Tachyon Publications: The Best of Michael Moorcock, Michael Moorcock


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			Michael Moorcock

			Visit the Michael Moorcock website.

	Michael Moorcock is amongst the most influential British authors of fantasy, science fiction, and mainstream literature. His many novels include the Elric series, the Cornelius Quartet, Gloriana, Mother London, and King of the City. Moorcock has received the Nebula, World Fantasy, and British Science Fiction Awards and is a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. As editor of the science fiction magazine New Worlds, Moorcock was one of the progenitors of the experimental and controversial New Wave literary science fiction movement. His nonfiction has appeared in many UK outlets including the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, and the New Statesman. A member of the progressive rock band Hawkwind, Moorcock received a platinum disc for the album Warrior on the Edge of Time.

The Best of Michael Moorcock

by Michael Moorcock

Trade paperback / 412 pp. / May 2009 / 978-1-892391-86-5

Edited by John Davey with Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Cover art and design by Ann Monn
Interior design by John Coulthart

From the legendary author of the Elric sagas, a Science Fiction Grand Master, a platinum album-receiving rock star, and the controversial editor of the New Wave's New Worlds, this definitive collection captures the incomparable short fiction of one of science fiction and literature's most important contemporary writers.

These exceptional stories range effortlessly from the genre tales that continue to define fantasy to the author's critically-acclaimed mainstream works. Classic offerings include the Nebula award-winning novella "Behold the Man," which introduces a time traveler and unlikely messiah that H.G. Wells never imagined, "The Visible Men," a recent tale of the ambiguous and androgynous secret agent Jerry Cornelius, the trilogy "My Experiences in the Third World War," where a Russian agent in an alternate Cambodia is powerless to prevent an inevitable march toward nuclear disaster, and "A Portrait in Ivory," a Melibone story of troubled anti-hero Elric and his soul-stealing sword, Stormbringer.

Newer work handpicked by the expert editing team includes one previously unpublished story and three uncollected stories. With all of his finest stories finally collected in one volume, this book is a long-overdue tribute to an extraordinarily gifted, versatile and much-beloved author.

Contents

Introduction by John Davey
A Portrait in Ivory
The Visible Men
A Dead Singer
Lunching with the Antichrist
The Opium General
Behold the Man
A Winter Admiral
London Bone
Colour
My Experiences in the Third World War:
*Going to Canada
*Leaving Pasadena
*Crossing into Cambodia
Doves in the Circle
The Deep Fix
The Birds of the Moon
The Cairene Purse
A Slow Saturday Night at the Surrealist Sporting Club
Afterword by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Praise for The Best of Michael Moorcock

"The 17 stories in this collection demonstrate the breadth of scope
and the excellence in storytelling of sf Grandmaster and multigenre author
Moorcock...Moorcock crosses genres, bends boundaries, and breaks rules as
only a master storyteller can."
-Library Journal

"...Moorcock is a throwback to such outsized 19th-century novelistic
talents as Dickens and Tolstoy."
-Locus

"[Moorcock] introduced me to the ridiculously powerful things that
happen when you put a sophisticated, contemporary literary vocabulary at the service of a blackly grim high-fantasy imagination. A giant of the genre in every possible sense."
-TIME magazine - Nerd World Blog

"It is all quintessential Moorcock - a wild, fascinating batch of
stories fairly balancing the fantastic and the nearly ordinary, and
showcasing Moorcock's talent very well, thank you."
-Booklist

"...a handy, one-volume collection that serves as a superb
introduction to the boundless imagination of this unique and fascinating
author..."
-Bookgasm

"..something for everyone to love...this collection illustrates the
breadth of Moorcock's talent. A long-overdue retrospective."
-The Guardian (Manchester)

Praise for the author

"The greatest writer of post-Tolkien British fantasy."
-Michael Chabon.

"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."
-Walter Mosley

"Moorcock weaves history, myth and alternate realities into a seamless whole."
-Publishers Weekly

"He is a giant. If you are at all interested in fantastic fiction, you must read Michael Moorcock."
-Tad Williams.

"A major novelist of enormous ambition."
-Washington Post.

"He is the master storyteller of our time."
-Angela Carter.

"Moorcock has the bravura of the nineteenth-century novelist; he takes risks, he uses fiction as if it were a divining rod for the age's most significant concerns."
-Peter Ackroyd.

"A master craftsman at the height of his powers. He has the energy of a Golden Age author."
-Iain Sinclair.

"The 20th century's central fantasist."
-John Clute.

"No one at the moment in England is doing more to break down the artificial divisions that have grown up in novel writing - realism, surrealism, science fiction, historical fiction, social satire, the poetic novel - than Michael Moorcock."
-Angus Wilson

"Michael Moorcock is one of the secret architects of 21st-century pop culture"
-Goodreads

"Moorcock is the wielder of the wandlike pen...a remarkable window
through which to gaze in upon a fascinating writer."
-Sci Fi Wire

"A concise compendium of unrelenting quality."
-Foundation

For Elric: Stealer of Souls:

"The spells that first drew me and all the numerous admirers of his work with whom I am acquainted into Moorcock's luminous and captivating web."
-Alan Moore, creator of Watchmen and V for Vendetta