Michael Moorcock
1 A little imagination helps
So if a little imagination helps, consider what it's like when your imagination is unreined. No reason to let a little reality stand in your way. And when the forms are constrained, it only somehow heightens the free play. Reinvention of self has rarely gone so far. Jerry's or yours.
Moorcock wrote about these stories: "Part of my original intention with the Jerry Cornelius stories was to 'liberate' the narrative; to leave it open to the reader's interpretation as much as possible - to involve the reader in such a way as to bring their own imagination into play."
These chronicles are among my favorite literary works. Each is a different literary experiment. Transform the mundane, don't let it run you down. How cool can you be? How important can you be? How intriguing can the folks you hang out with? Only Jerry seems to know. Let him show the way. Profound? Well, it's at least great, incredibly well-written fun.
Read "Dancers at the End of Time" if you want to see how well Moorcock can construct a "traditional" story. But if you want to see Moorcock's talent unleashed, give The Cornelius Quartet a try.
2 Moorcock's fabulous sf
This is Moorcock's most ambitious work. Certainly his most honest. There are a million and one experiments in literature here, not all of which come off. But according to Schopenhauer the errors of geniuses are worth a hundred truths of lesser mortals. (Or something like that.) The fact that Moorcock provides the most visceral experiences in the sort of fabulous sf universe his brain inhabits means that even when he's mistaken his point is well taken. (For a similar world, see Zelazny's stuff.) The characters of this book will live forever. Even though he's not a household word like Tolkien or Rowling he certainly will be some day. Keep your chin up Mike, the zombies will get the point eventually.
3 Here we go again
It's been argued that these books were an angry/funny response to the Vietnam War and certainly the second story A Cure For Cancer refers a lot to Vietnam. What is particularly interesting about it, however, is how it refers to the PRESENT
situation. The Administration's rationales for going into Vietnam and the military's rationales for staying there are here transported to Europe. And that's no doubt what makes the books so relevant to the immediate situation we have at the moment with Europe refusing America's rationales for going to war and the Administration reacting with an aggressive, bullying tone. The ways in which imperial adventuring are cloaked in the language of 'saving the natives' are clearly shown here. Moorcock takes the experience of British imperialism and equates it with American imperialism. He does it all, of course, with irony and black humor which gets more and more sophisticated as the series continue. The Final Program is the weakest of the books, though it parodies 60s slang rather than parroting it, and has subtleties rarely found in US fiction of the day. These books were of their time and half a century AHEAD of their time and the way in which Moorcock reveals the underbelly of his society as well as the
postures of his main character are brilliant. Unquestionably, some of the very best experimental and influential fiction of our time! Recommended at every level -- fun, funny, fantastic and literary. I would also recommend Moorcock's very latest Cornelius novella, Firing the Cathedral, with its introduction by Alan Moore.
4 Stunningly good
I found this one of the most amazing books I have ever read. After the first one, which is fairly straightforward though written with a sardonic humor, they get better and better, with more and more information adding to your first impression, rather like a good movie by Lynch, say. Don't expect anything like you've read before, even if you've read other Michael Moorcock titles. The first one deals with Jerry Cornelius's quest for revenge and the microfilm which contains the information to make the 'final program' of the title -- a computer program which will put the sum of human knowledge into a single, self-reproducing human being. The second one, A Cure for Cancer, changes pace and style and has direct reference to the Vietnam War, set in a London which has been taken over by American 'military advisors', who are occupying Europe. Here Jerry also visits America and meets Indians, black power activists and so on in his search for his sister and for the black box which enables people both to change identity and travel through the multiverse, through multiple versions of our own realities, all of which bear satirical or ironic reference to the world we know. By The English Assassin Jerry is in a coffin, living dead, being traded between his enemies and friends across a Europe embroiled in civil war which prefigures what has since happened in Yugoslavia, Russia and elsewhere. The style and the substance of the books matures and deepens as you go, but also the characters become more complex and interesting. We meet Bishop Beesley and his
daughter, Miss Brunner, the Thatcher-like character, Major Nye, the embodiment of idealistic imperialism and Colonel Pyat, whose story is continued in Moorcock holocaust series beginning with
Byzantium Endures.
References to both American and European history, especially imperial expansion, abound, but there are some wonderfully funny and dramatic scenes. Here you can see how much has been borrowed for whole series of comic books, movies and other novels, including Bryan Talbot's Luther Arkwright series and Grant Morrison's Invisibles series, along with a lot of alternative history series, such as Harry Turtledove's. But Moorcock is also a literary writer, so there is always much more going on.
