Michael Moorcock: Top 50 English Language Writers since 1945

The Times Online have just released their list of The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945. Quite a few genre names on the list, including Tolkien, Lewis, Pullman and Rowling, and also, coming in at number 50, our own Michael Moorcock. They say, ” 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.” They discuss his major works and his influences on such notables as William Gibson, Neil Gaiman, Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd.

Meanwhile, Andrew McKie reviews The Metatemporal Detectivefor the Telegraph, in a piece called “Michael Moorcock: His Own Private Multiverse.” McKie opens by crediting Moorcock with bringing the term Multiverse to quantum physicists and philosophers, then describes his latest as, “tremendous fun for fans of Sherlock Holmes, or perhaps Sexton Blake, so long as they are prepared for occasional forays into the milieu of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, as well as Robert E Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian… This is all pastiche, and Moorcock’s fans will not be surprised to find that it is astoundingly sure-footed….I think it, on the whole, terrific. “