Jerry Cornelius: His Lives and His Times

by Michael Moorcock

Jerry Cornelius is an English assassin, physicist, rock star, and messiah to the Age of Science. Mainstay of the infamous and influential magazine NEW WORLDS and star of some of Moorcock's most celebrated novels, here are the short stories which made his name. Set in a shifting, fluid version of the counter-culture 1960s, the adventures of Jerry Cornelius were among the most prominent 'New Wave' SF books. Jerry Cornelius is one of the most remarkable and distinctive characters in Moorcock's work, and his time-travelling, trippy and bizarre adventures are must-reads.Contains a wide selection of Jerry Cornelius short stories, including THE NATURE OF THE CATASTROPHE, THE ENTROPY CIRCUIT, THE DELHI DIVISION and many more.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy

417 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 8, 2014

About the author

Michael John Moorcock is an English writer primarily of science fiction and fantasy who has also published a number of literary novels.

Moorcock has mentioned The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw and The Constable of St. Nicholas by Edward Lester Arnold as the first three books which captured his imagination. He became editor of Tarzan Adventures in 1956, at the age of sixteen, and later moved on to edit Sexton Blake Library. As editor of the controversial British science fiction magazine New Worlds, from May 1964 until March 1971 and then again from 1976 to 1996, Moorcock fostered the development of the science fiction "New Wave" in the UK and indirectly in the United States. His serialization of Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron was notorious for causing British MPs to condemn in Parliament the Arts Council's funding of the magazine.

During this time, he occasionally wrote under the pseudonym of "James Colvin," a "house pseudonym" used by other critics on New Worlds. A spoof obituary of Colvin appeared in New Worlds #197 (January 1970), written by "William Barclay" (another Moorcock pseudonym). Moorcock, indeed, makes much use of the initials "JC", and not entirely coincidentally these are also the initials of Jesus Christ, the subject of his 1967 Nebula award-winning novella Behold the Man, which tells the story of Karl Glogauer, a time-traveller who takes on the role of Christ. They are also the initials of various "Eternal Champion" Moorcock characters such as Jerry Cornelius, Jerry Cornell and Jherek Carnelian. In more recent years, Moorcock has taken to using "Warwick Colvin, Jr." as yet another pseudonym, particularly in his Second Ether fiction.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you were smart enough to have read the Quartet first, you'll find the general content of these stories VERY familiar. So familiar for me that I only enjoyed a couple of them. So familiar that I could probably write my own Jerry Cornelius short story now.

[Pavlo Tverdokhlib · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of short stories about Jerry Cornelius. The stories range from the 60s to the 90s. If you liked "The Cornelius Quartet", this is more of the same. lots of absurdity, some philosophizing, some action, but a lot of the same seemingly disjointed stream of consciousness that made up the bulk of the Quartet, with a few flashes of "is there a big picture?"

Roughly, I'd divide the stories in 3 categories. The first, early stories have Jerry travel the world, doind things, driven by some strange logic. The second sub-set reads almost like a Saturday Morning Cartoon where Jerry Cornelius and the Time Centre Crew foil evil time-manipulators. Here, villains and heroes switch regularly, and lots of the cast of the Quartet makes appearances.

The third sub-set, set in roughly modern times, deals with some early 21st century themes and may get a bit preachy at points. But it also has the best story imho, "the Spencer Inheritance"

There are multiple points of interest here, including many generous nods to the Multiverse, a superb shout out to "Nomad of the Time Streams", as well as hints where Stross' ideas of computational demonology came from.

N.B.: I am aware that there aren't ALL of the Cornelius stories. I suspect the rest of them are packed away in the 3 volumes of "best short fiction" that also make up parts of the Collection, but which I have not purchased (yet)

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've heard a lot of good things about Moorcock, so this collection of stories about time-shifting counterculture assassin Jerry Cornelius was disappointing. The later stories - essentially opportunities for Moorcock to make a series of banal political points via embarrassingly bad satire - are mostly awful. The earlier, dreamlike stories spell things out less, and partly as a result they're more fun. They're a series of abstractly connected vignettes in which Cornelius travels the world, has nonsensical conversations with cartoonish characters, and occasionally kills someone for reasons that are never fully explained. I wouldn't necessarily recommend these earlier stories either, but Moorcock does certainly succeed in creating a distinctively dreamlike, acid-laced atmosphere, so that's something.

[7thTrooper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ja, jag måste erkänna mig besegrad. Det första jag kommer att tänka på är Ballard och Burroughs, närmare bestämt bådas experiment med icke-linjär kronologi och transgressiva teman i "The Atrocity Exhibition" och Nova-trilogin. Tyvärr har inte Moorcock, hur mycket jag än respekterar honom inte samma skicklighet med bildspråk eller tematiken för att det skall funka med dessa vinjetter. Men problemet ligger nog mera hos mig och min envishet med att läsa den pärm till pärm när det förmodligen tjänar mer till att ta dem en och en. För det finns bra grejer med, Moorcock är ju trots allt inte en klåpare. Den skall ges en chans till, när jag läst romanerna, men för stunden är jag less.