Michael Moorcock specialises in fantasies, but his aren't of the jubilant human variety which the Christmas fairy loves. His universe is one which possesses neither meaning nor logic, and human beings can play only a minimal role in it. The Knight of the Swords is a science fiction of the past—'science' in the sense that Man and all his works are not at its centre. It's really a novel about changing perceptions, about evanescent technologies and star-crazed soft-ware that escape the usual boring traps of 'the individual' and 'society'. Prince Corum—not a human being but some creature of a greater destiny—goes on a quest to destroy the thing he most fears. And in the process the book adopts the sacramental language of Malory, and combines it with the special effects of a Dr Who script….

The narrative might be set in the remote past or in some unimaginable future, and this peculiarly disembodied quality allows Moorcock to concentrate upon the thing itself: the telling of a story, so that each element becomes outrageously predictable and everyone's fantasies are satisfied. It has, in other words, to be written like a children's story or a newspaper report.

It needs an imagination that is visual rather than literary (which is why so many of The Knight of Swords' effects have been borrowed directly from the cinema): to deal directly with sensations and to transfer them to the page without embarrassment. This means, of course, that the prose can work freely in only two directions. In its odd encounters of the third kind—when it veers towards 'meaning'—it can become heavy and unnecessarily crude: 'Upstart Man was beginning to breed and spread like a pestilence across the world.' In a work of pure sensationalism, this needn't be said. It is only necessary that power, and powerful effects, should win in the end. (p. 29)