The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius: Stories of the Comic Apocalypse

Jerry Cornelius #6

by Michael Moorcock

Jerry Cornelius – English assassin, physicist, rock star, messiah to the Age of Science – is one of fantastic literature’s greatest creations. Acclaimed by Moorcock’s readers, critics, and peers from Mick Jagger to J. G. Ballard, Cornelius is the ultimate postmodern antihero, more Borgesian than Asimovian. Three of the stories in this collection are here anthologized for the first time: “The Spencer Inheritance,” which enmeshes Jerry with Princess Di; “Cheering for the Rockets,” involving an attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant; and “Firing the Cathedral,” a novella based on 9/11 and its aftermath.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction, Short Stories, Anthologies, Collections

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Michael John Moorcock is an English writer primarily of science fiction and fantasy who has also published a number of literary novels.

Moorcock has mentioned The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw and The Constable of St. Nicholas by Edward Lester Arnold as the first three books which captured his imagination. He became editor of Tarzan Adventures in 1956, at the age of sixteen, and later moved on to edit Sexton Blake Library. As editor of the controversial British science fiction magazine New Worlds, from May 1964 until March 1971 and then again from 1976 to 1996, Moorcock fostered the development of the science fiction "New Wave" in the UK and indirectly in the United States. His serialization of Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron was notorious for causing British MPs to condemn in Parliament the Arts Council's funding of the magazine.

During this time, he occasionally wrote under the pseudonym of "James Colvin," a "house pseudonym" used by other critics on New Worlds. A spoof obituary of Colvin appeared in New Worlds #197 (January 1970), written by "William Barclay" (another Moorcock pseudonym). Moorcock, indeed, makes much use of the initials "JC", and not entirely coincidentally these are also the initials of Jesus Christ, the subject of his 1967 Nebula award-winning novella Behold the Man, which tells the story of Karl Glogauer, a time-traveller who takes on the role of Christ. They are also the initials of various "Eternal Champion" Moorcock characters such as Jerry Cornelius, Jerry Cornell and Jherek Carnelian. In more recent years, Moorcock has taken to using "Warwick Colvin, Jr." as yet another pseudonym, particularly in his Second Ether fiction.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius: Stories of the Comic Apocalypse - Michael Moorcock on Jerry Cornelius from his Introduction:

"For me, he's a character combining the endearing and enduring traits of a number of my contemporaries as well as being a latter day Pierrot, Colombine, and Harlequin, responding to the world around him with, if not always appropriate sentimentality, at least an admirable resourcefulness and malleability. An almost limitless good humor, Jerry's a pretty lighthearted existentialist. He once claimed to be too shallow to hold on to his miseries for very long. I think he also said somewhere (or I might have said it for him) that it isn't especially important if all we're doing is dancing forever on the edge of the abyss. It's scarcely worth worrying about. The really important thing, of course, is the dance itself and how we dance it.
So here are what I consider to be the best of the dances Jerry has danced since the 1960s. I hope some of them at least will get your feet tapping. After a while, you might even feel like joining in."

In the spirit of tapping feet, here's my review of the first two tales. For my write-up of each of the eleven tales, click on the link below -

THE PEKING JUNCTION
"Out of the rich and rolling lands of the West came Jerry Cornelius, with a vibragun holstered at his hip and a generous message in his heart, to China."

Whoa, baby! Jerry C might be a lighthearted existentialist but he's neither a stranger like Camus' Meursault nor nauseated like Sartre's Roquentin; nope, Jerry Cornelius travels to China sporting the beard and uniform of a Cuban guerrilla and pours Wakayama Sherry for three generals who have agreed to meet him in a remote Chinese province.

Conversation revolves around all that mass devastation cited in previous Jerry Cornelius adventures, most notably A Cure for Cancer - skies thick with Yankee pirate jets, nonstop napalm, millions dead in London, Paris, Berlin - and one general carefully voicing, "The tension, the tension," undoubtedly thinking of Kurtz and his dreadful "the horror! the horror!"

