Michael Moorcock, science fiction and fantasy author, literary novelist, magazine editor, bon vivant, rock star, anarchist, turned 80 In December. Born in London at the very beginning of the Second World War, he has lived in Texas for the past 25 years.

“And part of me expects to go on forever,” he says. Moorcock is tall, and bearded, and speaks with an accent that is somehow of an England that is slightly lost. “Like some of my characters.”

And what characters have sprung from his fevered brow. Elric of Melnibone, the pale and wan otherworldly albino with a black sword that eats souls. Dorian Hawkmoon, the far future German prince waging war against the fascistic, imperialistic island state of Granbretan. Jerry Cornelius, the hip and sexy secret agent swinging his way through a psychedelic London.

Wildly different protagonists, yet thanks to Moorcock’s overarching concept of a multiverse for much of his fictional output, all connected… and even the same, all aspects of his “Eternal Champion” existing to maintain the balance between order and chaos across the many facets of reality.

Well, Moorcock did hang out with Hawkwind and the Blue Oyster Cult, and he did embrace all the swinging decades had to offer. “In the 1960s and 1970s, if I hadn’t thought I could go on forever, I don’t think I would have made it to 80,” he says. “I only feel 80 in my body sometimes. I feel about 35 in spirit.”

Moorcock’s fiction turns in on itself, his novels and characters wind about each other. If you let it, it can do the same to you. His worlds are full of parallels. It’s remarkably easy to find your own. When Moorcock was indeed 35, I was five — the same age he was when his father abandoned him and his mother and inadvertently opened the door to Moorcock’s literary ambitions. When Moorcock was 40, half his life ago, I was ten.

Ten years old, and a voracious reader. There is no library in the working class suburb of Wigan where I live, but every Tuesday a mobile library pulls into the street behind my home, and sits there for an hour. The vehicle is long and old, maybe twenty or more years old even then, in 1980. It is, in my recollection, dusty and smells slightly musty, though with hindsight that may well be an erroneous, self-assembly memory with pieces borrowed from various second-hand bookshops I have haunted. It was also, as far as I can trust the four-decade-old pictures in my mind’s eye, overwhelmingly purple.

In winter I kick snow off my wellies and in summer I wear shorts and T-shirts, climbing up the steps into a narrow cave of books, squeezing past the old ladies perusing the large-print doctor-and-nurse romances and heading to the children’s section right at the back.

There is one problem on this day (I cannot remember if it is in the depths of winter or the height of summer) when I am around ten: I have read everything. I have read the Secret Sevens and the Three Investigators and the Hardy Boys and the Narnias and a slew of what today would be called Young Adult, slim volumes about the end of the world and alien invasion and children coping with social or domestic issues.

The driver of the mobile library is also the chief librarian, a transformation he effects by, I think, swivelling around his driver’s seat to sit behind the desk at the front of the vehicle, stamping books and taking in the returns. I can’t remember his name, nor his age, other than he was old in the way that everyone is old to a ten-year-old. What I do remember is that he had very pale skin and slightly pinkish eyes and hair so blond it appeared to be white. Not old-man white, but properly platinum white. I am later given to wonder if he is an albino, like Elric.

As I am coming to terms with the fact that I have read all the children’s section in the mobile library, the librarian appears beside me. He seems to know the problem without me vocalising it, and gently steers me to one of the shelves along the other walls.

“You seem to like science fiction,” he murmurs, taking one book from the shelf, and then another. I barely register the books as he presses them into my hands, and then picks a third, my maximum weekly allowance. “Try these.” I have graduated from the children’s section. I am reading grown up books. I feel as though I have been given the keys to a magic kingdom.

When I get the books home I find that two are thick anthologies in the same series. They are called Decades, one stuffed with classic science fiction short stories from the 1940s and the other from the 1950s. I devour them both, discovering hitherto unknown to me authors such as Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. The third book is a much slimmer paperback, a novel. The name on the cover means nothing to me — Michael Moorcock — and the blurb on the back suggests it is about time travel. That is OK. I have grown up on Doctor Who, first Jon Pertwee and then Tom Baker. One of the last novels I have read from the children’s section is about a kid who kept getting flipped back to the Second World War. I am good with time travel. So I decide to give Behold The Man a go.

