By lemec at Mon, 2008-01-07 19:42
Michael Moorcock has been selected as one of the 50 greatest post-war authors by The Times.
The Times newspaper has selected the fifty greatest British writers since 1945 and Michael Moorcock has been placed at number 50.
Erica Wagner writes: "You might begin by asking how we came up with our half-hundred; and the order in which we placed them. Because there is no scientific method for making such a list in the correct order, we applied no scientific method. But we considered a number of factors — sheer quality of writing, longevity, lasting impact and, naturally, commercial success."
According to The Times Online: "Most of Moorcock’s 80-plus novels are unashamedly pulp. But he wins his place for a series of genre-crossing novels linked by a taste for metafictional devices — he often appears in them himself and characters occur and recur in “historical” and “fantasy” guises. Early work such as Behold the Man, a deconstruction of the Christ story with time travel, was called science fiction, and he was closely linked to the West London hippy scene of the 1960s, celebrated and satirised in The Cornelius Quartet. These work were a key influence on writers such as William Gibson and Neil Gaiman, but Moorcock moved away from sci-fi, setting out his own idiosyncratic view of history in the Between the Wars quartet, in which the monstrous Colonel Pyat charts the course from the Russian Revolution to the concentration camps. Perhaps his best work, Mother London, is a history of the capital from the Blitz, and blazed a trail picked up by Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd."
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