FOREWORD

MY ETERNAL CHAMPION

by Walter Mosley

My first experience with Michael Moorcock was at a little newspaper kiosk at the entrance of a tube station in London, 1968. There I saw the bright, psychedelic colors of the paperback edition of the first volume of the Corum chronicles. I was on a tour with a bunch of high school kids from California. We were supposed to be broadening our cultural awareness. But instead I spent every available moment reading that book and at least six other Moorcock masterpieces while others oohed and aahed at the Tate Gallery, Carnaby Street and a dozen other places that I never gave a second glance.

Michael Moorcock was the beginning of my literary education. He has maintained that role ever since.

Moorcock’s writing is intricate, fabulous and mellifluous. Reading his words I was, and am, reminded of music. His novels are symphonic experiences. They dance and cry and bleed and make promises that can only live in the moment of their utterance.

In the early works there was a lot of swordplay and magicks, Shakespearean villains (and heroes) locked in struggles that were both unwinnable and unending.

But these brilliant facades were only the beginning of the power Moorcock exerted over me. Reading his books I understood, for the first time (and most clearly), that a novel is only a movement, an act, a scene in the greater theme of a master fiction writer.

Moorcock’s mind encompasses not one world but a whole, and expanding, galaxy of possibilities, fates and second chances.

He understands destiny, lives under its unforgiving logic but never accepts it. Instead he rebels for us like the knight in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

Each story expands our possibilities, but in the end we hit a wall and are given the existential choice that Camus’s Mersault faced on the morning of his execution.

Michael Moorcock refuses to be guided by the dead hand of history. His lively intelligence and his spirit, hardened by the German bombing of London, makes him a beacon of hope and, oddly, a realist who tells you, “You will die, my friend, and that death may be terrible and tragic. But today you live and this is your only chance to be somebody real and tangible in the malleable, seemingly meaningless movement that some people mistake for time.”

It is a great honor for me to be given the chance to introduce Michael Moorcock in this book. It is a gift to the world that he and his writing still map our hubris and folly, our hope and our ecstatic demolition.