From his beginnings as a writer of science fiction and heroic fantasy in the early 1960s through his long, idiosyncratic, unclassifiable novels of the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Moorcock has been compared, variously but rarely adversely, with Charles Dickens, William S. Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and Jorge Luis Borges. As editor of the British speculative-fiction magazine New Worlds from 1966 to 1971, Moorcock was perhaps the dominant force for change in New Wave science fiction, the attempt to introduce experimental modernist and postmodernist techniques into what Moorcock and his associates viewed as an ossified genre. Since the 1980s he has moved away from the realm of overt fantasy to become an acclaimed novelist of urban life with his Dickensian novel of the London Blitz and its survivors, Mother London (1988), and his Between the Wars tetralogy (1981-).

Michael John Moorcock was born in Mitcham, Surrey, a suburb of London, on...