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The Cornelius Quartet: The Final Program, A Cure for Cancer, The English Assassin, The Condition of Muzak

The Cornelius Quartet: The Final Program, A Cure for Cancer, The English Assassin, The Condition of Muzak

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: I put it down
Review: Lately, I've been reading lesser-known authors that helped define modern science fiction (Alfred Bester, Pat Franks, Walter Miller). The literary references to William Gibson and others on the back cover led me to buy this book. For only the second time in 37 years, I've put a book down unfinished and it pains me to do so.

This book failed to entice me. The language is very much mired in the mid-60's and doesn't translate well to 2000. I didn't find myself rooting for or caring for any of the characters. I don't mind amoral lead characters, so long as they are interesting. Jerry Cornelius isn't interesting. If there are parallels to the plot and events of our era, I didn't see them. The plot just kind of meanders around with little regard to time--we get minute details of going into a club and playing music, but a whole year is thrown away in two paragraphs (Jerry leaves the cave, goes to Stockholm, meets a girl, plays in a band, gets married, then Miss Brunner shows up again).

One thing I found humorous was that the cover says the music of the 80's band Human League was inspired by Jerry Cornelius. Now I know why I hated the Human League.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The Gravity's Rainbow of British New Wave Sci-Fi
Review: The adventures of Jerry Cornelius! To paraphrase the back of the 1977 Avon edition, copulating, hallucinating, devastating, and coming back from the dead. Frequently. What a pleasure it is to see Mister Moorcock?s wild ride back in print again.

So what?s it like? Imagine if Edgar Rice Burroughs was transmogrified into William S. Burroughs and he/she teamed up with Thomas Pynchon to leading us all screaming and mad into the sea.

In reality, this one right here in front of you, Michael Moorcock did an experimental cut-up job on his escapist power fantasies (his Elric books specifically) and managed to conjure up a priddy picture of England?s Dreaming circa 1965-1977. Magnificent characters, all suffering from a cosmic, entropic personality crisis stumble and scheme through a barely comprehensible (but nevertheless still audible) conspiracy between the forces of Chaos and Order. Or something like that. Or maybe nothing like that at all. And even if you are a Mexican American living in San Francisco (my own current incarnation) who has never been to Ladbroke Grove except in the pages of crazy books, it will all make (non)sense and seduce masterfully somehow.

Billed as the first time these four novels have appeared un-cut and uncensored in the USA, this new edition comes with a few caveats.

Upon casual inspection, the text does indeed contain the odd phrase and sentence here and there that are nowhere to be found in previous US printings (specifically that ?77 Avon edition). But the old Avon also contains the odd bit here and there that doesn?t appear in this new edition. This seems to be the case the most often with the second novel, A Cure for Cancer. To sum it up, the restored material is pretty insubstantial, as is the missing material. Until a truly Cornelius Quartet ever materialize in this multiverse, this one will do except for ...

the lack of John Clute?s introductory "The Repossession of Jerry Cornelius" essay which graced the old US edition. It was a spectacular piece of textural analysis that added much to the enjoyment and appreciation of the 900 + pages to follow.

Oh well. This is all minor picky stuff really. And what with that war going on and everything ? just get your head around it already.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Moorcock's Finest
Review: The Cornelius Quartet along with The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius, Life and Times of Jerry Cornelius, and The Entropy Tango represent some of the best fiction Moorcock has ever penned.

As a young teenager I devoured Moorcock's Eternal Champion books, but it wasn't until college that the Cornelius books held any interest for me, and at that point I had stopped reading SF/Fantasy altogether (I had Nabokov to read...). In many ways Jerry is the mature reader's Eternal Champion--the novels do echo many of the themes found in the other EC novels.

I actually find it quite daunting to sum up The Cornelius Quartet in such a limited space. My 1977 Avon edition is almost 1000 pages and the four novels that make up the Quartet offer different experiences and styles.

My nutshell: The novels are concerned with Jerry's struggle for identity amidst the entropy of urban life in 1970's London. Satirical, funny, sexy, and sad; filled with a wonderful cast of characters. It really is genre-busting--from 60's spy flick to urban realism. Postmodern (in the literary sense; search for Brian McHale). In many ways it reminds me of Pynchon's V.

