The nurse said, ‘Try getting some sleep.’
‘I don’t need any sleep.’
‘You don’t, but it’s easier to run a hospital with all the patients sleeping.’The Final Programme, 1968
“Easiest way to run the world, for that matter,” Jerry Cornelius replies in the film version of The Final Programme, made several years later when reality had caught up a little with the imagination of British new wave writer Michael Moorcock. Swinging London had by then given way to the three-day week, an oil shock and rampaging inflation — a world far closer to the crumbling dystopia Moorcock had set his “urban adventurer” Cornelius loose in in the mid-1960s.
Moorcock offered Cornelius as a kind of template for other writers to use in the growing experimentalism that marked his editorship of New Worlds magazine and the emergence of JG Ballard, Brian Aldiss and then Moorcock himself at the forefront of a new kind of “speculative fiction” entirely at odds with traditional, American-style science fiction. Jerry Cornelius initially appears as an immaculately dressed, Bond-style action hero, not to mention a guitarist, physicist, former Jesuit, serial bisexual seducer and the putative messiah to the age of science. He totes a lethal “needle gun”, drives beautiful 1930s cars, flies his own aircraft and has apparently endless supplies in his fortress in Ladbroke Grove and scattered across the world. As becomes clearer as the novels progress, Cornelius is also a time traveller, or perhaps multiverse traveller, dipping into and out of various worlds, which only have in common their incipient surrender to that beloved trope of sixties sci-fi, entropy.
But whatever his trappings, Cornelius is no traditional hero: his passivity soon becomes apparent even in the first, most straightforward novel. The Final Programme ends with Jerry fused with the formidable, vampiric Miss Brunner — the computer engineer who drives the entire plot — into a self-replicating “final human” produced by a supercomputer in a cave in Lapland. The second, and most explicitly political, of the novels, A Cure for Cancer, sees Cornelius, now unsubtly wielding a “vibragun” (and continuing his pansexual conquests), in the midst of a US invasion of Europe, with London — he sees the apt graffiti “Vietgrove” near his HQ — eventually enveloped in Vietnam-era sheets of napalm.
In the third, set in alternate, steampunk realities familiar to readers of Moorcock’s A Nomad of the Time Streams novels — worlds of ceaseless, century-long wars between empires that never fell, armed with vast fleets of airships and suburb-sized tanks — Cornelius’ lack of agency is near-total. He spends most of the novel dead, his corpse the occasional MacGuffin for, but mostly a backdrop to, the adventures of a developing ensemble of characters, including Jerry’s joyously slatternly mother. When he eventually emerges at the end, it’s to establish the Commedia dell’arte framing that will dominate the fourth novel, abandoning his role as Harlequin to adopt the guise of Pierrot to his sister’s Columbine (Jerry’s two persistent motivations are his pursuit of chaos and his incestuous love for his sister, who herself spends much of the tetralogy dead). By The Condition of Muzak, we’re not even sure Cornelius exists at all or whether he’s the projection of a London teenager anxious to find a gig for his band (“The Deep Fix”).*
Or perhaps not. It’s rarely clear; Moorcock’s dialogue is often elliptical and riddled with non-sequiturs, as if any attempt at communicating information is being broken down by the ever-encroaching entropy; in the film version of The Final Programme — the only film made of Moorcock’s vast output — the dialogue is transformed (as per that hospital gag above) into an exchange of arch drolleries, especially between Miss Brunner and Cornelius, played, not without some success, by Jenny Runacre and Jon Finch, in what might be termed the first screwball apocalypse.
Indeed, across the books, the end of the world and societal collapse are always just around the corner, and just a pogrom away; populations abandon cities, insurgents topple regimes, colonial rebellions overwhelm empires, ships shell seaside resorts (try saying that drunk), refugees ebb and flow across lands, millions of military “advisers” overrun and incinerate capitals. But Cornelius, indeed the entire cast, are rarely troubled by such disasters — those they themselves haven’t caused — as if permanent catastrophe and dislocation are the norm wherever you end up in the multiverse. “I have it on very good authority that the world is coming to an end,” Jerry says in the film. “I thought I’d go home and watch it on television.”
