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| Mayflower/Granada 1981, Art: Melvyn Grant |
In addition to his expanding book sequences (Jerry Cornelius, Corum, Hawkmoon, Oswald Bastable, Dancers At the End of Time),
in the 1970s Moorcock also wrote several notable short stories. These magazine and
anthology pieces range over a wide variety of genres, and include an existential sf
short ("Last Vigil"), a drug-fueled requiem on 60s rock ("A Dead Singer"), a sword
and sorcery self-parody ("The Stone Thing"), an ironic Twilight Zone-ish moral
fable ("Environment Problem") and a connected series of
politically-ambiguous, sexually-charged alternate history vignettes (collectively referred
to as
My Experiences in the Third World War). All of these also eventually appeared in various Moorcock anthologies from the late 70s and early 80s.
The earliest of the shorts discussed here is a Jerry Cornelius episode titled
"The Dodgem Arrangement", published in the July 1969 issue of the
fanzine
Speculation (#23). This story was written after
The Final Programme but before the completion of
A Cure For Cancer. Like the Cornelius stories of that period (such as
those found in
The Nature of the Catastrophe and
The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius), "The Dodgem Arrangement"
experiments with narrative structure, while at the same time wryly comments on
the state of fractured modern society. Although part of its message is a critique on the "state of the Empire", the raw appeal of this story comes from Jerry's irrepressible, anarchistic nature.
To be fair, I do also think of Jerry as a personality. He’s perhaps not
wholly reliable or consistent and maybe not entirely politically correct.
For me, he’s a character combining the endearing and enduring traits of a
number of my contemporaries as well as being a latter day Pierrot,
Colombine, and Harlequin, responding to the world around him with, if not
always appropriate sentimentality, at least an admirable resourcefulness
and malleability, and almost limitless good humor. Jerry’s a pretty
light-hearted existentialist. He once claimed to be too shallow to hold on
to his miseries for very long. I think he also said somewhere (or I might
have said it for him) that it isn’t especially important if all we’re
doing is dancing forever on the edge of the abyss. It’s scarcely worth
worrying about. The really important thing, of course, is the dance itself
and how we dance it.
MM - 2003, The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius ("Introduction")
In any case, the "plot" mainly consists of Jerry
pontificating on modern culture whilst causing havoc in whatever
neighborhood he finds himself in. In
Speculation #23, David Pringle (
"shortly to begin a University English course") writes an
apt introduction which is also well worth looking at. This story also later appeared as either "The Dodgem Division" or "The Dodgem Decision" (note that "dodgems" are apparently the same as "bumper cars").
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Art: Eddie Jones
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"Last Vigil" appeared in the magazine
Vision of Tomorrow (No. 11, August
1970). This story depicts the ruminations of a far-future "last man" (or close to last) on a
small planetoid, as he calmly faces the imminent, hours-away collapse of the
universe into another Big Bang star-core. However, before the "end of time" arrives, he
ventures out into the wilderness on an impulsive excursion. There he comes across the last surviving native of
the planetoid, whose race had long ago been driven extinct by mankind's
arrival. This story fits well with other Moorcock sf works like
The Black Corridor and
The Time Dweller. Note that, although
sometimes published as "Waiting For the End of Time", this story is not part
of the
Dancers At the End of Time sequence.
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| Abelard-Schuman 1973 |
"Environment Problem" appeared in Richard Davis' 1973 anthology
Space 1. This is a modern "Faust tale" in which the wily, self-assured
main character believes that he has found a way to "happily" enjoy an afterlife
spent in Hellfire. The very ending features a twist (of course).
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| Michael Joseph 1974, Art: John Riley |
"A Dead Singer" appeared in the 1974 anthology
Factions, edited by Giles Gordon and Alex Hamilton. This is a free-wheeling
"road-trip" tale featuring Shakey Mo Collier (Jerry's bandmate/roadie from
the Cornelius sequence) driving a resurrected Jimi Hendrix around modern
England. Together they investigate what has happened to rock and roll, and
if there is any hope for its future.  |
| Art: James Cawthorn (as "J. Allen Frazenkel") |
"The Stone Thing" (1974) is a no-holds-barred parody of heroic
fantasy, in particular Moorcock's own brand of idiosyncratic myth-making as
illustrated in the Corum and Elric books. This short (but hilarious) post-modern
fantasy portrait appeared in the fanzine Triode 20 (October 1974), and then in Fantasy Tales (Summer 1977). Many readers will probably have first read it in the 1985 DAW
Books anthology Elric At the End of Time.
