2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Arab Question, November 30, 2001
This book was published in 1989 and reprints much of Moorcock's work from the previous two or three years, much of it journalism.
What's really remarkable is that in 1987 Moorcock was warning about our relationship with the Arab world, our failures to recognise and understand its culture and manners. This book isn't that hard to get in the UK second hand. I don't think the essays (there is also a lot of material on Moorcock's strongly
held feminist views) have ever been reprinted anywhere else.
Moorcock's recent Cornelius stories have shown how finely tuned he is to world events -- some of them have an uncanny prescience.
This is where the Reminiscences of the Third World War first appeared, too, along with The Great Rock and Roll Swindle which Moorcock wrote in collaboration with the Sex Pistols. This is a writer who has made it his business to go to the places and events which are amongst the most crucial to this century -- whether it be his immersion in the world of sex, drugs and rock and roll, or his respectful fascination with the world of Islam.
If you want to know the concerns of the next ten years, don't read the 'futurists', read Moorcock, who has always insisted he is merely recording his own experience. This is a key Moorcock title but the short stories were swiftly collected elsewhere and it's a great shame we can't get the essays any more. Someone should publish a book of Moorcock's political and literary essays, including his profiles of Andrea Dworkin, Harlan Ellison, Maeve Peake and Angus Wilson which appear here, too. I'd like to see a copy of The Retreat from Liberty, his long political essay which predicted the fall of Thatcher and the decay of the Tory
Party in the UK. He also predicted how the USA would become increasingly dysfunctional as less and less real information got through to the US public through their common media. In a less self-centered age, Moorcock would be hailed as the modern H.G.Wells. Get this book and find out why!
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