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| The Michael Moorcock Collection is the definitive library of acclaimed author Michael Moorcock’s S.F. & fantasy, including the entirety of his Eternal Champion work. It is prepared and edited by John Davey, the author’s long-time bibliographer and editor, and will be published, over the course of two years, in omnibus editions by Gollancz, and as individual eBooks by the S.F. Gateway. | THE MULTIVERSE ORG |

If the people at the top think that reaching for a gun will solve the problem, why shouldn’t the people at the bottom think the same? (Michael Moorcock, “The Eternal Champion”, 1970)

Jerry Cornelius is a fictional secret agent and adventurer created by science fiction and fantasy author Michael Moorcock. Cornelius is a hipster of ambiguous and occasionally polymorphous sexuality. Many of the same characters feature in each of several Cornelius books, though the individual books have little connection with one another, having a more metafictional than causal relationship. The first Jerry Cornelius book, The Final Programme, was made into a 1973 film starring Jon Finch and Jenny Runacre. Notting Hill in London features prominently in the stories.

The series draws plot elements from Moorcock’s Elric series, as well as the Commedia dell’Arte. Moorcock hints in many places that Cornelius may be an aspect of the Eternal Champion. Characters from the Cornelius novels show up in much of Moorcock’s other fiction: The Dancers at the End of Time series has a character called Jherek Carnelian who is the son of Lord Jagged of Canaria, and there are several hints in the series that Lord Jagged may be a guise of Jerry Cornelius; the Cornelius-series character Una Persson also appears in the “Dancers” series and the Oswald Bastable books, and may also be the character Oona in the later Elric books; Colonel Pyat has his own non-SF series of books by Moorcock, beginning with Byzantium Endures.

At least five other variants of the name occur in other Moorcock works (Jerry Cornell, Jehamiah Cohnalias, Jhary-a-Conel (Corum, Runestaff), Lord Jagged of Canaria from The Dancers at the End of Time, and the anagrammatic Corum Jhaelen Irsei). A space pirate named Captain Cornelius (who like Jerry is associated with the commedia dell’arte character Pierrot) appears in Moorcock’s Doctor Who novel, The Coming of the Terraphiles.

Moorcock encouraged other authors and artists to create works about Jerry Cornelius, in a sort of early open source shared world attempt at open brand sharing. One example is Norman Spinrad’s The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde; another is Mœbius’s The Airtight Garage. The Nature of the Catastrophe, a collection of Jerry Cornelius stories and comic strips which had appeared in the International Times (with art by Mal Dean) by various hands, was published in 1971. It includes works by Moorcock himself, James Sallis, Brian Aldiss, Langdon Jones, M. John Harrison, Richard Glyn Jones, Alex Krislov and Maxim Jakubowski. | WIKIPEDIA |

It is almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity. (Michael Moorcock)

Moorcock reimagines the realm of Queen Elizabeth I and her Early Modern England as that of Queen Gloriana I of Albion, ruler of an empire stretching from “Hindustan” and “Cathay” to the “great continent of Virginia (and Kansas).” The era is a century after the time of Elizabeth I: “I wrote the book as if it was being written in the late 17th century, closer to Defoe than Shakespeare, drawing on language and understanding from that far forward, as it were,” says Moorcock. Yuletide and Twelfth Night are celebrated within a pagan spirituality and pantheon that includes Mithras, Thor, and Zeus. Albion’s capital is “Troynovante” (New Troy), which is an allusion to sixteenth century mythologies about the alleged initial settlement of England by descendants of the sacked classical kingdom of Troy. Albion’s world is one of many parallel worlds of which Gloriana’s people are just learning. Her Councillor of Philosophy, Doctor John Dee, tells her, “There are other Glorianas, other Dees, other Lord Chancellors, no doubt,” from other spheres, perhaps separated by layers of ether. Gloriana’s Thane of Hermiston has traveled to some of them, and Albion has been visited from other spheres by such as Cagliostro and Adolphus Hiddler, an Austrian who claimed to have conquered his own world. The novel’s atmosphere owes something to English writer Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, published in the 1940s and 1950s, and Moorcock dedicated Gloriana to the memory of Peake, one of his literary heroes. Similar to the castle-city of Gormenghast, Gloriana’s palace is riddled with abandoned chambers, apartments, hallways, passages, balconies, stairways, and caverns—”the walls”—within which live an underground community of runaways, escapees, and vagrants.

