Behold The Man

Author: Michael Moorcock

The grandfather paradox â€“ which states that if you go back in time and accidentally kill your grandfather you will never be born, so you cannot travel back in time to kill your grandfather, and on endlessly â€“ is the central problem of time travel stories. Some authors ignore it, some embrace it; but what if the purpose of time travel isn't to go back and change history, but rather to go back and put history right? That is the intriguing idea behind Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man. In contemporary London, Karl Glogauer is a misfit, neurotic, homosexual, and with a messiah complex. Indeed, at one point in his childhood, he had himself crucified on the fence of the school playground. Unable to cope with modern life, he builds a time machine and travels back to meet the man he dreams of being. But when he reaches 1st century Palestine, he discovers that the historic Jesus is a drooling idiot. But Glogauer is so committed to the idea of Jesus that he starts taking on the role, repeating the parables he can recall and using psychological tricks that pass for miracles. In the end, determined to see his impersonation through to the end, he even connives in his own betrayal and execution. The original novella won a Nebula Award. There is a line in the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Behold the Man is a powerful novel about preserving the legend in the face of the facts.

Books in Karl Glogauer Series (1)

Breakfast In The Ruins

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As editor of New Worlds, Moorcock had already done enough to claim an essential place in the history of the new wave, but he then went on to write definitive new wave fiction in the form of the Jerry Cornelius sequence: The Final Programme, A Cure for Cancer, The English Assassin and The Condition of Muzak (which won the prestigious Guardian Fiction Prize). Hip, sexually ambiguous, Cornelius is a harlequin-type character who changes identity and appearance at will. Loosely identified as a secret agent in swinging London, he is embroiled in an increasingly wild set of adventures that involve a recurring cast of characters and usually end in some massive transmogrification.

Some of these characters, sometimes under different versions of their name, recur also in the Dancers at the End of Time sequence (An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands and The End of All Songs), a science fantasy extravaganza of decadence and time travel.

Other novels that deal with the paradoxes of time travel include Up The Line by Robert Silverberg, in which a courier on a series of time tours keeps having to patch things up as tourists constantly change the past. The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold is the story of a college student who inherits a "timebelt" and ends up constantly meeting different versions of himself. Corrupting Dr Nice by John Kessel is modelled on screwball comedies with lots of paradoxes and anachronisms twisting things around to comic effect.