Michael Moorcock

Michael John Moorcock was born in London in 1939 and grew up in the aftermath of the Blitz, an experience that left its mark on decades of fiction concerned with ruined cities and collapsing orders. He sold his first stories as a teenager and was editing the Tarzan Adventures magazine at seventeen.

His central importance to science fiction is editorial as much as authorial. He took over New Worlds magazine in 1964 and turned it into the engine of the British New Wave, publishing J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Thomas Disch, and Samuel Delany, and pushing the field away from engineering puzzles toward psychology, sexuality, politics, and formal experiment.

The magazine lost its distribution and faced questions in Parliament over material it printed, which tells you how far it had moved from the pulp tradition it came out of.

As a novelist he is best known for Elric of Melnibone, the albino emperor with a soul-drinking sword, introduced in 1961 and developed across many volumes. Elric was written partly against Conan and the muscular heroic fantasy that preceded him, and the character's physical frailty and moral compromise reshaped what a fantasy protagonist could be.

The wider Eternal Champion sequence connects Elric to Corum, Hawkmoon, Jerry Cornelius, and others as aspects of a single figure recurring across a multiverse, a structure Moorcock built long before shared universes became a commercial standard.

Behold the Man, in which a damaged modern man travels to first-century Judea and takes the place of Jesus on the cross, won the Nebula Award as a novella in 1967 and was expanded into a novel two years later. It remains his most controversial book and, for many readers, his best.

He has also written outside genre, including the Pyat Quartet and the Colonel Pyat novels, and has been an outspoken critic of the political comfort he finds in much English fantasy, most famously in his essay Epic Pooh.

He was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2008 and has won the Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. He has lived in Texas and in France.