To this day I wonder if that librarian knew what he was doing, if he chose Behold The Man specifically or if he merely selected it at random from the science fiction shelf. It’s safe to say that I had never read anything like it. The decidedly un-Who-like time traveller is Karl Glogauer, who arrives in a sphere filled with fluid in the Middle East in the year 28AD. His time machine splits and breaks; this is a one-way trip. And he is not there and then to save the world or fight Cybermen and Daleks. He is there to prove the existence of Jesus Christ. But the action in the far past — where Glogauer finds a severely-disabled Jesus who cannot possibly be the Christ of theology, and ends up fulfilling the role himself to its bitter end — is interspersed with flashbacks (flashforwards?) to Glogauer’s life in the 20th Century, his conflicted sexuality and his philosophical musings on the nature and possibilities of time travel.

Consider one ten-year-old mind well and truly blown. I like to think I rush back to the mobile library at the first opportunity and demand more Michael Moorcock. I was not that self-confident a child. More likely, I hand the book back the following week and scour the shelves for more. There are a couple — an Elric novel and the first in the Runestaff fantasy sequence. I never give much thought at that age as to who the authors of books are — I have no idea if Moorcock, or Asimov, or Bradbury, are alive or dead, or where they are from or where they live. All I know is that at the front of these slim paperbacks is an astonishingly long list of books “also by Michael Moorcock” and I resolve to track down them all.

Michael John Moorcock was born in “a nice little mock Tudor villa, rented” in South London, on December 18, 1939, three months or so into the Second World War. He grew up not only in the shadow of global conflict, but in the ruins of it.

“We were in the main zone for V1 and V2 bombs, so my world was highly malleable,” recalls Moorcock. “A building that was there the previous day would be gone next morning. I loved the paths people created through the ruins. I loved ruins. That is probably my main source of nostalgia. I have no interest in military history but I’m very curious about what leads to war and how people behave during one.”

There was conflict of a more personal and domestic nature, too. Most men were conscripted into the forces, apart from those with essential work on the home front. Moorcock’s father Arthur was one of those, employed as an engineer with an aerospace company. Most of his co-workers were women, and evidently the temptation was too much to bear. He, in Moorcock’s words, “ran off in 1945, when I was five.” It was on Christmas Day, a week after Moorcock’s birthday.

Perhaps because of his curiosity about “how people behave in war”, Moorcock seems philosophical about this — perhaps even, in a way, thankful. “Best thing he could have done for me,” he asserts, adding that his father was “a dull bloke. He avoided promotion if he could.” Moorcock senior didn’t leave much behind when he abandoned his family, but he did leave four books, two of which were by Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs. “It’s fair to say he provided the circumstances and materials of my forthcoming career,” says Moorcock.

In the absence of a father for her only child, Moorcock’s mother June stepped up to the mark, getting a job at a timber yard and working her way up to become a director of the company. “She was a bit flaky, but she loved me to bits,” he says fondly. Arthur might have taken his MG car, the fruits of the Moorcocks being part of the rising middle classes born into the 1920s, but June’s drive and hard-work saw her buy their home and provide a sound, secure base from which to provide for her son. Perhaps she didn’t want her only child to have the sort of mundane, everyday life that would see him grow disaffected and have a mid-life crisis, abandoning his family. In any case, she ensured that the young Moorcock was encouraged in his endeavours and ambitions from the get-go. Perhaps she also saw the potential in him to enjoy her own unfollowed dreams — Moorcock calls her a “great mythologiser”, given to fanciful tales and outright lies, talking intimately of far-flung places she’d never visited. A writer, perhaps, who never got an outlet for her imagination.

He says that after his father left, “I had a very happy childhood, all in all. I could read before going to school. All kinds of fiction. I produced my first magazine, Outlaw’s Own, by the time I was nine. I wanted to be a writer from a very early age and my mother was determined for me to fulfil my ambition.”

While Moorcock was set on the course of being a writer, at the same age I am just discovering the body of work he would produce. I have exhausted the small supply of books in the mobile library but over the next couple of years discover a cache of Grafton paperbacks in an independent bookshop, Smith’s, in Wigan. They are perhaps 50p each, and over the course of one summer holiday I walk into town, buy a book, take it home and read it, and then go back the next day for another, until my saved-up pocket money has run out.

