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Pyat Quartet / Between the Wars book cover 1
Pyat Quartet / Between the Wars book cover 2
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Pyat Quartet / Between the Wars
Series · 4 books · 1981-1999

Books in series

Byzantium Endures book cover
#1

Byzantium Endures

1981

The first volume of the Pyat Quartet. Byzantium Endures, the first of the Pyat Quartet, introduces one of Michael Moorcock's most magnificent creations - Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski. Born in Kiev on the cusp of the twentieth century, he discovers the pleasures of sex and cocaine and glimpses a sophisticated world beyond his horizons before the storm of the October Revolution breaks. Still a student at St Petersburg, he is deflected into more immediate concerns, caught up in the rip-tide of history.
The Laughter of Carthage book cover
#2

The Laughter of Carthage

1984

The second volume of the Pyat Quartet. Having escaped the horrors of the Russian civil war, Maxim Arturovitch Pyat discovers that the hazards of Europe are as nothing to the perils that await him in America.He is almost immediately involved in further scandals, touring the country as a speaker for the Ku Klux Klan.In this second of Michael Moorcock's acclaimed Pyat series of novels, only the reappearance of Pyat's enduring love, his femme fatale, Mrs Corenelius, offers him a chance of escape.
Jerusalem Commands book cover
#3

Jerusalem Commands

The Third Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet

1992

The third volume of the Pyat Quartet. The third novel of the Pyat quartet finds Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski scheming his way from New York to Hollywood, Cairo to Marrakesh, from cult success to the utter limits of sexual degradation, leaving a trail of mechanical and human wreckage as he crashes towards an appointment with the worst nightmare of this century.
The Vengeance of Rome book cover
#4

The Vengeance of Rome

The Fourth Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet

1999

The final volume in the legendary Pyat “Moorcock has the bravura of the nineteenth-century novelist; he takes risks, he uses fiction as if it were a divining rod for the age’s most significant concerns.”–Peter Ackroyd

Author

Michael Moorcock
Michael Moorcock
Author · 134 books

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.

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Pyat Quartet / Between the Wars