Michael Moorcock

Michael Moorcock (born 1939) is a noted critic, editor, and fantasy writer, part of the "New Wave" of science fiction writers in the 1970s. Perhaps his most famous works are his Eternal Champion series, a series of anti-heroic heroic fantasy novels, most famously centering on the Eternal Champion incarnation Elric of Melniboné. He has been married to two different women involved in SF: Hilary Bailey, also an author, and Jill Riches, an illustrator who did some of the cover art for Moorcock's books.

Moorcock identifies as an anarchist, and many of his works demonstrate an anarchist worldview. Many of Moorcock's characters exhibit an androgynous characteristic, or are impliedly bisexual. Moorcock has himself engaged in some kinds of feminist action: Lobbying English bookstores to move John Norman's Gor books to a less accessible location, to "marginalize stuff that works to objectify women and suggests women enjoy being beaten".

Moorcock has similarly critiqued Robert A. Heinlein and H. P. Lovecraft, among others, as authoritarians; see "Starship Stormtroopers".

Influences and references

• Mary Gentle has said her White Crow series was inspired by Michael Moorcock, as well as by Joanna Russ's character Alyx.
• Moorcock was influenced by pulp writers, including Leigh Brackett, Robert Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs; as well as classic fantasists such as Mervyn Peake. (He was friends with Mervyn Peake and Maeve Peake.)

Notable works

• Gloriana, or The Unfulfill'd Queen alternate history / fantasy about Elizabeth I of England (1979 John W. Campbell Memorial Award; 1979 World Fantasy Award (Best Novel))
• Behold the Man (1967 Nebula Award)

Criticism

• "Epic Pooh" - a critique of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings as a "Merry England" work, similar to Winnie the Pooh
• "Starship Stormtroopers" (1978 essay)
• Wizardry and Wild Romance (rev. ed. 2004, MonkeyBrain Books) (a study of epic fantasy, including of Fritz Leiber)

Further reading

• Michael Moore's website ("multiverse.org")

databases

• FantasticFiction.co.uk
• ISFDB
• "Michael Moorcock", Wikipedia

studies of

• Colin Greenland, The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British 'New Wave' in Science Fiction (1983)
• Colin Greenland, Michael Moorcock: Death Is No Obstacle (1992; book-length interview)
• Carter Kaplan, "Fractal Fantasies of Transformation: William Blake, Michael Moorcock and the Utilities of Mythographic Shamanism" in New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction, (Hassler, Donald M. & Clyde Wilcox, eds.) Univ of South Carolina Press, 2008, ISBN 1-57003-736-1, pp. 35–52