British novelist (born 1939)

In the 1960s Moorcock edited the science fiction magazine New Worlds, pioneering and encouraging New Wave writing, which attempted to give science fiction a new social and political relevance to the time. Moorcock’s own New Wave work is at its peak in his Jerry Cornelius books (including The English Assassin and The Final Programme), which are less straightforward novels than firework displays of ideas,magical mystery tours round one man’s overheated brain. In later books Moorcock returned to a more sober style, still crammed with ideas but much easier to read. Many of his novels offer alternative versions of the present (Warlord of the Air, for example, imagines a twentieth century where the First World War never happened and the old nineteenth-century empires, British, Austrian, Russian and German, are still jockeying for power). Others (Gloriana, The Jewel in the Skull) are satires about societies which are dark and decadent perversions of our own. All of Moorcock’s work, however, is interlinked at some level, a reflection of ‘the multiverse’ he has imagined, the interconnected, parallel universes through which his characters travel. Jerry Cornelius, Elric of Melnibone (doomed albino prince of a dying race in some of Moorcock’s best sword-and-sorcery titles), Corum, Hawkmoon, Von Bek and others are all avatars of the Eternal Champion, Moorcock’s Hero With a Thousand Faces.

DANCERS AT THE END OF TIME  (1981) A good starting-point to Moorcock’s multifarious, dazzling work is the series Dancers at the End of Time (An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands, The End of All Songs and a cluster of less closely related novels). The time is the very last days of the universe. The few hundred surviving members of the human race control vast energies: anything desired can be obtained by twisting a 'power ring'. Jerek Cornelian (the last human being ever to be born, an avatar of Jerry Cornelius from the earlier novels) falls in love with a strait-laced Victorian time-traveller, Mrs Amelia Underwood. He follows her back in time, and is promptly stranded in the slums of Victorian London: a typical Moorcock idea, allowing him to collapse history, fantasy, social commitment and literary parody - Cornelian gives D H.G. Wells the idea for The Time Machine unpredictable experience.

Many of Moorcock’s novels are grouped in series: The Chronicles of the Black Sword, The High History of the Runestaff, The Chronicles of Castle Brass, The Books of Corum, The History of the Eternal Champion. Byzantium Endures, The Laughter of Carthage and Jerusalem Commands are three epic novels which follow the scheming Colonel Pyat through the story, real and imagined, of the twentieth century. Mother London and King of the City are non-science fiction novels, dazzling recreations of London lives past and present.

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Behold the Man (time traveller arrives in Judaea at the time of Christ)

The Jewel in the Skull

The Dancers at the End of Time

To Mother London : Iain Snclair, Downriver Maureen Duffy, Capital

to other New Wave SF writers : Brian Aldiss , Galaxies Like Grains of Sand J.G. Ballard, The Terminal Beach

J.G. Ballard, The Day of Creation Robert Heinlein, The Number of the Beast Robert Silverberg, Tom O'Bedlam Robert E. Vardeman Victor Milan, The War of Powers

British writer (born 1943)

For the last 25 years, Iain Sinclair has been conducting his own intense, idiosyncratic, fictional study of the topography, history and inhabitants of his adopted city, London. His work does not often make easy reading. In Sinclair’s imagination there are interconnections between the most disparate phenomena and the city is a net- work of links between people (past and present), buildings, sites of numinous significance, books, rituals and power structures. This, and his highly wrought, linguistically inventive prose, make demands on the reader but the rewards are considerable. Lud Heat, influential on Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, is a mixture of prose and poetry which centres on the London churches of the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor. Sinclair’s first novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) follows the antics of a group of seedy, unscrupulous book dealers as they try to track down arcane editions of Victorian novels and joins to this a sequence of meditations and revelations about the Whitechapel murders of Jack the Ripper.

DOWNRIVER  (1991) Sinclair’s finest novel to date, as ambitious to encompass the possibilities of London as Joyce’s Ulysses is to memorialize Dublin. Built around twelve interlocking tales centred on the Thames and the life surrounding it, and incorporating characters from Victorian boatmen and visiting Aboriginal cricketers to Sixties gangsters and nuclear-waste train-drivers, Downriver is an extraordinary, ebullient celebration of the splendours and squalor of the city.

Sinclair’s other novels are Radon Daughters, Landor’s Tower, and Dining on Stones. Lights Out for the Territory is a collection of essays, London Orbital an idiosyncratic account of walks around the M25. Rodinsky’s Room (written in collaboration with the artist Rachel Lichtenstein) is an exploration of the Jewish East End focused on the mysterious disappearance of a reclusive scholar from his room above a synagogue in Princelet Street.

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Landor’s Tower (Sinclair deserts his usual setting of London in a story set entirely in the borderlands of England and Wales).

Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor Michael Moorcock, Mother London Paul West, The Women of Whitechapel Chris Petit, Robinson Nicholas Royle, The Matter of the Heart Maureen Duffy, Capital