This, the first of twenty-one mini-chapters that make up The Peking Junction concludes with the following exchange:

A Wakayama Sherry sipping general says, "It must have seemed like the end of the world..."
Jerry frowned. "I suppose so." Then he grinned. "There's no point in making a fuss about it, is there? Isn't it all the for the best in the long run?"
The general looked exasperated. "You people..."

The tale's tone is set thusly and fans will be pleased to encounter quotes from and references to The Chronicle of the Black Sword, The Dreaming City, The Sundered Worlds, dad's fake Le Corbusier château, Karl Glogauer and Jerry's reflecting: "Having been Elric, Asquiiol, Minos Aquilinus, Clovis Marca, now and forever he was Jerry Cornelius of the noble price, proud prince of ruins, boss of the circuits. Faustaff, Muldoon, the eternal champion..."

Three Peking Junction highlights that caught my attention:

A Common Bond Between JC and MM
Jerry Cornelius joins the generals on a visit to the site of a crashed US F111A tactical attack jet. After assessing the damage to wing and tail along with also taking a gander at the ragged, now dead pilot, Jerry forces himself to climb up on the jet's fuselage and "strike a pose he knew would impress the generals." After a general describes how the jet will eventually go in a museum, Jerry pretends to study the cliff above the aircraft since he doesn't want the generals to see him weeping.

Jerry's weeping brings to mind a moving statement in Michael Moorcock's Introduction: "I remember weeping at images of burning children in Vietnam and a few hours later I had turned that grief into comedy in my Jerry Cornelius novel A Cure for Cancer. Maybe, after all, that was my way of staying sane."

Moderan Madness
Returning to the pagoda where they sipped Sherry, one of the generals muses while staring across the flat Chinese landscape, "Soon we shall have all this in shape." Really, general? Such a noxious statement is cringeworthy, reminding me of David R. Bunch's Moderan men, half steel, half flesh, whose ultimate goal is to cover the earth with a white-grey sheet of uniform plastic.

Jack the Dripper
At one point while in conversation with the generals, Jerry "suddenly remembered the great upsurge of enthusiasm among American painters immediately after the war and a Pollock came to mind." Love how something someone says can spark a memory of a specific painting. Not surprising this happens to Jer, an eternal champion who is never so overwhelmed he looses his aesthetic sense.

THE DELHI DIVISION
Jerry, the Eternal Champion, entered the land of Shiva-Shakti, drove his Phantom V down twisting lanes in a smoky Indian rain and it's "difficult to see through the haze that softened the landscape. In rain, the world becomes timeless.
Jerry switched on his music, singing along with Jimi Hendrix as he swung around the corners."

Good thinking, Jerry! Sing along with Jimi, very much like a devotee chanting mantra, link your own, very personal voice with the rocker who portrayed himself as the Hindu deity Vishnu. Anchoring yourself via sound, as if practicing nada yoga - just what the Indian sages and rishis call for when time is measured in cycles of billions of years. Remember what Professor Hira told you about kalpa and Kali Yuga.



Jerry arrived at his destination, his big wooden bungalow in Simla, in the far northern reaches of India, just to the west of Tibet. As Cornelius the Champion walked through the rain to the veranda, "he listened to the sound of the water on the leaves of the trees, like the ticking of a thousand watches.
He had come home to Simla and he was moved."

So ends the first of sixteen micro-chapters of Delhi Divison, an ending featuring the sound of a thousand watches ticking, bestowing expanded, richer, deeper meaning to time and eternity for our Eternal Champion.

What brings Jerry C to India, pray tell? Answer: to take on the role of English assassin. And speaking of English assassin, with its narrative quick shifts, its insertions of news clips, its prodding readers to fill in the gaps and also a mention of the SS Kao An, The Delhi Division gives us a foretaste of The English Assassin, Book Three of The Cornelius Quartet.

