Le forum de la Science-Fiction et de la Fantasy
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Moorcock conceived of Gloriana as his last fantasy novel, which it wasn’t, and as a crucial turning point in his career, which it was. Spenser’s The Faerie Queene—that great Elizabethan allegory and a favorite, like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, of Moorcock’s childhood—provides some of the names (e.g. Una, Duessa) and many of the visuals in Gloriana. Moorcock, who once sketched new worlds in a few paragraphs and then destroyed them in a sentence, here borrows many of the tricks of epic poetry: long catalogues of exotic names, exhaustive inventories of elaborate pageantry, fantastically exaggerated settings, and characters ludicrously exemplary of Vice or Virtue.