English writer and editor

Michael Moorcock has been a pioneering science fiction author and editor for decades. He began contributing to fanzines in the 1950s, and after leaving school was professionally publishing in commercial heroic fantasy magazines. His first science fiction novel was The Sundered Worlds (1965), a metaphysical space opera which introduced his recurring concept of the "multiverse," a universe in which multiple parallel worlds co-exist and intersect. Also introduced was the figure of the Eternal Champion, who would appear in various manifestations in much of Moorcock's future work, helping tie it together into one enormous series.

Moorcock's Elric stories, with the melancholy albino hero Elric of Melnibone and his supernatural chaos-inducing sword Stormbringer, were published intermittently beginning in 1965 and constitute Moorcock's first consequential work. In contrast, the protagonist of the Jerry Cornelius series, also begun in 1965, was a portmanteau antihero painted initially in the pop colors of 1960s "Swinging London." Elric turned inside out, Cornelius was an anarchic streetwise urban ragamuffin with James Bond gear, and amorally deft at manipulating everything from women to the multiverse itself.

In the 1960s Moorcock became editor of New Worlds magazine. For some time he had bemoaned the dearth of literate and humane science fiction and fantasy, and he now began to publish works from authors such as Brian W. Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany and Norman Spinrad. Their works were soon identified as comprising a “New Wave” in the genre.

Among Moorcock’s noteworthy science fiction work thereafter is the Karl Glogauer series, which includes the Nebula award-winning Behold the Man (1969), the Oswald Bastable books (1971-81) and the far-future Dancers at the End of Time series (1972-89). What may be his finest single novel, Mother London (1988), centrally features the city with which he has been obsessed from his early, vivid memories of World War II bombing.

Moorcock continues even today to simultaneously exploit and dramatically expand the typical topics and settings of science fiction.

Selected Bibliography:
The Sundered Worlds (1965)
Stormbringer (1965)
The Final Programme (1968)
Behold the Man (1969)
Warlord of the Air (1971)
An Alien Heat (1972)
Mother London (1988)

Courtesy of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Copyright © John Clute and Peter Nicholls 1993, 1999, published by Orbit, an imprint of the Time Warner Book Group UK.