Michael Moorcock was born on December 18, 1939. Moorcock’s novella “Behold the Man” won the Nebula Award in 1968. He has won the British Fantasy Award six times, for the novels The Knight of the Swords, The King of the Swords, The Sword and the Stallion, and The Hollow Lands, as well as for the short story “The Jade Man’s Eyes.” He won a special committee award from them in 1993. In 1979 he won the World Fantasy Award and…
Last month I wrote a brief feature on Thomas M. Disch and his 1968 dystopian SF novel Camp Concentration. Michael Moorcock, who serialized the novel in four issues of his magazine New Worlds (July -October, 1967), contacted me to share his own memories, and challenge my portrayal of Tom as “a tragic figure.” Tom was a close friend. Sometimes hard to be friends with. He was given to depression and to taking offence over imagined insults. In spite of this, I…
Michael Moorcock is best known today for his ambitious Eternal Champion story arc, which includes the sword & sorcery classic Elric of Melnibone, the Hawkmoon novels, the Chronicles of Corum, the Von Bek novels… and man, a whole lot more. Seriously, if you want to dive in, there’s a whole lot of reading ahead of you. The Wikipedia page, which lists roughly a billion novels and short stories in the seres, will get you started. But some of Moorcock’s most acclaimed fantasies…
Tachyon Publications released The Best of Michael Moorcock, edited by John Davey and Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, back in 2009, and I finally bought a copy last month. I don’t know what took me so long. Moorcock has an enormous back catalog of fantasy; so vast I’ll never be able to read even a fraction of it. But this book finally gives me the opportunity I’ve wanted for years: to sample the full range of Moorcock’s storytelling craft in one compact volume,…
Titan Books has been doing a marvelous service for modern fantasy fans, as they gradually reprint Michael Moorcock’s back catalog — including some of the most fondly remembered fantasy of the 20th Century. They began with his early steampunk trilogy Nomad of the Time Streams (starting with The Warlord of the Air), and continued with the complete Chronicles of Corum. This year they’ve turned their attention to the Cornelius Quartet, starring the hippest adventurer in fantasy, scientist and rock star…
Woo hoo! We have three winners! Last week we invited you to enter a contest to win one of three copies of The Final Programme, the opening volume in Michael Moorcock’s classic Cornelius Quartet, available again in a brand new edition from Titan Books. To enter, all you had to do was send us an e-mail with a one-sentence review of your favorite Michael Moorcock tale. We don’t have room to present all the entries here, but we can offer up…
Titan Books has been doing something pretty marvelous for modern fantasy fans: they’ve been gradually reprinting Michael Moorcock’s fabulous back catalog, which includes some of the most fondly remembered fantasy of the 20th Century. They began with his early steampunk trilogy Nomad of the Time Streams (which opened with The Warlord of the Air), and continued with the complete Chronicles of Corum (see our cover gallery from last May). In 2016, they’ve turned their attention to the Cornelius Quartet, starring the…
Last week I purchased a small collection of vintage paperbacks (something I do a lot). I bought it chiefly because it was inexpensive, all the books were in terrific shape… and it had a Michael Moorcock paperback I’d never seen before. The Moorcock was The Black Corridor, an Ace Science Fiction Special, written in collaboration with Moorcock’s then-wife, Hilary Bailey (author of Frankenstein’s Bride and Fifty-First State.) The Ace Science Fiction Specials are highly prized by readers and collectors alike….
I was talking about The Chronicles of Corum, which Fletcher Vredenburgh calls “the most intense and beautiful books” in Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion series, in a Vintage Treasures post recently. I was unaware at the time that Titan Books was planning to reprint the entire series in high quality trade paperback editions. If I was, I wouldn’t have spent all that time and money tracking down the 1987 Grafton paperback. The first, The Knight of the Swords, was published on…
I need to read more Michael Moorcock. I discovered Moorcock in the late 70s with An Alien Heat, the first novel in a trilogy featuring Jherek Carnelian and the Dancers at the End of Time. I discovered Elric shortly thereafter. But the other incarnations of his famous Eternal Champion — including Jerry Cornelius, Dorian Hawkmoon, and Corum — managed to escape me. Lately, however, I’ve been growing increasingly intrigued by The Chronicles of Corum, partly triggered by Fletcher Vredenburgh’s comments in…