The cavalier Michael

Michael Moorcock has put his name to more books, pamphlets and fanzines than, probably, even Michael Moorcock can count, but nothing ‘major’ over the past ten years. He’s now 75. But not, as this eruption witnesses, extinct. A cult has formed around him — Moorcockians who can discourse knowledgeably on the second aether and the ‘weirdness’ of Elric of Melniboné.

Inexhaustibly inventive, Moorcock proudly calls himself a ‘bad writer with big ideas’. He is interested in ‘New Worlds’ (the name of the science fiction journal he edited which injected 1960s postmodernism into the genre, banishing little green men and spaceships); ‘Other Worlds’ (e.g. his Pyat Quartet, which inhabits a comically alternative universe in Ukraine); and, as here, London ‘Underworlds’.

For Moorcock, London is a city of ‘psychic space’. There’s a lot of psychic spatiality in The Whispering Swarm. Holding it together is an anchoring strand of memoir. The hero-narrator is Michael Moorcock, but born in a different year with different parentage.