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. Call him ‘Michael Moorcock’. The narrative follows, roughly, the outline of the author’s known life. ‘Moorcock’ is a Londoner, an early school leaver, and smart as paint. A lover of low-lit, he edits a Tarzanfanzine before drifting into SF proper. Soon he’s running the genre.
He hangs out with the likes of J.G. Ballard (here ‘Allard’ — interested in no fiction ‘but his own’) and other SF luminaries. ‘Michael’s’ chronicle covers the first 30 years of his life. The Whispering Swarm is part one of a trilogy, devotees will be delighted to learn.
As regards oeuvre, this novel is a follow-on from Mother London (1988). That novel fantasised a London under London (laced with buried rivers, defunct tube lines, sewers) as
home of a troglodytic race that had gone underground at the time of the Great Fire, whose ranks had been added to periodically by thieves, vagabonds and escaped prisoners, receiving many fresh recruits during the Blitz when so many sought the safety of the tubes.
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