I'm excited to see their re-release. They've been out of print for too long. Of Moorcock's "SF" work, these (with Behold the Man and Mother London) are the ones that should stay in print--eternally.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Racy tales of an immoral adventurer
Review: The Cornelius Quartet provides under one cover the uncensored saga of Jerry Cornelius, a time traveling hero figure whose antics have earned him the title of the first 'cyberpunk hero' in science fiction. These racy tales of an immoral adventurer will hold appeal for a wide audience; especially for newcomers who will find the tales easy to absorb under one cover.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: From brilliant promise to fulfilment of promise
Review: The first book of this sequence, THE FINAL PROGRAM, is a young man finding his feet, his own voice, his own subject matter, and as far as structure goes it is pretty much all over the place.
The second book, A CURE FOR CANCER, is very much the sort of thing a crossword player or math-buff would love,because it turns narrative conventions upside down and sideways with quite extraordinary skill -- like a flyer showing off. But the third book, THE ENGLISH ASSASSIN, shows a quantum jump, both in skill, ambition and language. Moorcock is not showing off here -- he is tackling the Matter of Britain -- modern Britain, if you like, but with reference to Arthur (it opens in Tintagel) -- and Jerry Cornelius is in a state of suspended animation throughout the book. It is the fourth book, THE CONDITION OF MUZAK,which combines the virtues of the three previous books and compounds them, offering a brilliant construct, a discoverable linear narrative linking all four books and a wonderful symphony of intellectual, emotional and visionary literature. Is there a modern composer who could do it justice ? The subject matter, the commentaries, are as relevant as they always were. This is a very uncomfortable sequence, but it does not leave you with any sense of pessimism. It rises to a humane and heartening resolution, offering a sudden change of perspective which is heart-breakingl. This is the closest experience to reading a combination of Charles Dickens and James Joyce and it gets better and better the older you get. I read the old Avon edition until it fell to bits. I'm grateful for this new, much more durable book.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Read the books, watch the movie
Review: There is a new print of The Final Program movie now out from Anchor Bay on DVD and VHS. The movie is a weird version of the book, but has a lot of its flavor and is worth watching. In some places it became a cult picture, shown along with Rocky Horror Show, and it has some of that same quality, but that's really what's left from the books. According to Moorcock's account, the actors provided much of the best dialogue and the director did his best to turn the story into an Avengers episode. At one point Moorcock had to stop him putting Billie Holliday on the sound-track and at some stage removed his name from the script-writing credits. For all that, John Finch, Sterling Hayden, George Chakaris, Jenny Runacre and pretty much an all-star cast, give the picture a flair Cornelius readers will probably enjoy.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Chillingly Funny!
Review: These weren't written between 1965 and 67 as the blurb says, but between 1965 and 1976, when the last book Condition of Muzak, won the prestigious literary award The Guardian Fiction Prize. They deserved the award in 1977 and they deserve some kind of award now. There are parts of these books that could have been written today -- the chilling American rationales for bombing the crap out of Europe -- but the thing that continues to make them vital is that they are increasingly easy to understand because Moorcock's sense of the social fault lines is about as accurate as anyone can get. Philip K. Dick had something similar and expressed it fairly similarly in some of his later books. It's about the search for identity and therefore affect in a modern urban landscape -- about the various strategies with which we manipulate our paths through an increasingly complex information age. That's why the cyberpunks loved it so much but there isn't one that I've read who has Moorcock's breadth and depth. This stuff has fed the imaginations of most of the admired cultural icons of our time and it's still feeding mine. This is as funny as it is terrifying. The existential human comedy.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Moorcock's fabulous sf
Review: This is Moorcock's most ambitious work. Certainly his most honest. There are a million and one experiments in literature here, not all of which come off. But according to Schopenhauer the errors of geniuses are worth a hundred truths of lesser mortals. (Or something like that.) The fact that Moorcock provides the most visceral experiences in the sort of fabulous sf universe his brain inhabits means that even when he's mistaken his point is well taken. (For a similar world, see Zelazny's stuff.) The characters of this book will live forever. Even though he's not a household word like Tolkien or Rowling he certainly will be some day. Keep your chin up Mike, the zombies will get the point eventually.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Weird but wonderful
Review: This is the coolest book I ever read. I can't believe it was censored in America but I can see why!! Jerry Cornelius is my hero!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Amazing Prescience -- Heartening, Too!
Review: This is the first and still the best. The scenes in a Europe occupied by US troops (echoes of Bosnia) are uncanny and the military rationales haven't changed since Vietnam -- except you'd think they'd have some self-knowledge by now! This is by far and away more substantial than anything that followed it from the cyberpunks it influenced. But if you want the original literary rock and roll, this is it! This is the first and best 21st century urbanite adapting his identity and his morality to all the cool challenges of the Media Age. Sexy, subtle and sophisticated, yet fresh and vulgar as a new theme-park ride. With a classic Moorcock slam bang happy ending which never avoids the issues but thoroughly defines the attitudes! This is the dude who launched a thousand imitators. Read Cornelius and see why Moorcock remains the real thing. This is the literature the modernist doomsayers tells us 'doesn't exist'. He writes like an angel and thinks like the devil.


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