By the time we get to the resolving volume The English Assassin, the books are making more and more sense on more and more levels.
This is probably the richest and most mature of the books and Moorcock manages a heart-rending Christmas resolution which has the same mixture of melancholy and merriment you find in the best Dickens. At last you start to understand why literary critics have likened Moorcock to a modern Dickens. Also, you realise that everything you have read up to this point can be interpreted in a TOTALLY different light. Don't expect anything like the regular sci-fi tale, however good. This is more like Pynchon or
DeLillo and can only be fully appreciated if you accept it as a literary novel, rather than the popular adventure novel it sometimes pretends to be! A genuine masterpiece and deserving of every praise it has received. I remain stunned and deeply
impressed. And I thought it wasn't possible to feel like this
from a novel any more. I'm now reading King of the City, which
is a weird kind of development from this. I'm looking forward to finding a copy of Mother London, which I'm told is even better!
5 I put it down
Lately, I've been reading lesser-known authors that helped define modern science fiction (Alfred Bester, Pat Franks, Walter Miller). The literary references to William Gibson and others on the back cover led me to buy this book. For only the second time in 37 years, I've put a book down unfinished and it pains me to do so.
This book failed to entice me. The language is very much mired in the mid-60's and doesn't translate well to 2000. I didn't find myself rooting for or caring for any of the characters. I don't mind amoral lead characters, so long as they are interesting. Jerry Cornelius isn't interesting. If there are parallels to the plot and events of our era, I didn't see them. The plot just kind of meanders around with little regard to time--we get minute details of going into a club and playing music, but a whole year is thrown away in two paragraphs (Jerry leaves the cave, goes to Stockholm, meets a girl, plays in a band, gets married, then Miss Brunner shows up again).
One thing I found humorous was that the cover says the music of the 80's band Human League was inspired by Jerry Cornelius. Now I know why I hated the Human League.
6 From brilliant promise to fulfilment of promise
The first book of this sequence, THE FINAL PROGRAM, is a young man finding his feet, his own voice, his own subject matter, and as far as structure goes it is pretty much all over the place.
The second book, A CURE FOR CANCER, is very much the sort of thing a crossword player or math-buff would love,because it turns narrative conventions upside down and sideways with quite extraordinary skill -- like a flyer showing off. But the third book, THE ENGLISH ASSASSIN, shows a quantum jump, both in skill, ambition and language. Moorcock is not showing off here -- he is tackling the Matter of Britain -- modern Britain, if you like, but with reference to Arthur (it opens in Tintagel) -- and Jerry Cornelius is in a state of suspended animation throughout the book. It is the fourth book, THE CONDITION OF MUZAK,which combines the virtues of the three previous books and compounds them, offering a brilliant construct, a discoverable linear narrative linking all four books and a wonderful symphony of intellectual, emotional and visionary literature. Is there a modern composer who could do it justice ? The subject matter, the commentaries, are as relevant as they always were. This is a very uncomfortable sequence, but it does not leave you with any sense of pessimism. It rises to a humane and heartening resolution, offering a sudden change of perspective which is heart-breakingl. This is the closest experience to reading a combination of Charles Dickens and James Joyce and it gets better and better the older you get. I read the old Avon edition until it fell to bits. I'm grateful for this new, much more durable book.
7 Hours of boredom---Minutes of brilliance
I bought this book due to the rave reviews I had seen. I was largely disappointed. At times the writing is brilliant, but most of the time Moorcock is just coasting. I'm not objecting to the largely idiotic plots, that is part of the charm in fact, it's just that they really don't ever go anywhere.
I think this is the kind of book that probably seemed wonderful when you were 17 and stoned half the time. It does not, however, age very well. I kept coming back to these stories over a six month time span, but never could get more than mildly involved with them. I enjoy experimental writing and stretching the limits of credulity, but these stories just pick at the fringes.
8 Racy tales of an immoral adventurer
The Cornelius Quartet provides under one cover the uncensored saga of Jerry Cornelius, a time traveling hero figure whose antics have earned him the title of the first 'cyberpunk hero' in science fiction. These racy tales of an immoral adventurer will hold appeal for a wide audience; especially for newcomers who will find the tales easy to absorb under one cover.