Elric At the End of Time, DAW Books 1985, Art: Michael Whelan /
Fantasy Tales, Summer 1977, Art: Jim Pitts
My Experiences in the Third World War
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Savoy Books 1980, Art: Michael Heslop
- "Going to Canada"
- "Leaving Pasadena"
- "Crossing into Cambodia"
- "The Dodgem Division"
-
"The Adventures of Jerry Cornelius: The English Assassin" (comic)
- "Peace on Earth"
- "The Lovebeast"
-
"The Real Life Mr Newman (Adventures of the Dead Astronaut")
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In 1978 and 1979 Moorcock wrote three short stories which eventually appeared as a
linked sequence in
My Experiences in the Third World War (1980): "Going to Canada", "Leaving Pasadena" and "Crossing into Cambodia". A fourth episode in the series, "Casablanca",
appeared in 1989 in the anthology Casablanca. These alternate
history "travelogues" are narrated by an undercover Russian spy named Volker as he
navigates through several politically-sensitive periods of the late 20th
century (with each one taking place in a different country/continent). The
over-arching premise begins during a "cold war", but by the last episode a
nuclear conflict has been well under way. Usually presented in collections in
narrative chronological order ("Casablanca", "...Canada", "...Pasadena", "...Cambodia"), these shorts were actually written "out of
sequence", with
"Crossing into Cambodia" appearing first, and "Casablanca" appearing 10 years later. Thus, if read in
publication sequence, the story goes backwards in time.
However, this allows the stories to chronologically reflect on contemporary conflicts ending/arising at the time they were written, thus following "real" history. For example,
"Crossing into Cambodia" (1979) takes place farthest in the future, but its
premise more closely evokes brutal imagery from the Vietnam War (which had ended
four years prior to the story's publication). "Going To Canada" and "Leaving
Pasadena" (both 1980) contain
commentary on the Cold War and its origins. "Casablanca" (1989) takes
place earliest, its framing premise depicts a Muslim power struggle
in North Africa. Actually it may be interesting to read the sequence first one way and then the other...
Additionally, Moorcock approaches his theme - a third global war - in an unexpected way,
or at least one which a reader might not expect when imagining WW III. In popular media, WW III is usually depicted as an apocalyptic "flash-point" conflict essentially
lasting a matter of hours and visually portrayed as swarms of atomic mushroom
clouds blossoming all over the globe (immediately followed by a "nuclear winter").
However, Moorcock's modern version of a "future war" story depicts the next global
conflict as a series of slow, inefficient tactical moves (both hidden and
overt) taken by regime-change agents who are seemingly more concerned with
their "wild-at-heart" mistresses than some kind of dogmatic
national/religious agenda. However, it's worth noting that these stories are also the products of an "unreliable narrator", so part of the charm here is
in parsing through Volker's subjective self-awareness of reality. The narrator "is revealed not so much by what he says as by what he selects to say to the reader."
Denoël 1979, Art: Stéphane Dumont / New English Library 1979, Art: Tim White
Publication-wise, "Crossing into Cambodia" first appeared in Maxim Jakubowski's anthology,
Twenty Houses of the Zodiac (1979). "Going To Canada" and "Leaving Pasadena" first appeared together in the
Savoy Books' 1980 Moorcock collection My Experiences in the Third World War.
"Casablanca" appeared nine years later in Moorcock's 50th birthday anthology,
Casablanca (1989), but was soon reprinted with the three earlier stories
in the 1990s Earl Aubec omnibus anthologies. Since "Casablanca", a
few additional stories in the Third World War sequence have appeared,
with the most recent ("Kabul") being published in France in 2018 (Kaboul Et Autres Souvenirs De La Troisième Guerre Mondiale).
Postscript 1: Some of the stories described here first appeared in book form in the
Moorcock anthologies Moorcock's Book of Martyrs (1976) and
Dying For Tomorrow (1978).
Moorcock's Book Of Martyrs (Quartet Books 1976, Art: Chris Achilleos)/
Dying For Tomorrow (DAW 1978, Art: Michael Whelan)
- "A Dead Singer"
- "The Greater Conqueror"
-
"Behold the Man" (novella version)
- "Good-bye Miranda"
- "Flux"
- "Islands"
-
"Last Vigil" ("Waiting for the End of Time")
Postscript 2: My Experiences in the Third World War also includes pages from "The Adventures of Jerry Cornelius: The English Assassin", a series of comic one-sheets co-written with M. John Harrison and featuring artwork by Mal Dean and Richard Glyn Jones. These were originally published in IT (International Times) from June 1969 to January 1970 (#57-71). Scanned pages can be seen online at the IT archive.