Climate change is one of the catastrophes, but the kind resulting from the heat death of the universe (entropy, again), not the greenhouse effect –– A Cure for Cancer ends with a frozen world from which Cornelius has sucked all energy in order to briefly restore his sister to life. The end of the world was an atomic-fueled staple of fifties and sixties sci-fi, but for Moorcock, at the end of the world, the screaming terror of end-times is replaced with insouciance, pragmatism and a bemused acceptance that catastrophe is the price to be paid for modernity. Cornelius’ only complaint about the oncoming collapse of civilization in The Final Programme is that it’s happening more quickly than he expected, but he’s well-prepared for it anyway.
This indifference toward catastrophe is more than just sixties cool — swinging London in the shadow of the mushroom cloud — it seems prescient given it is formal government policy now in response to heat death of another kind, as we know from the relaxed response of the political class to the climate emergency: even as cities flood and refugees begin to shift en masse, we too are invited to simply watch it on television.
That Cornelius sprang forth, at least in novel form, in 1968 also seems apt over recent weeks. The US conducted its own bizarre version of the 1968 election (is not Trump a perfect embodiment of the 1960s presidents minus their virtues — Kennedy’s sexual predation, LBJ’s vulgarity and corruption, Nixon’s paranoia and criminality). A health insurance CEO was assassinated on a New York street. A Middle Eastern regime collapsed overnight, in the manner of the ceaseless Third World coups d’état of the 1960s — all while a US-sponsored war immiserates the Middle East.
Even now, we’re still playing catch-up to Moorcock’s dystopias. In A Cure for Cancer — the cancer being the communism the US must burn out wherever it’s found — President Teddy “Angel Face” Paolozzi dispatches 3 million “military advisers” to Europe (partly to confront an expansionist Israeli empire gobbling up eastern Europe) before being replaced with Ronald Boyle of the “Greater American Party”, who announces a special militia to reestablish law and order in the US (“I’m sure you will be prepared to suffer a little inconvenience for a short time so that the president can make sure there’s plenty of law and order in the future?” the arriving inmates of a concentration camp are told).
By the third novel, The English Assassin (Jerry does little assassination, or anything else) imperialism, and especially British imperialism, becomes the primary backdrop for the adventures of the growing cast, with much of the story’s disparate scenes — you’re never sure if you’re in the same universe as the one on the previous page — having a decidedly Edwardian, or perhaps Wellesian, air. Una Persson, Jerry’s rival for Catherine’s affection — Harlequin, eventually, to his Pierrot — appears as a jobbing music hall songstress when not leading revolutions (whether music hall or The Beatles, the books are steeped in English music). The atmosphere sticks even as the global conflict rages across much of the twentieth century and the cast variously fights with and against each other amid revolutions, occupations and invasions.
Imperialism, both old and new world, persists like radioactivity across the novels, making the experience of reading them a crystallisation into plain view of the imperialism that continues to dictate terms for much of the contemporary West, in both domestic and international politics. The West’s support of, or at least readiness to turn a blind eye to, Israel’s genocide and radically accelerated program of occupation and apartheid, all armed and funded by US taxpayers, continues the great tradition of Anglophone settler colonialism.
Here in Australia, after spending most of 2023 debating, ostensibly, how to integrate Indigenous communities into policymaking, but in fact debating and legitimising white resentment, we persist in our own settler colonial fantasy of terra nullius, with a formal constitutional position that Indigenous peoples don’t and have never existed here except as incidental features of the landscape. First Nations peoples vanished into a great political silence in 2024, perhaps henceforth to be mentioned only in February each year when yet another Closing the Gap report is issued, with politicians from both sides joining together to regretfully discuss how, yet again, there’s been little progress. You can watch it on television.
And once you start examining events through the persistence of imperialism, other things slot into place. Imperialism dominates Australia’s strategic priorities: we’re caught between the decline of the United States, a democratic empire prone to invading other countries and supporting genocide, and the rise of China, a monstrous tyranny rather less interested in invading anyone else or supporting the extermination of other peoples. Navigating this imperial seesaw will be Australia’s lot for decades to come (anyone for Moorcock’s “Australasian-Japanese Federation”, a major imperial player in his steampunk adventure The Land Leviathan?), especially as American policymakers become more and more obsessed with containing China and less and less interested in the costs — to themselves and everyone else — of doing so. The US is already knee-deep in bipartisan tariffs aimed at choking off China’s strategic advantages and returning president Boyle Trump promises more, so much more in terms of a trade war, with the chance of a real war between empires thrown in for good measure. We can only hope for some military technology as elegant as heavily armed airships.