As well as Elric and Hawkmoon and Jerry Cornelius I immerse myself in the stories of Corum, a member of the gentle, poetic, elf-like Vadagh whose family is slaughtered by brutish humans. I read about the Dancers at the End of Time, a handful of decadent immortals living at the far-future death of the universe. I devour the tales of Oswald Bastable, the Edwardian soldier catapulted into a variety of universes that are similar but different to our own, and considered to be ground zero for the steampunk sub-genre, which concerns itself with alternate Victorian-era realities where technologies such as airships and steam-powered robots are rife. Many years later I will write my own steampunk novels. There will be a blink-and-you’d-miss-it appearance of a walk-on character called Reverend Bastable, minister of a fictional church called St Oswald’s, in Whitby. I do not notice the unconscious homage to Moorcock until someone points it out to me.

But most of all, I thrill to the interconnectedness of Moorcock’s work, at the concept of the Eternal Champion, of which Corum, Hawkmoon, Jerry Cornelius and Oswald Bastable are all facets. I am amazed to see Karl Glogauer appear again, decidedly un-crucified, in the Dancers at the End of Time books and the novel Breakfast in the Ruins. And, throughout it all runs perhaps most enticing of all his creations, Una Persson.

Una Persson is Moorcock’s genius distilled into one package, the lover of Jerry Cornelius and his sister Catherine Cornelius, a secret agent and time traveller and pretty much anything else, who appears in almost everything Moorcock writes, sometimes in name and appearance (typified by her dark, bobbed hair) and other times as a flitting hint of tone and attitude, a perfume ghost that hides between the lines of printer’s ink.

At the same time I am reading JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and epic fantasy novels by the likes of David Eddings and Raymond E Feist, which follow in roughly the same paths, replete with dwarves and dragons and goblins and quests. Moorcock’s work is fantasy, is shelved in the same places in the bookshops, but those doorstep tomes are nothing like his work. Nothing like Una Persson. Nothing like any of it.

I wonder how such a prodigious imagination could ever have come to be.

Some 30 years before I began to devour his books in earnest, and at roughly the same age as I was then, Moorcock had decided he wanted to be a journalist, and at the age of 11 or 12 went to Pitman’s College to learn typing and shorthand. Not wanting to wait for a job before he began his periodicals career, he began to produce his own amateur magazines, or fanzines: “One was devoted to old boys’ story papers and books in general, and one was for fantasy and science fiction, especially Edgar Rice Burroughs.”

“My mother had given me self-confidence from the beginning,” he says. “She sent me to a posh school and supported all my literary endeavours.”

Posh school notwithstanding, Moorcock and formal eduction didn’t really get on very well. Post-war Britain didn’t hold the same excitement as the war years had for a small boy exploring ruined London. “I found peacetime dull and school bored the crap out of me,” he says. “As a result I was regularly in trouble with schools and was expelled not because I was ‘bad’ but because I was bored stiff. Happily for me my mother continued to support me in my ambitions to write and produce magazines. I left school at 15 and by 16 was assistant editor on a juvenile national magazine and by 17 was editor, promoting my own policies.”

That magazine was Tarzan Adventures, his editorship the fruits of an obsession gifted him by his absent father who was otherwise interested only in cars and motorbikes.

I am a little older than Moorcock when I begin to publish my own fanzines — 13, I think. My first effort is called Vox Stellarum, a phrase I have found in a book which is Latin for, roughly, “voice of the stars”, which I think is a suitably science fictional phrase. I draw (badly) my own comics and write (haltingly) about science fiction books and TV shows. My uncle photocopies it at work and I distribute it among friends and neighbours. I will be much older than Moorcock was when I take typing classes in my lunch breaks at sixth form, and learn shorthand (Teeline to his Pitman) aged 18 at my journalism course. And though I am by this point set on being a journalist and writer, I most certainly do not have the unassailable confidence that Moorcock had at 16, which led to his first professional gig.

For his Edgar Rice Burroughs fanzine he interviewed the then editor of Tarzan Adventures, published by the magazine giant IPC, and was disappointed to find him “an old hack” who had no real interest in the subject matter. Moorcock sat down and wrote a scathing piece on him, and sent a copy of his amateur magazine to him. He recalls with a laugh, “I was told I’d never work in Fleet Street again. I didn’t even work in Fleet Street at the time.”

