[Gloriana, or the Unfulfill'd Queen] represents something of a new departure for Michael Moorcock. Those who admire his ingenuity and creativity but deplore the lax forms in which he has often indulged them will at the outset be favourably disposed towards a Moorcock work that claims to "have some relation to The Faerie Queene". It seems to offer a change from those interminable gothic or barbarian intrigue fantasies; taking a new start, perhaps, from Sprague de Camp's and Fletcher Pratt's Spenserian fantasy The Mathematics of Magic. Besides it promises a definite mise-en-scène, instead of the vacuous elasticities where Moorcock's stories have usually been sketched.

However, the world of Gloriana turns out to be Tudor England and Faeryland with a difference. Some characters' names and motifs are drawn from Spenser; but the action takes place—or fails to—in the Elizabethan court of some other time line than...