Writing in The Observer, Angus Wilson called it 'one of the most ambitious, illuminating and enjoyable works of fiction published in English since the war'.(1939- ) UK author and editor, married to Hilary Bailey 1962-1978 London-based until around 1980, and London-obsessed from his first vivid memories of the bombing in World War Two of its southern suburbs, an experience constantly reflected in his fiction – wartime London underlies many of its characteristic landscapes and Icons and its images of Entropy – and central to what may be his finest single novel, Mother London ( 1988), a work of singular complexity whose comprehensive grasp makes generic pigeonholing impossible, despite touches of Telepathy and other psi phenomena in the text (see ESP Psi Powers). Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut have similarly developed) a writer who has managed to supersede conventional science fantasy and yet make of traditional fiction something wholly new'. In a piece in The Guardian, Barry Cole was 'struck by the singular fact that out of science fantasy or science fiction has emerged ( J. As indeed, is the implication, are we all'. The realisation comes that Jerry is seeking sanctuary in different universes of Time in separate private mythologies. Here we move through Mr Moorcock's obsessions, the serials of Fantômas, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Arthurian legend, through chronos-zones-behold the pun!-to bi-sexuality, with a small sideswipe at Stanley Kubrick on the way. In his review in The Times Tom Hutchinson wrote: ' The Condition of Muzak considers the process of living as a harlequinade and is, for me, a most moving summation. Jerry Cornelius, increasingly morphing into his role as Pierrot, has lost the power to change or even affect events and narrows his quest to an everlasting search for his true love, his sister Catherine. The chaos and decay that permeated Moorcock's A Cure for Cancer and The English Assassin has devolved further into a surreal Europe of splintered city states. The title refers to Walter Pater's maxim: 'All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music'. The novel won the 1977 Guardian Fiction Prize.

It was first published in its revised form in 1979. It is the final novel of his long-running Jerry Cornelius series. The Condition of Muzak is a novel by British fantasy and science fiction writer Michael Moorcock, published by Allison & Busby in 1977.

Moorcock runestaff