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. The establishment view of him, which he naturally deprecates, has accordingly been that ‘I struggled from the slums of pulp fiction to establish myself in the better-class literary suburbs.’

Among the many sympathetic surprises to be met with in this massive selection of Moorcock’s ‘short non-fiction’ — a mere fraction of half a century’s scribbling (‘a decision was taken to arrange the contents randomly’) — is that he has ‘never been much at ease’ with science fiction. A natural writer, from the age of eight he was steeped in Dickens, Wodehouse and Richmal Crompton’s William books — but it is ‘probably fair to say that I owe my career to Edgar Rice Burroughs’. At 14 Moorcock produced a fanzine called Burroughsania, and by 16 he was a regular contributor to Tarzan Adventures magazine. ‘Between the ages of 17 and 20,’ he recalls, ‘I was able to earn almost any amount of money by writing … and became a fairly dissolute teenager for a while.’