But the editor moved on, to do a gardening magazine, and on the back of his Burroughs fanzine work Moorcock was contacted by the publishers to ask if he would like the post of assistant editor at Tarzan Adventures. Furthermore the new editor, Alistair Graham, who is still a friend of Moorcock’s, told him that he was planning to leave himself within six months, and that the teenager would be in the frame to edit the magazine. That first appointment would mean he would go on to edit a magazine called New Worlds, and usher in a revolution in science fiction writing.

New Worlds magazine had been around in various guises since the 1930s, and while it was the home of the British version of what might be called classic, Golden Age science fiction, concerned with space exploration, aliens and the far future of mankind, it also published early work by such luminaries of the scene as Brian Aldiss, John Wyndham, John Brunner and Arthur C Clarke. And in 1956 New Worlds published the first story that JG Ballard ever sold, Escapement. This was significant because it sowed the seeds for the tone of Moorcock’s take-over of the magazine in 1964, and the beginning of what became known as the New Wave of science fiction. The New Wave would be more experimental, would take a more literary approach, and be far more inclusive than the largely white male dominated era that had gone before.

”It was boring,” says Moorcock of the science fiction status quo. “It showed little interest in style or character or, indeed, adults.

Moorcock, Ballard and a Birmingham-born writer called Barrington J Bayley had for a long time by the mid-Sixties been lamenting the genre. New Worlds was going to be their cure for an ailing industry.

He recalls, “Barry Bayley, Jimmy Ballard and myself met in pubs for years, planning a magazine which would prepare the way for literary fiction for the future. We’d write stories as if our readers were familiar with all we wrote about. No explanations or rationales.”

Moorcock wrote a sizeable amount of fiction for New Worlds, mostly under the pen name James Colvin, and his first version of Behold The Man was published there in 1966. He also made a conscious effort to break the stranglehold on the genre of the white male author. Writers of colour such as Samuel R Delany were published in New Worlds, and the New Wave introduced or gave better platforms to many women writers such as Pamela Zoline, Judith Merrill, Joanna Russ and Ursula K Le Guin.

Moorcock says reading Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics articles in the Evergreen Review counter-cuture magazine, which published Beat authors such as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, “gave me the political language” to try to change the landscape of science fiction. He became close friends with Millett, and with radical feminist Andrea Dworkin. I wonder if being brought up by a strong-willed single mother had in any way informed his 1960s feminism ally-ship.

“Very likely,” he muses. “All my aunts, my grandmother, wives and daughters, all tell me what I should be doing, but I had to build my own moral compass.”

Undergoing a variety of owners and bail-out grants, New Worlds burned brightly for the second half of the decade but limped to a close as a periodical in early 1970. But it had done its job, creating a new landscape that allowed writers who had previously been gatekeepered out of the genre, to flourish. New Worlds appeared sporadically as a quarterly and then even more semi-regularly, and eventually the name disappeared in 1979.

My 1979 edition of Who’s Who In Science Fiction, by Brian Ash, and published by Sphere in the year that Moorcock turned 40, has an entry on the author, of course. It calls him a “germinal influence” on the New Wave, and says of his tenure as New Worlds editor that “he encouraged experimental styles and approaches which sometimes read more like hard-core pornography than software science”. Ash notes that New Worlds had to be “rescued with an Arts Council grant in 1967”, and that WH Smiths banned the magazine because of the “salty language” in Norman Spinrad’s story Bug Jack Barron. The entry also observes, possibly a little tartly, that with regards to the science fiction with which Moorcock made his name, “He now views the genre with distaste.”

Could that have been true? “I viewed most genres, including literary fiction, as moribund,” he says. “I remain interested in well-done fiction, preferably outside genre, like Peake, Gerhardi, Firbank etc. Most fiction bores me these days and I tend to read 18th and 19th century literary and popular fiction. I like reading fiction which had not yet learned to become self-conscious.”

Around the time Who’s Who In Science Fiction was briefly profiling Moorcock, his first marriage was coming to an end. Moorcock has been married three times. His first was to Hilary Bailey, the editor and critic. They married in 1962 and had two daughters together quite quickly — Sophie and Katherine. A son Max came along a little later. They separated in 1978 and Moorcock was briefly married to the artist Jill Riches, who illustrated some of his book covers. He married Linda Steele, an American, in 1983, with who he now lives in Texas.

