Michael Moorcock (1939– ) is an iconic English writer and editor recently listed by the London Times as among the fifty best writers since 1945. One of the most important figures in speculative literature, Moorcock has shown a startling versatility and range in his writings throughout his long career. He has been compared to, among others, Balzac, Dumas, Dickens, James Joyce, Ian Fleming, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Robert E. Howard. Born in London, Moorcock now divides his time between Paris, France, and Austin, Texas. He is married to Linda Steele and has three children from a previous marriage.
An author of literary novels and stories in practically every genre, he has won or been short-listed for numerous awards, including the Nebula (for Behold the Man [1969]), World Fantasy (for Gloriana [1978]), Whitbread (for Mother London [1988]), and Guardian Fiction Prize (for The Condition of Muzak [1977]). He has been the recipient of several lifetime achievement awards, including the Prix Utopiales, the Stoker, the SFWA, and the World Fantasy, and has been inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. His award-winning tenure as editor of New Worlds magazine in the sixties and seventies is widely regarded as a high-water mark for science fiction editing, blending genre and literary fiction, science and the arts. Moorcock’s leadership and writings in this context were crucial to the development of the so-called New Wave, which brought to prominence not just Moorcock but also contemporaries such as M. John Harrison and J. G. Ballard. He has continued to influence subsequent generations of writers through his writing and editing.
Moorcock’s journalism has appeared in the Spectator, The Guardian, the Financial Times, and the Los Angeles Times. He is also a musician who recorded and performed in the seventies with his own band, the Deep Fix (The New Worlds Fair and “The Brothel in Rosenstrasse” [also a novel]), and won a platinum disc as a member of the space-rock band Hawkwind (for Warrior on the Edge of Time). He is currently working on a new album, Live from the Terminal Café, for the Spirits Burning label.
Moorcock’s literary creations include the series Corum, The Dancers at the End of Time, Hawkmoon, and Jerry Cornelius; Von Bek; and, of course, his most famous character, Elric of Melniboné. His Colonel Pyat Quartet (Byzantium Endures, The Laughter of Carthage, Jerusalem Commands, The Vengeance of Rome) has been described as an authentic masterpiece of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is the author of several graphic novels, including Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse and Elric: The Making of a Sorcerer. He recently published a novel, The Whispering Swarm, that combined autobiography and fantasy.
A single selection from Moorcock’s oeuvre cannot hope to capture the depth and breadth of his range, but “The Frozen Cardinal” does showcase the author’s imagination, his sense of adventure, his devotion to characterization, and the ways in which he tends to subvert science-fictional tropes. The story first appeared in the anthology Other Edens in 1987, long after Moorcock wrote it, and was reprinted soon thereafter in Moorcock’s combined fiction and nonfiction collection Casablanca (1989). “The Frozen Cardinal” was originally written in 1966 on commission from Playboy (for Judith Merril, then the science fiction editor), but Moorcock withdrew it when asked for a rewrite.