by Michael Moorcock and The Deep Fix, New Worlds Fair, was released in 1975 with contributions from Snowy White and Peter Pavli of The Third Ear Band, and with Hawkwind regulars in the credits. The band's name came from an obscure collection of short stories written under the pen name James Colvin, and the title's associations with releasing the unconscious allegedly cost the band considerable airplay while earning Moorcock what he described as a great reputation in the drug community. Moorcock's connection with Hawkwind ran deeper than his own project: the band's album Warrior on the Edge of Time, on which he collaborated, earned him a gold disc, and The Chronicle of the Black Sword was largely drawn from the Elric novels. He wrote the lyrics to "Sonic Attack", Hawkwind's science fiction satire of public information broadcasts. For Blue Öyster Cult he wrote three album tracks: "Black Blade," referring directly to the sword Stormbringer; "Veteran of the Psychic Wars," which traces Elric's emotional state at a critical point; and "The Great Sun Jester," about his friend the poet Bill Butler, who died of a drug overdose. A rare live performance by The Deep Fix took place at the Roundhouse, London, on the 18th of June 1978, at Nik Turner's Bohemian Love-In. The album Live at the Terminal Cafe, begun in Paris with Martin Stone and completed with producer Don Falcone after Stone's death in 2016, was released on the 11th of October 2019 on Cleopatra Records.

• 7. Literary Recognition

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  Moorcock won the 1967 Nebula Award for the novella Behold the Man, the story of a time-traveller named Karl Glogauer who takes on the role of Christ. A decade later, The Condition of Muzak won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1977, and Mother London was shortlisted among the final three for the Whitbread Prize alongside Rushdie and Chatwynd. Gloriana won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1979. The Pyat Quartet, which deals with the Nazi Holocaust, began in 1981 with Byzantium Endures and concluded with The Vengeance of Rome in 2006. Critics including Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, and Allan Massie have written about Moorcock's literary fiction in publications including The Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. In 2008, The Times named him one of the fifty best British novelists since 1945. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named him its 25th Grand Master in 2008, following life achievement awards from the World Fantasy Convention in 2000, the Utopiales International Festival in 2004, and the Horror Writers Association in 2005. These recognitions span genres that rarely acknowledge each other, which may be the most accurate measure of what Moorcock actually built: with the 60th-anniversary Elric novel The Citadel of Forgotten Myths published in 2022, the original 1961 character was still generating new canonical fiction more than six decades after his first appearance.