After working on the Sexton Blake Library (a long series of thrillers) – publishing one non-sf novella for it, Caribbean Crisis ( 1962 chap) with James Cawthorn, writing together as Desmond Reid – and after doing some night-club work as a blues singer, Moorcock, inspired by John Carnell, began to contribute sf and fantasy stories to Science Fiction Adventures and Science Fantasy. The Golden Barge (written 1958 excerpt 1965 New Worlds as by William Barclay 1979) also demonstrated the precocity common to many generic writers, plus an already characteristic questioning of the violence and morality of commercial heroic fantasy, a genre he was all the same to exploit extensively for the next fifteen years. In the meantime, having left school, he became a teenage professional, contributing to Tarzan Adventures, which he edited 1957-1958, producing for it his first Heroic-Fantasy series, later assembled as Sojan (coll of linked stories with independent material 1977). In general, it is difficult to pigeonhole Moorcock's work as a whole his many titles comprise a far-reaching array of Equipoisal strategies available for the writing of Fantastika, though a high proportion of them do default in the end to fantasy, and are not treated here in detail (vts and omnis of fantasy works are selective).ĭuring his desultory schooling Moorcock wrote and published Outlaw's Own (about 1950), a hand-done magazine, continuing with several other similar Fanzine titles until 1962.

(1939- ) UK author and editor, married to Hilary Bailey 1962-1978 London-based until around 1980, and London-obsessed from his first vivid memories of the bombing in World War Two of its southern suburbs, an experience constantly reflected in his fiction – wartime London underlies many of its characteristic landscapes and Icons and its images of Entropy – and central to what may be his finest single novel, Mother London ( 1988), a work of singular complexity whose comprehensive grasp makes generic pigeonholing impossible, despite touches of Telepathy and other psi phenomena in the text (see ESP Psi Powers).

Von Bek by Michael Moorcock