The Dancers at the End of Time is a series of science fiction novels and short stories written by Michael Moorcock, the setting of which is the End of Time, an era “where entropy is king and the universe has begun collapsing upon itself”. The inhabitants of this era are immortal decadents, who create flights of fancy using power rings which draw on energy devised and stored by their ancestors millions of years prior. Time travel is possible, and throughout the series various points in time are visited and revisited. Space travelers are also common, but most residents of the End of Time find leaving the planet distasteful and clichéd. The title of the series is itself taken from a poem by a fictitious 19th Century poet, Ernest Wheldrake, which Mrs. Amelia Underwood quotes in The End of All Songs. “Ernest Wheldrake” had been a pseudonym used by Algernon Charles Swinburne. The original trilogy (An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands, and The End of All Songs) was published between 1974 and 1976. The trilogy purports to tell the last love story in human history. Other stories in this sequence include The Transformation of Miss Mavis Ming (also known as A Messiah at the End of Time) which is a rewrite of the novella Constant Fire. Several short stories, some of which were included in the collection Legends from the End of Time, were published in New Worlds 7-10 (the paperback revival of the magazine). Short stories featuring Elric (“Elric at the End of Time”), and Jerry Cornelius (“The Murderer’s Song”) also feature characters and places from the End of Time. Main characters in the series include Jherek Carnelian, one of the few humans at the End of Time to have been born naturally, rather than created; Mrs Amelia Underwood, a time traveler from the late 19th century; the enigmatic Lord Jagged; and Miss Mavis Ming in the eponymous The Transformation of Miss Mavis Ming, which also features the Fireclown. (The 1993 Millennium omnibus edition of Legends from the End of Time ostensibly assembles all the stories and The Transformation of Miss Mavis Ming – under the title Constant Fire – but was affected by severe printing errors and omits the final six lines of Elric at the End of Time and all but the final chapter of Constant Fire. These were corrected for the 1997 Orion edition.)

Legends from the End of Time: Pale Roses begins with the destruction of the rainbow part of Werther de Goethe’s creation Rain by the Everlasting Concubine, Mistress Christia, and Werther’s despair. After a short interlude, Werther discovers, by the use of a parachute that closely resembles a Hot air balloon, a child (Catherine Lily Marguerite Natasha Dolores Beatrice Machineshop-Seven Flambeau Gratitude) who is the fourteen year old daughter of two time travelers, and deigns to take on the role of her now deceased parents. Following a masquerade with the theme of Childhood, Werther is passionately overcome and engages in sexual intercourse with Catherine. After the event, disgusted by what he perceives to be the enormity of his acts, he is even more disgusted in Catherine for having enjoyed what she describes as le petit mal. The story climaxes with Werther’s suicide by jumping from his tower unaided by his parachute and his subsequent resurrection. It is then revealed that Catherine is really Mistress Christia in disguise, the series of events being an attempt to reconcile after her having destroyed his rainbow. White Stars: after discovering that he had inadvertently destroyed one of Lord Shark the Unknown’s experiments with lichen, the Duke of Queens offers to duel with him in order to rid himself of his guilt. In Ancient Shadows, a time traveler, Dafnish Armatuce, and her son, Snuffles, arrive at the End of Time, and become involved with Miss Mavis Ming.

Byzantium Endures (1981) is a novel by Michael Moorcock. It is the first in the Pyat Quartet tetralogy. The book is written in the first person from the point of view of unreliable narrator Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, whose posthumous notes Moorcock claims to have transcribed. Pyat, as he is also known, describes in the novel his adventures in Tsarist then Revolutionary Russia. Born on 1 January 1900 in Kiev, Pyat dreams from early on to become a great inventor and engineer. His widowed mother, lacking any means to support his higher education, sends him at age 16 to a relative in Odessa, where Pyat is introduced to bohemian life, cocaine and sexual adventures. Making a good impression on his relative, he secures a position at a technical university in St. Petersburg. After having failed to obtain a degree, he returns to Kiev, where he manages to profit from his knowledge of machinery and runs a successful repair enterprise. The revolutionary and post revolutionary civil war bring him again to Odessa; on the way, he aligns with whatever group is in power. Finally, he manages to escape by ship to western Europe. Throughout all his wanderings, Pyat will not pass over any opportunity for self-aggrandisement, despite being a genuinely despicable character. The character appears to have been addicted to cocaine and sex. He is also obsessively antisemitic despite multiple hints that his father was Jewish.