Michael Moorcock has established himself at the imaginative forefront of popular writing in the 1960s and 1970s. His editorial work and his own fiction together represent a titanic effort, often against great resistance from the establishments of magazine and book publishing, to reunite the highest literary values with the forms and vitality of popular culture. The immense goodwill and philanthropy displayed even in his most doomladen visions spring from a living knowledge of a span of popular arts that reaches from Charles Dickens to William Burroughs, from the eighteenth-century commedia dell'arte to the rock band Hawkwind. In the 1960s Moorcock planned and carried out what was almost a one-man revolution in the genre of science fiction and, more important, transformed it in its relation to the larger scheme of mundane fiction. Modest of all his achievements, ferocious in his loves, his artistic desires, and his commitments, he seems...