Pegging the President

In the 1960s Jerry Cornelius was the coolest assassin on the Ladbroke Grove block.

By the 1970s The Condition of Muzak had won the Guardian Fiction Prize and The Final Programme was a feature film starring Jon Finch, Jenny Runacre, Hugh Griffith and Sterling Hayden.

In the 1980s the world’s first cyberpunk continued to inspire a generation of writers including William Gibson, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and bands like the Human League.

By the 1990s he was up and running towards the guns again in stories like ‘The Spencer Inheritance’, ‘The Camus Referendum’ and ‘Cheering for the Rockets’, which dealt with the icons and key events of the day.

At turn of the millennium, in Firing the Cathedral, he responded to the attacks on America of September 2001 and their consequences, to the realities of global warming and global terrorism.

Now, in Pegging the President, Jerry Cornelius is back; the ambiguous, amoral, androgynous English Assassin, cooler, sharper, his fingers still firmly on the pulse of the twenty-first century, counting names and taking heads, showing once again that colonialism and despotism — the roots of empire gone sour — do not change. The apocalypse has never seemed more terrifying, never been more fun, and modern life will never feel the same to you again.