9 The Big Well
It's amazing how many people have drunk from Moorcock's well. Cornelius created a revolution both in literary fiction and graphic novels. It was crucial in the way cyberpunk developed and it's obvious in the surreal adventures of Steve Aylett's
Beerlight denizens, which lacks Moorcock's substance but looks to rival him one day. This is a far more complex and profound series than anything that's followed it so far, though Ingo Schulze, the young German writer, looks as if he could give Moorcock a run for his money one day. This is muscular stuff! It is by no means conventional in its attitudes. Moorcock is a literary anarchist -- but a classicist, too, so these stories have complex, sturdy structure. He's like Borges writing contemporary Stevenson (his favorite British writer) but with an irony, a wild sense of fun, a genuine prescience which none can touch. Moorcock's wit, his cunning shaping of his narratives, is all his own. He's a master. Very satisfying
reading. Take the plunge. Let him lead you down twisting branches to places you've never thought of going to before and let him stimulate your mind, because this has a way of being utterly contemporary -- as in The Nature of the Catastrophe -- with the same issues being discussed, the same trouble spots under examination. Get aboard Moorcock's Mobeus Strip Express, the wildest roller coaster in the universe!
10 Chilling, timely
Ballard and Moorcock between them seem to have an uncanny sense of the psychic future and the Cornelius Quartet, in the context of recent terrible events in New York and Washington, will offer a lot more clues to the reasons (if 'reason' is the appropriate word) than the sayings of Nostradamus.
These are deeply serious books, often couched in outrageous comedy, rather like Moorcock's later Colonel Pyat holocaust books and his recent King of the City. They bear considerable re-reading and are structured so that they can be dipped into. But they build with extraordinary relentlessness to a picture of the world in which international terrorism is virtually a way of life. These inspired the Watchman and Sandman stories of Moore and Gaiman and the whole cyberpunk movement, but in some ways they are more pointed and profound than anything which came after them.
The speech by 'General Westmoreland' -- a transcription of a real speech from the time of Vietnam -- in which the word 'Europe' is substituted throughout for 'Vietnam' has a terrible resemblance to some of less moderate language coming out of the American heartland.
11 In my own top ten
Funny, relentless, a real understanding of the international corporate world long before other people started talking about
it. Attacks on all kinds of imperialism, but not, REALLY NOT,
politically correct. Moorcock doesn't just offend conservative bigots. He gets orthodox liberals pretty mad sometimes, too.
These books don't date. Slowly, we're catching up with them,
though, and discovering what depth as well as range they have.
This is a great edition and I'm recommending it to everyone.
Imagine Lenny Bruce with the cool literary control of Evelyn Waugh and you'll get close to just how good Moorcock is.
12 The Gravity's Rainbow of British New Wave Sci-Fi
The adventures of Jerry Cornelius! To paraphrase the back of the 1977 Avon edition, copulating, hallucinating, devastating, and coming back from the dead. Frequently. What a pleasure it is to see Mister Moorcock?s wild ride back in print again.
So what?s it like? Imagine if Edgar Rice Burroughs was transmogrified into William S. Burroughs and he/she teamed up with Thomas Pynchon to leading us all screaming and mad into the sea.
In reality, this one right here in front of you, Michael Moorcock did an experimental cut-up job on his escapist power fantasies (his Elric books specifically) and managed to conjure up a priddy picture of England?s Dreaming circa 1965-1977. Magnificent characters, all suffering from a cosmic, entropic personality crisis stumble and scheme through a barely comprehensible (but nevertheless still audible) conspiracy between the forces of Chaos and Order. Or something like that. Or maybe nothing like that at all. And even if you are a Mexican American living in San Francisco (my own current incarnation) who has never been to Ladbroke Grove except in the pages of crazy books, it will all make (non)sense and seduce masterfully somehow.
Billed as the first time these four novels have appeared un-cut and uncensored in the USA, this new edition comes with a few caveats.
Upon casual inspection, the text does indeed contain the odd phrase and sentence here and there that are nowhere to be found in previous US printings (specifically that ?77 Avon edition). But the old Avon also contains the odd bit here and there that doesn?t appear in this new edition. This seems to be the case the most often with the second novel, A Cure for Cancer. To sum it up, the restored material is pretty insubstantial, as is the missing material. Until a truly Cornelius Quartet ever materialize in this multiverse, this one will do except for ...
the lack of John Clute?s introductory "The Repossession of Jerry Cornelius" essay which graced the old US edition. It was a spectacular piece of textural analysis that added much to the enjoyment and appreciation of the 900 + pages to follow.
Oh well. This is all minor picky stuff really. And what with that war going on and everything ? just get your head around it already.
13 Weird but wonderful
This is the coolest book I ever read. I can't believe it was censored in America but I can see why!! Jerry Cornelius is my hero!