At the time of his first marriage Moorcock moved to Notting Hill in London. It’s fair to say Moorcock embraced the Sixties outside of driving forward the New Wave of science fiction. The houses either side of where he lived were brothels, and he remembers the arrest of his dope dealer causing widespread dismay in the community.

Moorcock is a grandfather now, and recalls that at a family meal in a restaurant a few years ago one of his grandsons said loudly, “Grandpa, please don’t give my mummy any more weed!” To which his response was that he’d never given his daughter drugs… he’d always sold them to her.

Notting Hill had a large West Indian population then, and was often the focus of right wing attention. Moorcock and a friend famously infiltrated a fascist organisation that turned out to be run by a white haired old lady who poured tea from a pot and held forth with her opinions on Jews and people of colour. It further turned out that absolutely everyone else in the gathering aside from the elderly host were also left-wingers who had infiltrated the group. Moorcock joined the Race Relations Council and lobbied for legislation to make racism against the law.

He was being a father, and a husband, and editing magazines and writing novels. He was writing novels at a terrific pace. He wrote his Corum books in just three days apiece. He didn’t have time to read them before sending them off to his editor, who didn’t have time to read them before sending them to the printer.

And then there were the bands. Moorcock was friends with and collaborated with Blue Oyster Cult and the group he is most often associated with, Hawkwind. He and Hawkwind appeared in the background of the movie of the first Jerry Cornelius novel, The Final Programme, in 1973.

“Essentially both bands asked me for material, and that’s how we began working together,” says Moorcock. “Some of them were readers of mine. Hawkwind were friends through Frendz, the underground paper.”

Hawkwind’s 1985 album The Chronicle of the Black Sword directly referenced Elric, and their track The Black Corridor used lines from Moorcock’s novel of the same name. Similarly, he wrote the lyrics to Blue Oyster Cult’s track The Black Blade, among others.

Since 1975 Moorcock has recorded with his own band, The Deep Fix. Moorcock’s written mythology winds through his music; The Deep Fix was the title of a short story collection he wrote in the 1960s as James Colvin. It’s also the name of the band that Jerry Cornelius fronted. The latest album Live From the Terminal Cafe was released in October. He still plays live but these days, he says, largely limits himself to the harmonica.

When I was entering my own twenties, the age when Moorcock is re-inventing science fiction, I lost interest somewhat in the genre, though perhaps not as far as viewing it with distaste. I have discovered more literary novels, and embraced other pursuits such as girls and pubs, music and festivals and occasional recreational drugs. I will form a band with my friends and we will play dingy pubs around Preston, Lancashire, and will never trouble the Hawkwinds or Blue Oyster Cults of the world.

In the early 1990s, perhaps 1992, I attend a large used book fair at Haydock racecourse with a friend, hunting the aisles for anything with a whiff of the counter-cultural about it. I wear a Manic Street Preachers T-shirt with the legend BABY I’M BORED on the back, which I feel is suitably nihilistic and edgy for a book fair. I lurk around the “K” sections of shelves, looking for more Kerouac for my collection. My eyes graze to the “M”s, attracted by a name I’d almost forgotten. Michael Moorcock. But this is not one of the slim paperbacks with lurid covers that are still piled up in a cupboard at my parents’ house. This is a big, thick, chunky beast of a novel. This is Mother London, and it does not appear to be science fiction or fantasy.

Mother London was published in 1988, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. It is a love letter to Moorcock’s native city, and follows the lives of three outpatients from a mental health hospital as they navigate a London where time roils like an ocean rather than flows like a river, detailing their — and the city’s — lives from the Blitz, into which Moorcock was born, to the late 1980s.

Despite the bulk of his work being in the science fiction and fantasy genres, Moorcock feels he had been fortunate enough to not be pigeonholed as a writer only working in those areas, especially after the publication in 1976 of Gloriana, a re-imagining of the reign of Elizabeth I through the lens of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, and Byzantium Endures in 1981, the first book in his Pyat Quartet, about the picaresque adventures of a young man in Tsarist Russia. Both books earned Moorcock his “literary fiction” stripes, and paved the way for Mother London, a book he had been wanting to write for almost 30 years before it eventually appeared.

