The novel “The Final Programme” by Michael Moorcock was published for the first time in 1968 fixing-up short stories written in previous years. It’s the first novel in the Jerry Cornelius series.

Jerry Cornelius leads a team whose goal is to penetrate his family mansion, inhabited by his brother Frank, to get their hands on important information and save his sister Catherine. It’s a complex mission due to the sophisticated defense systems and doesn’t exactly end in a great success.

In Jerry Cornelius’ team there was also Miss Brunner, a computer expert who has her own very extreme project, in which she wants to involve Jerry as well. Taken from his fratricidal fight, Jerry tries to juggle relationships that become more complex and dangerous than ever with his brother Frank and Miss Brunner.

In the 1960s Michael Moorcock started promoting the new wave literary current as editor of the magazine “New Worlds”, and as a writer he already started writing stories related to the concept of Eternal Champion, a hero with different identities in various universes. The combination of the new wave current and the idea of ​​Eternal Champion led to the birth of the character of Jerry Cornelius, who is not exactly a spotless hero but in some ways is more a likable rogue.

The new wave was a current based on experimentation and on the breakup with the themes that were then typical of science fiction with technical-scientific contents and space settings. Stories turned towards the so-called inner space already existed, but with the new wave they were explored in a much more specific and extreme way. The breakup also involved the presence of sex, which traditionally didn’t exist in the science fiction genre.

Michael Moorcock was central in the development of the new wave as author and editor, and in “The Final Programme” there are a lot of sexual references. It’s a novel in which traditional morality is trampled on without hesitation, as a result it was censored in the first American editions. Today what we call LGBT+ contents scandalize only some bigots and taboos like incest provoke very little shock, but in the 1960s those contents made it difficult to get a novel published.

Jerry Cornelius’ interest in sex, drugs and rock&roll is only a part of his personality, which is complex so it’s a mix of typical hippie knowledge such as the ones related to oriental philosophies with others more typical of people devoted to orthodox studies. The result is a curious version of the Eternal Champion, also because Michael Moorcock takes up elements of some plots of the adventures of Elric di Melniboné, the best known incarnation of that concept. From this point of view I realized too late that I had better read Elric’s stories first to connect them better. With Moorcock those are problems that can emerge because of the many interconnections that exist in what is a complex cosmogony.

In 1973 an adaptation of this novel was released in the movie “The Final Programme”. I watched it many years ago, well before I got to know Michael Moorcock’s works, so I remember practically nothing about it and I can’t offer an opinion about it.

“The Final Programme” is short even by the standards of the time and Michael Moorcock focuses on the development of the plot and on the new wave elements of the future in which it’s set. Today it’s partially dated, also because there’s little room to balance dramatic and humorous tones. It’s still interesting also because it’s the first novel in the Jerry Cornelius series.