Michael John Moorcock (photo ©Catriona Sparks) was born on December 18, 1939 in London, England.

An avid reader since his childhood, Michael Moorcock got into the world of literature initially as the curator of the magazine “Tarzan Adventures” from 1956 and the magazine “New Worlds” from 1964. In that role, he was fundamental to the development of the new wave current in the United Kingdom. As a writer, his career began in the fantasy genre with the first stories of what’s his most famous character, Elric of Melniboné, and continued for decades adding novels and short fiction in which he interprets the heroic fantasy genre in a personal way.

Michael Moorcock’s production is very varied and in some cases difficult to label because it mixes genres and subgenres in various ways. His activity is made more complex by his musical projects he alternates with literary ones, and by the fact that in various cases he published revised editions of some works with significant changes.

The use of various pseudonyms and the interconnections between various fictional universes make his production even more complex. Themes and tones are very different going even in a short time from the dark tones of the social collapse of “The Black Corridor” to myth and religion of “Behold the Man“, both published in 1969 although “Behold the Man” is the expanded version of a 1996 novella that won the Nebula Award.

Various Michael Moorcock’s fictional universes are characterized by the existence of an Eternal Champion, to the point of writing a cycle centered around this concept that begins with the novel “The Eternal Champion” (1970). Elric of Melniboné is an incarnation of that concept but over time the author created more of them such as Jerry Cornelius, Dorian Hawkmoon, Erekosë and Corum.

In some cases, other writers created works set in a Michael Moorcock’s fictional universe, such as the Jerry Cornelius’s one. Instead, in 2010, he published the novel “The Coming of the Terraphiles”, a crossover with the “Doctor Who” fictional universe in which Jerry Cornelius appears.

Michael Moorcock’s activity continued expanding the various cycles and sub-cycles with more or less interconnected novels and short fiction. In recent years he seems to be less active in the literary field and more in the musical field but his production is already so big as to require an encyclopedia to explain the great multiverse he created with all the interconnections among the various universes and their heroes generated by this writer’s extraordinary fantasy.