Fantastic Metropolis

You could say the same about his author. Moorcock is perhaps the most imposing landmark left upon the British literary landscape, once one ventures past the neatly-tended suburbs of Booker-approved civilisation and into the lurid, surprisingly healthy pulp wilderness beyond. The breadth of vision evident in later works such as the stunning, monumental Mother London or the shamelessly enjoyable King of the City (almost a Cornelius outing without Jerry) has always been there, most obviously in his Cornelius quartet and the accompanying short stories, comic strips, apocrypha, Corneliana. It’s just that back in the 1960s and the 1970s very few people yet possessed the language or the terms of reference necessary to decode that vision, would need a couple more decades to see it as a comically horrific prophecy, precise in all its major details. Now, though, it’s 2002. With the runaway train right on top of us, we finally make out the shouted warning. Now, with his fictions blooming monstrously into reality about him, Moorcock and his most iconic vehicle return into a world, a century, a context, that has suddenly made shocking sense of both of them.

Jerry Cornelius, Pierrot of Armageddon, is reaffirmed in Firing the Cathedral as one of the only genuinely modern characters in British fiction, certainly the only one in science fiction (which, we were told, was the only fiction capable of describing the present. Mind you, that was then). Right from those ingenious Elric re-treads in The Final Programme, Jerry was the first post-quantum personality, his various identities, agendas and appearances existing as a kind of super-position, a one-man multiverse of mixed states that would collapse down to a single fixed self only when observed. As such, he is perhaps the one essential, necessary fictional construction of our times, almost our only means of fashioning an adequate response to them. A vital thought-experiment. Cornelius explores the nightmare territories that are ahead of us; are now upon us. And, just when we need him, here he is.

With Firing the Cathedral, Michael Moorcock serves us up a story of fine vintage although clearly newly bottled, something he could have written thirty years ago or only yesterday. It contains the fire and energy and aura of the author’s earliest Cornelius outings, yet without the faintest DNA trace of nostalgia. Rather than some tragic band reunion tour around the chicken-in-a-basket circuit, Firing the Cathedral reads like something that the early works were merely leading up to. This is an exhilarating, crackling third rail of a novella, sparks in every line, and best not stepped upon by accident. One of our greatest authors dusts off what is arguably his greatest character, revealed now as a crucial archetype of our new and combustive century. Slam a fresh clip into the needlegun, slip Deep Fix: Greatest Hits in the car stereo and prepare for a millennium buggering that will make your eyes water and will forcibly remind you What Time It Is. like the author, like his fresh-as-a-daisy old assassin, you’ll never have felt better.

Alan Moore
Northampton
22 June 2002

This introduction was written for the first issue of Firing the Cathedral, PS Publishing. Firing the Cathedral was reprinted in the anthology Cities, edited by Peter Crowther and published by Victor Gollancz (UK) and Four Walls Eight Windows (US). It will appear again in Michael Moorcock’s collection The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius from Four Walls Eight Windows in October 2003.