A batch of Delhi Division highlights and questions:

Lord Shiva In Action
Jerry has a blown-up picture of Alan Powys (victim of LSD gas in The Final Programme), a 1952 copy of Vogue, a Captain Marvel comic book (nice touch, Michael Moorcock!), a pack of Pall Mall faded to a barely recognizable pink. No doubt about it, no matter where you look, Shiva's destructive power is made manifest. No wonder Jer mulls over "what was the exact difference between synthesis and sensationalism?"

Jerry, forever the artist and aesthete, that's synthesis as in unifying various art forms into an aesthetic whole, a creation that's more than the sum of its parts. As for sensationalism, Jerry wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than the extremely controversial and attention-grabbing, in a word, being sensational.

Come on, Jerry, you can do both at the same time as you balance order and chaos. All in a day's work for an Eternal Champion.

Vishnu/Jerry, Sustainer of Life
"Jerry stayed in for the rest of the afternoon, oiling his needle rifle. Aggression sustained life, he thought. It had to be so; there were many simpler ways of procreating.
Was this why his son had died before he was born?"

Sounds like a Zen koan we are being asked to unpack. Is Jerry's needle rifle a means to maintaining cosmic balance between procreation and death? Should we see Jerry's son as symbolizing his unquenchable sexual yearning?

Classic Flight
Jerry travels south via Tiger Moth biplane, sporting an old-fashioned leather helmet and goggles. Fans will recall Jerry widemouthed while wearing a leather helmet and goggles in a drawing by Romain Slocombe during a future adventure in The Entropy Tango.



Needle Rifle
"Jerry sighted and titled the rifle a little. He pulled the trigger and sent a needle up through the priest's open mouth and into his brain." Does this JC zap serve as a statement relating to Western conquest and colonization? And what happens further south following a crash landing (bummer) of his biplane, when Jer has an opportunity to kill the Pakistani he's hired to assassinate?

Stunning Sabiha
Back at his bungalow, Jerry opens a brass box and hold it out to Sabiha. She takes what she needs. One of the more provocative scenes in the tale. What is Jerry offering Sabiha? Can we imagine the stunningly beautiful Pakistani film actress Sabiha Khanum as the story's Sabiha?



From the Material to the Spiritual
Was Jerry hired to assassinate Sabiha's lover, a Pakistani, because he wasn't Hindu? And please keep in mind, there is an actual Delhi Division that's a subdivision of Indian Railways, a railroad as active today as it was back in 1968 when this story was written. Is Michael Moorcock drawing an analogy between the Industrial Divisions of regional railways and the Spiritual Division between Indian Hindus and Pakistani Muslims?

Nāmarūpa
Listening to Jimi Hendrix's "Waterfall," our Eternal Champion performd something most quizzical: "Jerry reaches down from the table and touched a stud in the floor. The hut disappeared. Jerry took a deep breath and felt much better."

What are we to make of this? Has Jerry reached a level of enlightenment where he has transcended nāma (name) and rūpa (form)?

I urge you to read this tale sooner rather than later and judge for yourself.

Link to my review of all eleven tales within The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius - https://glenncolerussell.blogspot.com...


British author Michael Moorcock, born 1939

[Merl Fluin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry. As other characters keep telling you in this book: you were so beautiful when you were young. Surfing along on the entropy wave, needle gun elegant at your hip.

But then – ironically enough – time passed, and it seems you lost your lust for glorious psychedelic sci-fi speculation and lapsed into a vehicle for dyspeptic, self-indulgent and rapidly ageing satire. Not so tasty.

True, sometimes the old Jerry flashes through. A riff, a wink, a debonair grin. But that just makes the disappointment all the tawdrier.

