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Michael Moorcock (born December 18, 1939Michael Moorcock is a prolific British writer primarily of science fiction and science fantasy who has also published a number of literary novels. Moorcock's most popular works by far have been the novels, starring the character Elric of Melniboné, an anti-hero written as a deliberate reversal of what Moorcock saw as cliches commonly found in fantasy adventure novels inspired by the works of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, and a direct antithesis of Robert E. Howard's Conan.

Moorcock became editor of , from May 1964 until March 1971 and then again from 1976 to 1996, Moorcock fostered the development of the New Wave in the UK and indirectly in the U.S. His serialisation of Norman Spinrad's was notorious for causing British MPs to condemn in Parliament the Arts Council's funding of the magazine.

During this time, he occasionally wrote under the pseudonym of "James Colvin", a 'house pseudonym' used by other critics on New Worlds. A spoof obituary of Colvin later appeared in New Worlds. Moorcock, indeed, makes much use of the initials 'JC', and not entirely coincidentally these are also the initials of Jesus Christ, the subject of his 1967 Nebula award-winning novella , which tells the story of Karl Glogauer, a time-traveller who takes on the role of Christ.

In his literary novel

His work is complex and multilayered. Central to many of his fantasy novels is the concept of an "Eternal Champion", who has potentially multiple identities across multiple dimensions. This cosmogony is called the "Multiverse" within his novels. The "Eternal Champion" is engaged in a constant struggle with not only conventional notions of good and evil, but also in the struggle for balance between law and chaos. Thus the criticism of metanarratives common in post-modern critical theory finds its expression in a form widely read and understood at a variety of levels.

Moorcock's most popular works by far have been the novels, starring the character Elric of Melniboné. Moorcock wrote the first Elric stories as a deliberate reversal of the cliches common in the fantasy adventure novels inspired by the works of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (work that Moorcock despises) as well as the work of Robert E. Howard. The popularity of Elric has overshadowed his many other works, though he has worked a number of the themes of the Elric stories into his other works (the "Hawkmoon" and "Corum" novels, for example). His Eternal Champion sequence has been collected in two different editions of omnibus volumes comprising fifteen books containing several books per volume, by Victor Gollancz in the UK and by White Wolf Publishing in the US.

One of Moorcock's popular creations was Jerry Cornelius (another JC), a kind of hip secret agent of ambiguous sexuality; the same characters featured in each of several Cornelius books. These books were most obviously satirical of modern times, including the Vietnam War, and continue to feature as another variation of the Multiverse theme. The first Jerry Cornelius book, was made into a feature film.

Since the 1980s, Moorcock has tended to write literary 'mainstream' novels, such as , which have had positive reviews, but continues to revisit characters from his earlier works, like Elric, with books like (due 2005), he announced that he was 'retiring' from writing heroic fantasy fiction, though he continues to write Elric's adventures as graphic novels with his long-time collaborator Walter Simonson. He has also completed his 'Colonel Pyat' sequence, dealing with the Nazi Holocaust, which began with .

Although Moorcock is mostly known for the books mentioned above, he also wrote several novels and novellas which are staged on Earth in some million years at the End of Time. The strange characters inhabiting this world, , may seem weird at first, but Moorcock's language and storytelling manage to capture the reader after some pages. Not really fantasy (or dark fantasy, as his writing has been called by many), these stories are an example for the mastery with which the author handles science fiction, fantasy and classical fiction. His novel , while an alternative world story is not strictly a fantasy but won the John W. Campbell Award in 1978 and the World Fantasy Award in 1979. Other novels have won the British Fantasy Award, August Derleth Award. He received The Guardian Fiction Prize for , the last volume in the first Jerry Cornelius sequence, in 1977. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award, the Prix Utopiales, in Nantes, France, in 2004.

He has also collaborated with the British rock band Hawkwind on many occasions: the Hawkwind track "The Black Corridor", for example, included verbatim quotes from Moorcock's novel of the same name, and he also worked with the band on their album . Moorcock also penned the lyrics to "Sonic Attack", a SF send-up of the public information broadcast, that was part of the set.

Moorcock also collaborated with former Hawkwind frontman and resident poet, Robert Calvert (who gave the chilling declamation of "Sonic Attack"), on Calvert's albums by "Michael Moorcock and the Deep Fix" was released in 1975, which included a number of Hawkwind regulars in the credits. A second version of the album "Roller Coaster Holiday" was issued in 2004. ("The Deep Fix" was the title story of an obscure collection of short stories by "James Colvin" published in the 1960s).

Moorcock wrote the lyrics to three album tracks by the American band Blue Öyster Cult: , showing us Elric's emotions at a critical point of his story (this song may also refer to the "Warriors at the Edge of Time", which figure heavily in Moorcock's novels about John Daker; at one point his novel "The Dragon in the Sword" they call themselves the "veterans of a thousand psychic wars"), and , about his friend, the poet Bill Butler, who died of a drug overdose. Moorcock has even performed live with BÖC (in 1987 at the Atlanta, GA Dragon Con Convention) and Hawkwind.

Moorcock is a fervent supporter of the works of Mervyn Peake, and an almost equally fervent detractor of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. He met both Tolkien and C. S. Lewis in his teens, and claims to have liked them personally even though he does not admire them on artistic grounds.

Moorcock criticises works like in his essay "Epic Pooh" [1].

He cites as an example of an author who writes fantasy that is not escapist and contains meaningful themes, Fritz Leiber, one of the pioneers of sword and sorcery fiction. These views can be found in his study of epic fantasy , which was revised and reissued by MonkeyBrain Books in 2004.

Likewise, Moorcock has criticized writers who he perceives as having hidden political agendas. Among his targets are Robert A. Heinlein and H.P. Lovecraft, both of whom he attacked in a 1978 essay. In this essay (caustically entitled "Starship Stormtroopers"), he compared Heinlein's , calling it "xenophobic." Likewise, he attacked Lovecraft for having anti-semitic, misogynistic and extremely racist viewpoints, which he included in his short stories.

Moorcock has allowed a number of other writers to create stories in his fictional Jerry Cornelius universe. Brian Aldiss, M. John Harrison, Norman Spinrad and James Sallis, among others, have written such stories. In an interview published in I came out of popular fiction and Jerry was always meant to be a sort of crystal ball for others to see their own visions in — the stories were designed to work like that — a diving board, to use another analogy, from which to jump into the river and be carried along by it. [...] All of these have tended to use Jerry the way I intended to use him — as a way of seeing modern life and sometimes as a way of commenting on it. Jerry, as Harrison said, was as much a method as a character and I'm glad that others have taken to using that method. [2]

He is also a friend and fan of comics writer Alan Moore, and allowed Moore the use of several of his own copyright characters in Moore's .

In 2000, Moorcock wrote a 50,000 word outline for a computer game, which was then improved upon and fleshed out by Storm Constantine, resulting in the novel,

Moorcock was a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loose-knit group Heroic Fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's anthologies.

In 1997, Moorcock was one of the guests of honor at the Worldcon in San Antonio, Texas and as Guest of Honour at the World Fantasy Convention in Corpus Christi, Texas (2000) received a 'Howie' World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2002 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

In the 1990s, Moorcock moved to Texas in the United States. In 2004, he announced plans to move back to Europe, probably eventually settling in France and Spain.