14 Read the books, watch the movie
There is a new print of The Final Program movie now out from Anchor Bay on DVD and VHS. The movie is a weird version of the book, but has a lot of its flavor and is worth watching. In some places it became a cult picture, shown along with Rocky Horror Show, and it has some of that same quality, but that's really what's left from the books. According to Moorcock's account, the actors provided much of the best dialogue and the director did his best to turn the story into an Avengers episode. At one point Moorcock had to stop him putting Billie Holliday on the sound-track and at some stage removed his name from the script-writing credits. For all that, John Finch, Sterling Hayden, George Chakaris, Jenny Runacre and pretty much an all-star cast, give the picture a flair Cornelius readers will probably enjoy.
15 Chillingly Funny!
These weren't written between 1965 and 67 as the blurb says, but between 1965 and 1976, when the last book Condition of Muzak, won the prestigious literary award The Guardian Fiction Prize. They deserved the award in 1977 and they deserve some kind of award now. There are parts of these books that could have been written today -- the chilling American rationales for bombing the crap out of Europe -- but the thing that continues to make them vital is that they are increasingly easy to understand because Moorcock's sense of the social fault lines is about as accurate as anyone can get. Philip K. Dick had something similar and expressed it fairly similarly in some of his later books. It's about the search for identity and therefore affect in a modern urban landscape -- about the various strategies with which we manipulate our paths through an increasingly complex information age. That's why the cyberpunks loved it so much but there isn't one that I've read who has Moorcock's breadth and depth. This stuff has fed the imaginations of most of the admired cultural icons of our time and it's still feeding mine. This is as funny as it is terrifying. The existential human comedy.
16 Amazing Prescience -- Heartening, Too!
This is the first and still the best. The scenes in a Europe occupied by US troops (echoes of Bosnia) are uncanny and the military rationales haven't changed since Vietnam -- except you'd think they'd have some self-knowledge by now! This is by far and away more substantial than anything that followed it from the cyberpunks it influenced. But if you want the original literary rock and roll, this is it! This is the first and best 21st century urbanite adapting his identity and his morality to all the cool challenges of the Media Age. Sexy, subtle and sophisticated, yet fresh and vulgar as a new theme-park ride. With a classic Moorcock slam bang happy ending which never avoids the issues but thoroughly defines the attitudes! This is the dude who launched a thousand imitators. Read Cornelius and see why Moorcock remains the real thing. This is the literature the modernist doomsayers tells us 'doesn't exist'. He writes like an angel and thinks like the devil.
17 Moorcock's Finest
The Cornelius Quartet along with The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius, Life and Times of Jerry Cornelius, and The Entropy Tango represent some of the best fiction Moorcock has ever penned.
As a young teenager I devoured Moorcock's Eternal Champion books, but it wasn't until college that the Cornelius books held any interest for me, and at that point I had stopped reading SF/Fantasy altogether (I had Nabokov to read...). In many ways Jerry is the mature reader's Eternal Champion--the novels do echo many of the themes found in the other EC novels.
I actually find it quite daunting to sum up The Cornelius Quartet in such a limited space. My 1977 Avon edition is almost 1000 pages and the four novels that make up the Quartet offer different experiences and styles.
My nutshell: The novels are concerned with Jerry's struggle for identity amidst the entropy of urban life in 1970's London. Satirical, funny, sexy, and sad; filled with a wonderful cast of characters. It really is genre-busting--from 60's spy flick to urban realism. Postmodern (in the literary sense; search for Brian McHale). In many ways it reminds me of Pynchon's V.
I'm excited to see their re-release. They've been out of print for too long. Of Moorcock's "SF" work, these (with Behold the Man and Mother London) are the ones that should stay in print--eternally.
18 Darned if I get the point here
I've read Moorcock before and usually like his writing, but I'll be darned if I can 'get' Jerry Cornelius. Between stories, he seems to morph into a completely different person who happens to have the same name. The stories aren't great, although it very obvious that they were written in the 60s and defined a trippy lifestyle.
Nah, pass. I read 3 of the 4 stories in this book already and was ready to give up by the end of the first. I was just too stubborn to stop...
19 This book bent my little head
Its back in print!
The original ever so fashionable Jerry Corenius is back.
Having lost the paperback to the ravages of time, the elements, and avid reading I can't describe how tickled I am to have it back on my bookshelf.
The same illustrations and newspaper clippings as well as the history of Cornelius are here. Everything you remembered.
