Whatever the cause, it doesn’t seem to slow him down, and his prodigious output and intellectual ambition put him at the head of that great sea change in science fiction in the 1960s – the New Wave. Even as he is enchanted, Michael – who describes himself as a committed materialist – seeks a rational explanation for how all this is possible.Īn explanation proves elusive, and when Michael returns to the mundane world he finds his memories of Alsacia growing vague and easily attributable to bad LSD or mental illness. It is a place where purely fictional characters such as Moll mingle with fictionalised versions of historical people such as Dick Turpin.

It’s from here that the brilliant, red-haired Molly Midnight rides out to steal from greedy corporations to give to the workers. This hidden quarter of the city, somewhere between the Inns of Court and the river, somehow exists outside time and space as we understand them. Michael meets Friar Isidore, an honest-to-god monk, with a tonsure and everything, who introduces him to Alsacia, the secret heart of London. And this, as they say, is where the story really starts. From the printing presses around Fleet Street to the coffee bars of 1950s Soho, young Michael received an eclectic education on the streets that saw him become, by the age of 16, a published author, aspiring skiffle musician and editor of Tarzan Adventures magazine. Few children, he writes, could have enjoyed growing up as much as he did. Moorcock’s first memories are of the Blitz and a childhood spent in the tangle of streets that mark the border between the City and the West End. It’s fitting indeed that Michael Moorcock should become his own unreliable narrator. The fictional elements of the book are, confusingly enough, about exactly the same subjects. The reality in The Whispering Swarm is the life and career of one Michael Moorcock, writer, guitarist, Londoner and working-class hero, plus the magnificent city in which he grew up.

So it stands to reason that, having played around with notions of time, space and genre, he should do the same with reality and fiction. Michael Moorcock never saw a boundary he didn’t want to cross, blur or dispense with altogether.

Michael Moorcock by Michael Moorcock