Moorcock doesn’t have a huge amount of truck with genre distinctions anyway, and the literary fiction tag is no different. “I suppose I think of it as a genre with modernist and even post-modernist tropes,” he says. “I wasn’t really pigeonholed even before Gloriana and Byzantium Endures. In fact, that didn’t happen until they discovered they could sell a lot of my ‘lurid paperbacks’ and the critics got confused! Up until then I was reviewed frequently as general fiction.

“With Mother London, I had wanted to write about London from about 1960, and I wrote the book as soon as I had made sure it couldn’t be read as a generational novel.”

His ‘lurid paperbacks’ were the Grafton ones I discovered in the early 1980s, often with garnish covers that barely hinted at the upending of the genre that was going on inside. Never doing what’s expected has been Moorcock’s watchword throughout his career.

Take his latest novel, published in 2015. Like Mother London, The Whispering Swarm has as its focus the city he was born into; indeed, looked at from one angle it’s the nearest we have to his memoirs, detailing his life from the Second World War to creating his fanzines and on to editing Tarzan Adventures and New Worlds. But twist it slightly in the light and it becomes a whole different beast, a truly Moorcockian tale that departs reality, or at least our version of it, when the young author discovers a hidden city called Alsacia and its vivacious denizens, which exerts an almost irresistible pull on him and draws him away from the mundane world again and again.

It’s written from a distance, both of time and of space, as Moorcock now lives in Texas with Linda, and has since the late 1990s. It’s in Texas that Moorcock answers my questions, though of course, wonderfully, magically, I am in the north of England. The ten-year-old me who discovered Moorcock through Behold The Man, or even the 22-year-old me who re-discovered him through Mother London, could not have ever conceived that I would be one day interviewing him, and doing it — he has been a little unwell recently, and says he is not very good on the phone these days — via a flurry of emails zipping back and forth across the Atlantic throughout the first half of December.

As the exit polls correctly predict Boris Johnson’s storming majority and the utter refutal of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party on December 12th, I message Moorcock to see if he’s watching from the lone star state.

“I was devastated,” he says when he gets back to me. “For about an hour. Then I thought OK, we have a decision, let’s deal with it. Five year’s time will probably bring an enormous reaction of some kind. Meanwhile I probably won’t be around in the event of a disaster and hope my grandkids have a bolt hole somewhere relatively safe for them.”

Speaking of disasters, that’s exactly the word he uses with regards to Brexit. “It also makes our private lives very inconvenient,” he adds pragmatically. “We live in Paris half the year, so have no idea what our status will be. I understand principled reasons for leaving but I so wish we weren’t. My hopes for the future involve increased federation and increased independence under that umbrella.” Indeed, he points to the old Dan Dare comics from the 1950s which he used to devour, and its future vision of 1999 with “a world government, a world at peace, everybody equal… I saw the EU as the beginning of an alliance of nation states, what Dan Dare’s future looked to.”

Moorcock is often described as an anarchist, but he says his ideology is more Kropotkinism, the philosophy of the Russian activist, revolutionary and writer Pyotr Kropotkin, who died in 1921 and who was an advocate of anarchy-communism exemplified by his idea of “mutual aid”, a rebuttal of centralised control but with the flourishing of local co-operatives to exchange goods and services without a monetary system.

“I was attracted to Kropotkinism from an early age,” he says. “That gave me an idea of how to allow freedom to the individual and legislate for social justice and co-operation. It’s a moral position which allows you to take action according to the situation.”

I’m curious as to how he squares that with living on the front line of Trump’s America. “I’m an English citizen of the world!” he declares, adding a smily-face emoji. “I don’t want to hear opinions I agree with. That’s my reason for moving to a small town outside Austin, which has the conveniences of a largish liberal consumer base. I needed to see the Constitution in action. I was born an Englishman and hope to die one.” But, he adds, “If it were not for my offspring I’d hardly bother to visit.”

Perhaps more visits to the UK might be on the cards, though, as his cachet is about to zoom up even further, especially to consumers of event television. Despite Moorcock’s extensive oeuvre, adaptations of his work for TV and film have previously been scant. In 1973 director Robert Fuest, who had previously worked on the British quirky spy thriller series The Avengers and the darkly-comic Dr Phibes horror films, brought the first Jerry Cornelius novel, The Final Programme, to the big screen. It was a psychedelic slice of new wave apocalyptica that confounded the critics (one called it “an unmitigated disaster”) and ended up being shown on double bills with soft porn movies. However, now we are in an age where TV is taking more risks with higher production values and bigger budgets than ever before, it appears Moorcock’s time might have come at last.

