Mother London, King of the City and London Bone
Release Date:  Mid Sept
Michael Moorcock is one of genre fiction’s living legends. His Eternal Champion milieu spans science fiction, fantasy, alternate history and even contemporary fiction in a way that no other series ever has. While famous for his writings as part of the ‘new wave’ movement, it seems to me that Moorcock pretty much did everything cool, before it was cool. Grimdark, Steampunk, Singularity, Post-apocalyptic and Posthuman. There is an example of almost every style of genre fiction somewhere in his body of work, so describing his books can sometimes be difficult. These three titles, reissued this month are an example of this. The three of them are set in and around London, in the past as well as the present. They are effectively the story of a city as told by the people in it. But as is so often his way, Moorcock has added a layer of strangeness to the series, such that the city seems to not just have a metaphorical voice, but perhaps a physical one too. The unusual and unexplained elements of the books are subtle, so subtle that if I had to compare them to anything it would be to the Latin American magical realism of Borges and Allende, rather than books like Neil Gaiman‘s American Gods or Neverwhere. Through the novels, Mother London and King of the City and a collection of short stories in London Bone, Moorcock shares with the reader his love and fascination with London, the city as it is as well as the place that exists in Moorcock‘s mind and memory.