Sailing to Utopia

Series · 3 books · 1969

By Michael Moorcock

Books in series

The Ice Schooner

1969

Ice odyssey. The world lay frozen under a thousand feet of ice - and only in the Eight Cities of the Matto Grosso did men still live, hunting the wary ice whales for meat and oil, following the creed of the Ice Mother which foretold the end of all life in ultimate cold. But legend told of a city far to the north - fabled New York - whose towers rose above the ice, whose crypts held the forgotten lore that might bring warmth to Earth once again. And, in the best ice ship in the Eight Cities, Konrad Arflane embarked on the impossible voyage to New York - an odyssey of incredible peril and adventure...with a shattering discovery at journey's end!

The Black Corridor

1969

The Black Corridor is a science fiction novel by Michael Moorcock, published in 1969, first by Ace Books in the USA, as part of their Ace Science Fiction Specials series, and later by Mayflower Books in the UK. It is essentially a novel about the decay of society and the deep personal and social isolation this has caused, and tells of a man fleeing through interstellar space from Earth, where civilisation is collapsing into anarchy and wars. The author uses techniques ranging from straight narrative to entries in the spaceship's log, dream sequences and sixties-style computer printouts.

The Distant Suns

1969

A Cornelius novel by Michael Moorcock, co-written with Philp James and illustrated by James Cawthorn, originally serialized, in eighteen instalments, in the Bombay-based The Illustrated Weekly of India between June and November 1969 before being re-published for the English market by Unicorn Books in 1975. "Philip James" is a pseudonym for James Cawthorn, who took over the writing of the serial when Moorcock fell ill.

Author

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.