Michael Moorcock
Michael John Moorcock is an English writer, originally of science fiction and fantasy, who has published many well-received literary novels as well as comic thrillers, graphic novels and non-fiction. He has worked as an editor and is also a successful musician. He is best known for his novels about the character Elric of Melniboné, which were a seminal influence on the field of fantasy in the 1960s and 1970s.
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 of Great Britain for funding the magazine. In 2008, The Times named Moorcock in its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Moorcock is also a recording musician; he has contributed to the music acts Hawkwind, Blue Öyster Cult, Robert Calvert and Spirits Burning, and to his own project, Michael Moorcock & The Deep Fix.
Biography
Michael Moorcock was born in Mitcham, Surrey, 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 Master Mind 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 the writer Hilary Bailey, with whom he had three children: Sophie, Katherine, and Max. Moorcock is also the former husband of Jill Riches, who later married Robert Calvert. She illustrated some of Moorcock's books, including covers, among them the dustjacket for the first edition of Gloriana. In 1983, Linda Steele became Moorcock's third wife.
He was an early 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, 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 series of interviews with Moorcock about the techniques in his writing, 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, France.
Political views
Moorcock's works feature political content. In one interview, he states, "I am an anarchist and a pragmatist. My moral/philosophical position is that of an anarchist." 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 non-violent 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. For many years he has written for magazines and newspapers of all political stripes, including The Times, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Washington Post, LA Times and many others on all manner of subjects.
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, which had published at least a dozen of his own "Sojan the Swordsman" stories during that year and the next. At the age of 18, in 1958, 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, Moorcock worked on The Sexton Blake Library, a serial pulp fiction featuring Sexton Blake, which The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction referred to as the poor man's Sherlock Holmes.
Under Moorcock's leadership, New Worlds became central to "New Wave" science fiction. This movement, not of its own naming, promoted individual vision, literary style and an existential view of technological change, in contrast to generic "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. Moorcock claimed that he wanted to publish experimental/literary fiction using techniques and subject matter from generic SF but, initially at least, to marry "popular" and "literary" fiction at what he considered their natural overlap. After 1967, this policy became evident and allied to the British "pop art" movement exemplified by Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton and others. Paolozzi became "Aviation Editor".
During that time, he occasionally wrote as "James Colvin", a "house pseudonym" originally created for him by John Carnell 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 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 written longer, more literary "mainstream" novels, such as Mother London and Byzantium Endures, but he continued to revisit characters from his earlier works, such as Elric. With the publication of the third and last book in his Elric Moonbeam Roads sequence, he announced that he was "retiring" from writing heroic fantasy fiction, though he continued to write Elric's adventures as graphic novels with his long-time collaborators Walter Simonson and the late James Cawthorn and in 2021 announced that he had written a 'straight' Elric novel, within the first canon, for the 60th anniversary of his hero's appearance. He and Simonson produced the graphic novel, Elric: the Making of a Sorcerer, published by DC Comics in 2007. In 2006, he completed his highly praised 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. His most recent sequence, KABOUL, with illustrations by Miles Hyman, was published in French by Denoel.
Among other works by Moorcock are The Dancers at the End of Time, comedies set on Earth millions of years in the future; Gloriana, or The Unfulfill'd Queen, which he describes as an argument with Spenser's The Faerie Queen, set in an alternative Earth history; and the "Second Ether" sequence beginning with Blood, mixing absurdism, reminiscence and family memoir against the background of his multiverse.
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 issued by Gollancz and many of his titles are reprinted in the United States by Simon and Schuster and Titan and in France by Gallimard. Many novels and 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 and Hawkmoon series has been translated into many languages, including English. In 2025 Mutter London was published in Germany by Carcosa Verlag.