Introduction to The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius
by Michael Moorcock

These stories are published in the order in which they were written (with the exception of the Epilogue which is new to this edition). They were planned to be read in sequences as a continuous narrative. I think several of them contain some of my best writing about Jerry Cornelius. I stopped producing them when I felt I had nothing further to say in this form. I think its’s fair to promise that these are the only Jerry Cornelius short stories there will ever be (by me, at least).

For other stories about Jerry I’d recommend some of those which appeared in an anthology called The Nature of the Catastrophe. In my view three of the very best Cornelius stories ever done were by M. John Harrison. For a while his imagination sparked mine and vice versa. He invented, for instance, Shakey Mo Collier and was responsible for the title of the third book in the tetralogy, The English Assassin. The anthology is worth finding just for those pieces. Some day, too, the whole comic strip The Adventures of Jerry Cornelius, The English Assassin which appeared in IT in the late 60s and which satirised many of the ‘alternative society’ attitudes of the time, will appear. It was excellently drawn by Mal Dean and by R. Glyn Jones (usually one taking up where the other had left off the previous week). It was scripted, in the same fashion, by myself and M. John Harrison. Most of the same characters appearing n these stories appeared in the strip. At one time the strip was so much better known than the stories that many people thought that the books were derived from the comic strip and saw them as a kind of hip Modesty Blaise.

Since part of my original intention was, if anything, to parody stuff like James Bond, it was always a source of irritation to me that Jerry (rightly termed ‘that little wanker’ by his sister among others) should be seen as a modern Bond. I tried to make use of certain elements of a form (called by my friend Edmond Hamilton ‘the urban adventure story’) both to give a certain pace to my narratives and to add a certain irony, but I never intended to present another smoothly macho superstud to the world. I don’t read many thrillers, but those I like tend to have somewhat down-at-heel central characters as much victims of their own prejudices and neuroses as they are of villainous schemes. Having been brought up on the likes of Sexton Blake, I always thought Bond much more in the tradition of Frank Richards than Raymond Chandler (both of whom, however, were far more skillful writers than Fleming). Thus, I’ve never taken kindly to that particular comparison.

The key to Jerry’s character lies, I suppose, mostly in the ‘realistic’ sections of The Condition of Muzak. I have frequently found myself in violent disagreement with many of the admiring things written about Jerry. I think it was Jim Sallis (who also wrote a couple of Cornelius stories) who said that Jerry was more a form of fiction than he was a character. I have an affection for Jerry as a character, as I have for the other people who appear regularly in the stories, but I think Sallis made a good point.

Most of the material in this book was written in the heady period when I was editing New Worlds and a group of us were trying to find new ways of expressing themes which we felt were specific to our own age. Several of those experiments (notably by Ballard, Harrison, Langdon Jones and Sladek) were in my view extremely successful, influencing and giving heart to many other young writers anxious to develop their own methods of handling modern themes.

What we aimed for was to try to maintain narrative interest but at the same time to intensify and concentrate what we had to say. In this we had something in common with certain poets, although we were always much more interested in what could be done with prose. I think my stories were at least partially successful, if only because they don’t seem nearly as experimental now as they did when they began to appear! Jerry was a child of the optimistic 60s, when we all thought we could do a little something to change the world. I hope the present-day reader will find at least some relevance in Jerry’s experiences and, perhaps rather better than many of Jerry’s enthusiastic contemporaries, will enjoy the ironies, the jokes and the parodic aspects of these pieces!

Thanks to Quark (editors Delany and Hacker), Ink, Penthouse, Index of Possibilities (editors Martin, Trux & May), and the various other publications where these stories first appeared, and thanks to Pete Weston, who originally published “The Dodgem Decision” in his fanzine SPECULATION.

Michael Moorcock
Oxford
May 1985