Michael Moorcock

On the Road: John Picacio & Michael Moorcock, Part II

John Picacio reports from the road:

Great times in Austin, Texas yesterday…Mike Moorcock and I signed copies of The Metatemporal Detectiveat BookPeople, the largest independent bookstore in Texas. Mike did a short reading from the book, and then answered a wide range of questions from the audience. Amongst the topics discussed — the origins of Elric; his theories on magic; the status of the developing Elric film project; his relationship with the Weitz brothers; his days with Hawkwind; why people should read Barry Bayley; and much, much more.

After that, we signed lots of copies of The Metatemporal Detectiveand hey, even some copies of my artbook, Cover Story: The Art of John Picacio. Mike’s birthday isn’t until Dec. 18th, but that didn’t stop us from celebrating with a decadent Chocolate Eruption cake, sponsored by The Metatemporal Detective’sever-loving publisher, Pyr. Damn good. Here’s what it basically looked like, but much bigger (scroll down the link above for “Chocolate Eruption”).

After such a fine dessert, Linda Moorcock suggested we have dinner at Hyde Park Grill….fried egg sandwiches; buttermilk-battered fries; Kobe beef burgers; chicken fried steak; corn & cheese tamales; sirloin burgers smothered in cheddar cheese and scallions….so good. If you attended the signing, thanks for coming out, and if you missed out, maybe we’ll try to do it again in ’08 when Elric The Stealer of Soulsreleases in February.

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On the Road: Kenyon, Latner, Moorcock, and Resnick

A quick round-up of where to author appearances:

Kay Kenyon (Bright of the Sky, A World Too Near)

Feb. 15-17Radcon/Pasco, WA
Feb 29-Mar 2 ConDor/ San Diego, CA
Mar 13- 16 OmegaCon/ Birmingham, AL
July 17 – 20Readercon/ Burlington MA
October 30 – Nov 2 World Fantasy/ Calgary, AB Canada

Alexis Glynn Latner (Hurricane Moon)

Jan. 2 Bay Area Writers’ League/Clear Lake City, TX appearance as speaker
Feb. 28 Fondren Library/Houston, TX
Apr. 25-27 Nebula Awards/Austin, TX
Jun. 27-29 ApolloCon/Houston, TX
Aug. 15-17 ArmadilloCon/Austin, TX

Michael Moorcock (
The Metatemporal Detective)

Dec. 8 Book People/Austin, TX 3 pm featuring Moorcock and Illustrator John Picacio

Mike Resnick (Starship: Mercenary, Starship: Mutiny; Starship: Pirate; New Dreams for Old; Ivory)

Jan. 18-20 ConFusion/Flint, MI
Jan. 25-27 CoSine/Colorado Springs, CO
Feb. 14-17 CapriCon/Chicago, IL
Mar. 14-16 OmegaCon/Birmingham, AL
May 30-Jun. 1 ConCarolinas/Charlotte, NC
Jun. 26-29 Midwestcon/Cincinnati, OH
Aug. 6-10 Worldcon/Denver, CO
Oct. 2008 ConStellation/Huntsville, AL Mike will be the Toastmaster


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On the Road: John Picacio & Michael Moorcock

Via John Picacio’s blog, On the Front:

This is gonna be fun. Michael Moorcock and I will be signing copies of his new hardcover release THE METATEMPORAL DETECTIVE on Saturday, Dec. 8th at 3pm at the largest bookstore in Texas, BookPeople / Austin, TX. (Store location details here.) In addition, I’ll be bringing a few of my original drawings from the forthcoming release of ELRIC: THE STEALER OF SOULS. (Rumor has it, we may also be celebrating Mike’s birthday early, with free chocolate cake all around.)

Here’s a recent pic of a BookPeople shelf display featuring “Great Illustration & Design Books.” Needless to say, I’ll be happy to personalize copies of this book as well. 🙂

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We’ll Always Have Paris

Michael Moorcock signed copies of The Metatemporal Detective to a packed house this past November 5th at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, France. He is pictured left with co-owner and event coordinator Sylvia Whitman (daughter of the legendary bibliophile George Whitman) and Martin Stone, (sometimes known as Martin “Mad Dog” Stone, whose guitar work will be familiar to all Stiff Records listeners. )

Pictured right is a shot of Mike reading taken from the very back of the crowd, and lower left shows Mike signing The Metatemporal Detective for a fan.

Meanwhile, Mike will be returning to the states shortly , where he’ll join cover illustrator John Picacio for an event at BookPeople in Austin, Texas, at 3pm Saturday on December 8th.

We’ll be back with more pictures from that event too!

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Interview: Michael Moorcock on the Wire

John Joseph Adams interviews Michael Moorcock on SciFiWire today. They talk about the history of The Metatemporal Detective, and the book’s connection to Victorian detective Sexton Blake, New Worlds magazine, and the Pyat quartet. Speaking of Elric in his Count Zenith guise, itself modeled on Blade adversary Zenith the Albino, Mike says:

“Zenith was an influence on my character Elric, so in some ways these stories are homages. But there are many other homages in the stories, too. For instance in ‘The Affair of the Basin des Hivers,’ there are characters from French pulp fiction and movies, as well as a victim from a Balzac novel.”

