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The Cornelius Quartet

The Cornelius Quartet

Author: Michael Moorcock

The new wave can, all too easily, be presented as humourless, worthy stuff, but it was often exuberant, funny and full of vivid ideas. The best exemplars of this are the four loosely connected novels that introduced Michael Moorcock's recurring character of Jerry Cornelius, along with the circus of extravagant creations who spun off from these books into a variety of later novels. Jerry Cornelius (the J.C. initials appear constantly in Moorcock's work) was a polymorphous, ambisexual, secret agent who reflected all the wildest excesses of Swinging London in the first of the novels, The Final Programme. He fights his brother, his sister is kidnapped and killed, and he battles a supervillain, Miss Brunner, before emerging as a hybrid monster. In the second book, A Cure for Cancer, he is reborn with black skin and white hair and moves across a landscape that has been devastated by an occupying American army. The third novel, The English Assassin, hardly features Cornelius, a shivering wreck for most of the book, while a host of colourful subsidiary characters take part in wild adventures that spread across time. Finally The Condition of Muzak, which won the Guardian Fiction Prize, suggests that all the other stories may be fantasies in the mind of an adolescent Jerry growing up in Notting Hill. That wasn't the end of the story, of course, the characters from this quartet spread out into a host of other novels and stories, some by other writers, including a Doctor Who novel. Why it's on the list: Moorcock was already exploring the idea of the multiverse when he started writing these books, and they somehow manage to encompass the louche atmosphere of London in the Swinging Sixties, the fragmentary realities and fractured sense of identity characteristic of the new wave, and the colourful extravagance of the science fiction and fantasy he would go on to write. So this is where the new wave inserts itself into a wider range of sf and fantasy.

Books in Jerry Cornelius Series (5)

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