Hero of the counterculture

Michael Moorcock’s career is indisputably heroic.

Michael Moorcock’s career is indisputably heroic. At a rate of up to 15,000 words a day, rudimentarily equipped with exercise books, bottles of Quink and a leaky Osmiroid, he has written, among other things, novels by the score, some of which — The Cornelius Quartet, The Colonel Pyat sequence — are among the most ambitious, interesting and funny to have been published since the war. He is not taken as seriously as he might be, though, because most of the rest of his fiction is in the despised and dreaded genre of SF.

In 1968, for example, he published not only two brilliant novels — Behold, The Man (Guardian Fiction Prize) and The Final Programme (the first Cornelius book, written in ten days in 1965, when it was ‘rejected … with disgust and concern for my state of mind … with anger and hatred’), but also four others: The Runestaff, The Ice Schooner, The Black Corridor and The Mad God’s Amulet.