Never mind, my darling. We'll always have Ladbroke Grove.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jerry Cornelius is one of the great characters of science fiction, adding weirdness and surrealism and nonlinear perspective to traditional science-fiction themes while making political and societal observations. Jerry and his family and friends travel through the multiverse in an unlimited number of guises, fighting for (or sometimes, perhaps, against) the balance between the forces of Law or Chaos. Or, at Times, perhaps it's something else... He always seems to stand against Entropy. Sometimes the reader isn't sure what's -really- going on, and is left with the delightful impression that perhaps Jerry (and even Michael Moorcock) isn't too sure, either, but it's always an interesting trip. My 1979 paperback edition of this collection doesn't even have a table of contents, but that's okay. This is an interesting collection that fills in some holes nicely and provides answers (of a sort) to some hanging threads, but I can't recommend it as a good starting point to Moorcock's multiverse, but it's a good addition for longtime fans.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

While not reaching the heights of language or assured experimentation of W.S. Burroughs, “Atrocity Exhibition” era Ballard, or Borges, it should be know that the Jerry Cornelius stories are way more fun, as Jerry and his cast of players turn 20th century atrocity and culture into wild theater. The world ends over and over, wars are always being fought, music blaring, awesome outfits are worn, science fiction gadgets buzz and scream, they kill each other over and over, time blurs, and we rotate through this world over and over again from a variety of permutations. All possibilities are explored.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

These reality- and time-bending stories are snapshots of political conscience from 1969 to 2002 with the enigmatic title character as a focal point. Moorcock’s Cornelius stories have influenced an entire generation or two of writers, and with this latest collection (which contains some of Moorcock’s best tales) showcases his most original and daring character.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most abstract reads I've encountered, and I've read plenty of Burroughs and PKD. Scenes poetically described with innuendos in abundance. I felt like the stranger to inside jokes the whole time. I enjoyed it despite (because of?) my confusion. I'm not new to Moorcock either. This is a wholly different style of writing for him.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange, dumb, funny, and pompous all rolled into one crazy head trip. If you get lost, don't worry. That is the intent. It might make sense when you get to the end.

[Squire · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first edition of of this book. The last five stories were replace for the 2003 edition.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird.
I love it.
Don't really understand why.

[Mekon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm sure Moorcock is a clever writer, a provocative writer and very likely an important writer. That's why I'm rather disappointed that I found this book such a slog. I dipped in and out of this one over a period of months, hoping to find a find a story that would engage me.

It's not as if the subject matter didn't match my interests. I didn't warm to Cornelius as a character, but I've enjoyed plenty of books with unlikeable or ambiguous protagonists. Perhaps it was some of the references to news events before my time where I needed a better grasp of things - although when the action caught up with my own memories it still didn't really grab me.

This sounds very superficial, but I think my biggest struggle was Moorcock's writing style. Everything happens in such short sentences that it becomes a staccato hammering, there's never a point where it flows out in a way that I can easily absorb.

Only a two-star rating from me, but I feel more like a failed reader than a reader of failed fiction.

[Michael Prendergast · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Moorcock is a legend from the 1960's onwards. He was a pioneer in New Wave Science Fiction, this would be stories that broke the mould of starships, ray guns and aliens. What we get here is a selection of stories revolving around Jerry and his pals as they travel around an alternative world and London. Some of these stories are a little heavy and you do have to concentrate upon the storyline and especially the dialogue. That being said a great book with one of my favourite Moorcocks' creation: Jerry Cornelius.

[Arthur B · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Jerry Cornelius short stories were always fairly hit and miss, but this collection has a better proportion of hits to misses than some. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/201...

[Ben Shakey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the 2nd Jerry Cornelius book I've read and I still don't know what's going on here. (but I like it).

[Karl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Michael Moorcock was always one of my favorites as a kid. This is a collection of some of his Jerry Cornelius short stories. It was okay. I felt it was also a little self involved as well, but then again, that is the basis of the character.

[Squire]

This is the 2003 edition of the book and has five new stries in it that aren't in the first edition.

[Bob Fries · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know what to make of it. I often got the feeling that it would have made more sense or resonated with me more had I read it when it was originally published. Like if I were part of that particular zeitgeist I would have been able to find my way into it.
More "experimental" than what I typically read. I can't say I disliked it but I couldn't call it a favorite.