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Moorcock Interview: The Making of a Metatemporal Detective

Jeremy at The Fantasy Review has posted an interview he conducted with Michael Moorcock, in which they discuss, among other things, the genesis of the Sir Seaton Begg character and The Metatemporal Detective’srelationship to the Elric saga.

When asked about the direct connection between Elric and the book’s villain, Count Zenith, Moorcock says, “through it I could add a dimension to the Elric stories, as I’ve tried to do in the most recent trilogy beginning with The Dreamthief’s Daughter(which of course also dealt with the Nazis). I’ve always been wary of what I consider to be the fascistic elements in certain sword and sorcery stories. I feel that I want to make those elements manifest and use Elric/Zenith to question and oppose those elements.”

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Interzone 211: Michael Moorcock Special

Issue 211 of Interzone is a Michael Moorcock special. In addition to its regular content, the issue contains these bits of Moorcockanalia.

  • Guest Editorial: The March of the Whiteshirts
  • ‘The Affair of the Bassin les Hivers‘ (short story)
  • Lovers: A Memoir of Mervyn and Maeve Peake (extract from a Moorcock work in progress)
  • London, My Life! or The Sedentary Jew (extract from a Moorcock novel in progress)
  • Interview with Andrew Hedgecock: Staring Down the Witches (with previously unpublished photos)

“The Affair of the Bassin les Hivers,” incidentally, is one of Moorcock’s tales of Metatemporal Investigator Sir Seaton Begg, here in Paris to assist Commissaire Lapointe, in an adventure involving a certain mysterious albino. The story is collected in the forthcoming The Metatemporal Detectiveas well, out this October.

Update: Rick Keffel’s latest Agony Column looks at The Metatemporal Detective as well, while waxing nostalgic about growing up reading Moorcock as well as remembering Moorcock’s band the Deep Fix. He says, “It’s easy to get sucked back into Moorcock’s entertainingly dense and historically rich style. What’s particularly nice here is the way that Moorcock manages to pay tribute to the mystery writers who inspired him while writing some very peculiar bits of very weird fiction. “

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Eternal Vigilance

Michael Moorcock is the subject of a big, eight page interview in the second issue of the new SF media magazine, Death Ray. Among other things, Mike talks briefly about his forthcoming novel, The Metatemporal Detective.

“We have to keep struggling in order to maintain justice — the Balance,” says Mike. “The price of freedom is to quote again, eternal vigilance. My next book, The Metatemporal Detective (due in October from Pyr), might otherwise be different from anything I’ve done before, but ultimately that’s the same message it offers.”

Meanwhile, over on his blog On the Front, John Picacio talks about the cover, posting the final front cover image, the image sans type, and the spine/back cover wrap. Elsewhere on John’s blog, he discusses the Death Ray issue and – for Elric fans – he gives a glimpse of one of his interior illustrations for the upcoming Del Rey reissue, Elric The Stealer of Souls. Together with the image on the right, these represent the first look at “the Picacio Elric.”

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Metatemporal Matters

The fabulously-talented John Picacio has just delivered the final cover illustration for Michael Moorcock’s forthcoming work, The Metatemporal Detective.The book, coming from Pyr this October, collects for the first time eleven tales of Sir Seaton Begg vs. Count Zodiac the Albino (perhaps better known to the world as Elric of Melniboné), including the never before seen tale, “The Flaneur of the Arcades d’Opera.”

From the book description:

Seaton Begg and his constant companion, pathologist Dr “Taffy” Sinclair, both head the secret British Home Office section of the Metatemporal Investigation Department–an organization whose function is understood only by the most high-ranking government people around the world–and a number of powerful criminals.

Begg’s cases cover a multitude of crimes in dozens of alternate worlds, generally where transport is run by electricity, where the internal combustion engine is unknown, and where giant airships are the chief form of international carrier. He investigates the murder of English Prime Minister “Lady Ratchet,” the kidnapping of the king of a country taken over by a totalitarian regime, and the death of Geli Raubel, Adolf Hitler’s mistress. Other adventures take him to a wild west where “the Masked Buckaroo” is tracking down a mysterious red-eyed Apache known as the White Wolf; to 1960s’ Chicago where a girl has been killed in a sordid disco; and to an independent state of Texas controlled by neocon Christians with oily (and bloody) hands. He visits Paris, where he links up with his French colleagues of the Sûreté du Temps Perdu. In several cases the fanatical Adolf Hitler is his opponent, but his arch-enemy is the mysterious black sword wielding aristocrat known as Zenith the Albino, a drug-dependent, charismatic exile from a distant realm he once ruled.

In each story the Metatemporal Detectives’ cases take them to worlds at once like and unlike our own, sometimes at odds with and sometimes in league with the beautiful adventuresses Mrs. Una Persson or Lady Rosie von Bek. At last Begg and Sinclair come face to face with their nemesis on the moonbeam roads which cross between the universes, where the great Eternal Balance itself is threatened with destruction and from which only the luckiest and most daring of metatemporal adventurers will return.

These fast-paced mysteries pay homage to Moorcock’s many literary enthusiasms for authors as diverse as Clarence E. Mulford, Dashiell Hammett, Georges Simenon, and his boyhood hero, Sexton Blake.

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