Search Worlds Without End

In the 1960s Jerry Cornelius was the coolest assassin on the Ladbroke Grove block.

By the 1970s The Condition of Muzak had won the Guardian Fiction Prize and The Final Programme was a feature film starring Jon Finch, Jenny Runacre, Hugh Griffiths and Sterling Hayden.

In the 1980s the world's first cyberpunk continued to inspire a generation of writers including William Gibson, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and bands like The Human League.

By the 1990s he was up and running towards the guns again in stories like 'The Spencer Inheritance', 'The Camus Connection' and 'Cheering For The Rockets', which dealt with the icons and key events of the day.

Now, in Firing The Cathedral, he responds to the attacks on America of September 2001 and their consequences, to the realities of global warming and global terrorism and, once again, the apocalypse has never seemed more terrifying, never been more fun.

Cooler, sharper, his fingers firmly on the pulse of the 21st century, Jerry Cornelius is back, counting names and taking heads. And modern life will never feel the same to you again.

In the 1960s Jerry Cornelius was the coolest assassin on the Ladbroke Grove block.

By the 1970s The Condition of Muzak had won the Guardian Fiction Prize and The Final Programme was a feature film starring Jon Finch, Jenny Runacre, Hugh Griffith and Sterling Hayden.

In the 1980s the world's first cyberpunk continued to inspire a generation of writers including William Gibson, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and bands like the Human League.

By the 1990s he was up and running towards the guns again in stories like 'The Spencer Inheritance', 'The Camus Referendum' and 'Cheering for the Rockets', which dealt with the icons and key events of the day.

At turn of the millennium, in Firing the Cathedral, he responded to the attacks on America of September 2001 and their consequences, to the realities of global warming and global terrorism.

Now, in Pegging the President, Jerry Cornelius is back; the ambiguous, amoral, androgynous English Assassin, cooler, sharper, his fingers still firmly on the pulse of the twenty-first century, counting names and taking heads, showing once again that colonialism and despotism -- the roots of empire gone sour -- do not change. The apocalypse has never seemed more terrifying, never been more fun, and modern life will never feel the same to you again.

Cornelius, hero of the needle gun, slams his way through fratricide, incest, and murder in the consumerland he favours as he battles his way into a phony le Corbusier chateau, on into Sweden and then to a months-long party in Ladbroke Grove, all the time with a bizarre chorus of the killed and killers absorbed in Bond-like action.

Up from the ocean depths comes the jet-black Caucasian transvestite champion. Resplendent in warpaint, wampum beads and silk suit by Cardin, armed only with a tomahawk and vibragun, he returns to the napalmed ruins of London to resurrect his sister and wrest from the disgusting Bishop Beesley and his formidable henchwoman the black box which has diffracted the cosmos and set the world spinning at super-speed towards its own final solution. Lock up your daughters, hide your stash, keep to the shadows.

Jerry Cornelius is back.

Jerry Cornelius rises from the deep to witness the destruction of the world - and to break up the biggest party ever thrown west of Ladbroke Grove.

Civilization as we know it has been annihilated. The decay and chaos of the multiverse have left Europe in a surreal, yet ever-fashionable, mess. Jerry Cornelius finds himself in an increasingly futile series of guises, part of a cast of characters dancing the Entropy Tango towards oblivion. Will the legendary Cornelius ever be united with his true beloved, his sister Catherine? And will balance ever be restored to devastated London?

Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, The Condition of Muzak is the fourth, climactic novel in the Cornelius Quartet. But this is by no means the last we will see of Jerry Cornelius--an indelible spirit of counter-culture who continues to inspire writers and artists to this day.

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.

Black comedy, science fantasy, adventure story, end-of-the-world novel, musical, opera, rock folly...

The good airship Lady Charlotte Lever chugged over what was probably Transcarpathia. Una Persson was stopping over in London to see her lover Catherine.

Makhno's anarchists held Ontario. Toronto was about to fall. The Americans were agitated. It was 1948 and a Second World War was about to break out.

Major Nye hoped not. He remembered the Great War and Geneva in 1910. Jerry Cornelius was left behind in a New Hampshire barn.

While in Lionel Himmler's Blue Spot Club, Miss Brunner ordered jugged hare as Bartok played on the jukebox.