In February this year BBC Studios announced they had secured the rights to the four Runestaff books starring Dorian Hawkmoon, with Steve Thompson, whose previous credits include Doctor Who and Sherlock, attached as lead writer and executive producer. Moorcock is, of course, delighted. “I believe the team will do an outstanding job and I’m looking forward to seeing Hawkmoon, Count Brass and Yisselda brought to the screen,” he enthused at the time. “This is a perfect time for the series, which seems more relevant today than it did when I originally wrote it. I will be working closely with the writers to develop the stories. I feel like a schoolboy, breathlessly waiting for the first episode to be aired.”

Hawkmoon’s journey across the quartet which takes him from “ghost-cities in the Syrian desert to pirate colonies in the American bayou; from caravans of mutant creatures in Carpathian mountains to the heart of the Dark Empire itself — the glittering city of Londra where the river runs blood red”, according to BBC Studios, certainly has the epic narrative sweep to appeal to fans of shows such as Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. Perhaps even more exciting, yet less further along the production schedules, was the news just last month that the 11 novels in the Elric sequence have been optioned for TV.

New Republic Pictures have acquired the rights with Glen Mazzara and Vaun Wilmott, who between them have credits on The Walking Dead, The Shield, Prison Break and Star Trek: Discovery, lined up to adapt.

Despite his fulsome and positive words for the BBC press release, Moorcock has perhaps been around the block once too often to get too excited. “I believe movies or TV series if I’m sitting in front of a screen watching them,” he says. “I’m hoping something will become real.”

In the meantime, he’s reading — most recently Brian Catling’s Vorrh fantasy trilogy, Kate Abley’s self-published contemporary satirical novel Changing The Subject, and The Prague Coup, a graphic novel about Graham Greene finding himself at the heart of Bohemian intrigue, written by Jean-Luc Fromental and illustrated by Hyman Myles.

Moorcock is an avid reader (and writer) of comic books. He is friends with Alan Moore, and has been watching Damon Lindelof’s HBO TV series that acts as a sequel to the 1980s series written by Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, over which Moore has had a bitter relationship with publishers DC Comics. Watchmen the TV series has been winning huge plaudits, especially for its non-linear storytelling, but Moorcock, perhaps through loyalty to his friend, is biding his time with it. “I’ve been watching that and the BBC adaptation of His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman,” he says. “His Dark Materials, like Moore’s original, is the work of an original writer. The closer it captures his stamp, the better. I think Watchmen has a couple of nice ideas, but it’s more of a team effort. Let’s see.”

Oh, and he’s writing, too. “Lots!” he enthuses. “Just finished a Cornelius story, and am doing revisions on The Woods of Arcady, second novel of my Whitefriars trilogy, a short novel Stalking Balzac and the final part of the new Elric novel! Also, some comics in France. And music with Alan Davey [former Hawkwind bassist] in the US.”

I am ten years old again and I want to discover it all, for the first time.

At 80 years old, Moorcock’s work ethic puts many writers half his age to shame. It’s probably about time he received some kind of recognition in the New Year’s Honours list, surely? He won’t say if he’s ever been offered one, but says that like “JG Ballard, Benjamin Zephaniah, and others” — Ballard turned down a CBE in 2003 and poet Zephaniah rejected an OBE the same year — “I don’t do honours”.

After thinking about it he does say, “I did want to go on Desert Island Discs when Roy Plomley ran it but Roy hated me and refused the producer’s attempts to get me on! Even Ballard got on and he was tone deaf!”

Perhaps current host Lauren Laverne might be more amenable to hearing Moorcock’s musical choices, if she can get him to leave his writing desk for long enough, which might not be easy. “I still have stories to tell and songs to write.” he says. “I’ve had the impulse all my life and if it dies I’d probably be dead pretty soon afterwards!”

And if that did happen, if he proved to not be as immortal as his own creations, which of his actual characters would he like to be reincarnated as, if such a thing were possible, as all things are possible within his vast and interconnected body of work? Without hesitation, he says, “Una Persson.”

Michael John Moorcock, 80 years old, live and in full effect on all fronts, playing in a multiverse near you, until the End of Time.