But as veteran sci-fi historian and critic John Clute observed in his introduction to the series in the late 1970s, the Cornelius books are primarily urban novels.
Jerry Cornelius is the paradigmatic native of the inner city; his rôles constitute a genuine paradigm set of strategies for living there. His inner city is London (but could be New York), his patch is Ladbroke Grove. His real story (I believe) runs from about 1965 to about a decade later, a period during which London had been destroying itself as a place to live…
Indeed, this “urban adventurer” (Moorcock’s term) spends a lot of time in cities that have been burnt, bombed, shelled, depopulated, or invaded. London landmarks like Buckingham Palace are invariably occupied by figures like General Cumberland in A Cure for Cancer (a pun on Vietnam-era general William Westmoreland obvious to anyone familiar with England’s pre-1973 counties). In the most eerie moment of the entire series, Jerry returns to an increasingly deserted London midway through The Final Programme and visits one of his favourite haunts, only to be pursued by a blob-like crowd that tries to envelop and consume him. The ruined urban landscapes persist into the final novel: the teenage Cornelius seeks recognition, if not fame and fortune, in a filthy contemporary metropolis; later, Jerry will be crowned King of the city-state of London in an England now controlled by scores of small statelets and its former dominions, which have reverse-colonised the country.
In that regard, the books serve not only as a prescient nightmare of dystopias to come but an almost heartwarming evocation of a simpler era. It’s not cities themselves that have been depopulated by cataclysm, but the communities within them. The London of the 1970s, like other Western cities, hasn’t morphed into either deserted dystopia or garbage-strewn, Winter-of-Discontent capital of a lost empire, but something arguably bleaker and more sinister: a global city in which the nightmare is not to be absorbed by the mob but to be left behind.
The modern experience of residing in the cities of the West is now one of permanent competition, for things far more important than a gig for The Deep Fix: competition for housing, competition for the job sufficient to pay for housing, competition for educational opportunity, competition for infrastructure, for services. One fears not being absorbed, but missing out — on that house, that apartment, that job, that childcare place, that parking spot, that space in the next lane. And you can barely compete with the people already around you, let alone the tens of thousands of people that will arrive in coming years, who threaten to out-compete you and lock you or your children or your grandchildren out of a house, or out of a school, or out of a high-paying job.
In the post-neoliberal city, the most quotidian things of life — paying the rent, paying the mortgage, sending your kid to school, going to hospital, getting to your job — are a battle of all against all, with most of us barely keeping our heads above water while a precious few — the true elites — enjoy the perks of the system: asset owners, large corporations, scammers, developers, ticket clippers, every genius who has spotted an economic interstice in which to insert themselves and make money from the hundred or thousand micro- and macro-transactions we all have to make every day and every year, soaring above our dystopia in airships fueled by greed and the capacity to get away with it.
The resentment and exhaustion this breeds in all of us channels not into communitarian sentiment but tribalism, not generosity of spirit but rejection of the other, not fellow-feeling for the fact that we’re all in this together, but resentment that the system delivers us so little for so much striving for those who play by the rules. This curdling of the individualist economic value system of neoliberalism into a sour resentment of others, of the elite (like health insurance executives), of migrants, of minorities, of anyone and everyone because they’re not missing out and we are, is all nimbly exploited by the clever Harlequins of post-neoliberalism. The Trumps, the Johnsons, the Duttons, the Le Pens, offering themselves as messiahs to deliver salvation, justice and retribution to the disaffected, the aggrieved, the angry.
Inevitably, they prove empty idols, offering nothing but more rage and hate, pushing to turn the city into something still more tribal, violent, and divided. At the end of The Final Programme, Cornelius Brunner, the computer-created Messiah, gathers the remaining peoples of Europe into a vast throng and leads them to drown themselves, lemming-like, in the Black Sea. “A tasty world,” Cornelius Brunner reflects. “A very tasty world”, as if it was just one of many sampled and enjoyed, before the inevitable transition to another time and place.
Dystopias are rarely as bad as those who insist they can save us from them, especially for those of us without somewhere else to flee in the multiverse.
*I’m skipping Moorcock’s post-Brexit, Trump-era Cornelius effort, Pegging The President, which he’s now more or less disowned as having been written in too much anger.
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