a woman as the eternal champion ?

[Morgan Kane]

If the Eternal champion has ( amost ) always a woman he loves, i found only a female eternal champion : Ilian of Garathorm .... and when she comes in play, Hawkmoon occupies her body ........

Is the information corect ? is this a hazard ?

It is not a critics but a question ........

[Michael Moorcock]

Yes, it's something I began to worry about at around the same time I came up with Ilian of Garathorm. Una Persson is another, however, and she's appeared in quite a few books as have her namesakes Oon, Oona and so on. She also appears in Gloriana, as well as Cornelius stories, Seaton Begg and in The White Wolf's Son. Although I've been inclined to use a lot more female protagonists since the early 70s, say, I had already pretty much set my sword and sorcery heroes by then, though I have said before that Mrs Cornelius is probably my all time favourite character.

[Morgan Kane]

thanks you ......

one thing : at least you did not go to the polically correct feminist pointof view........... as Marion Zimer Bradley in some of the Darkover novels,forgeting the story !

but, if i may, ilian of Garathorm is an example of your elliptic way of discribing things. As a man in a woman body, hawkmoon had to adapt to many things and you pass on them treating them implicitly .

Once more, that is not a critic but a constat. In fact, very often, you choose not to go at length on many things but alluding to them .....

[Michael Moorcock]

To some extent this is because I'm part of a movement which was attracted to sf because we were rejecting the English modernist social novel. Our tendency (Jerry Cornelius is a more extreme example) was to reject the psychoanalytical approach and assume that any reasonably educated reader already took many things, including Freudian analysis, and certain kinds of social analysis, for granted. Also our motto at NW was always demonstrate don't remonstrate. The City in the Autumn Stars originally had a lot more concerning gender roles, since the rather macho character at the beginning spends about half the book disguised as a woman and being treated as a woman while the chief dynamic of the book is supplied by the main female character. The Adventures of Catherine Cornelius and Una Persson in the 20th Century was probably the first thoroughly pro-feminist book I wrote. I think it came out around the mid-1970s with a cover by French artist Romaine Slocombe, who also illustrated The Entropy Tango.

[Michael Moorcock]

Thanks, Ad. I did my best. I agree that too often a female protagonist just doesn't make it when written by a man, but I felt I had to try it at least once in that context.