Tu Shanshu application
!markdown
***Player Information:***
**Name:** Karin
**Age:** Plenty old.
**Contact:**
finalprogramme
**Game Cast:** Lord Henry Wotton
***Character Information:***
**Name:** Una Persson
**Canon:** Michael Moorcock's Multiverse (multiple novel series; see below).
**Canon Point:** After the events of *The Metatemporal Detective*. She's returning to London from Paris after the adventure in "The Flaneur des Arcades de l'Opera", and has gotten somewhat waylaid. For simplicity's sake, I'm putting her "history" in order of book publication, restricting myself to a few key Moorcock series and stories (see Reference) and completely dodging the controversy about her identity in the extended Elric series (which you'll see on her Multiverse.org wiki page) (and justifying it ICly with the argument that she has temporarily forgotten those parts of her history). All is explained in Setting and Personality.
**Age:** Difficult to pin down, but she appears to be in her early- to mid-thirties.
**Reference:** (I am really sorry for being constitutionally incapable of apping characters without a ton of canon baggage.)
* [TVTropes: Michael Moorcock](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/MichaelMoorcock?from=Main.MichaelMoorcock)
* [Publication history](http://una-persson.dreamwidth.org/310.html)
* [Assorted quotes and excerpts that I've scanned in over the years](http://una-persson.dreamwidth.org/98566.html)
* [Multiverse.org: Una Persson](http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=Una_Persson): Includes a crapton of speculation about her identity vis-a-vis characters in the extended Elric series, which I'm going to avoid completely by restricting myself to her appearances in the following series/stories:
- [Multiverse.org: Jerry Cornelius](http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=Cornelius_%28series%29)
- [Multiverse.org: Nomad of the Time Streams](http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=A_Nomad_of_the_Time_Streams)
- [Multiverse.org: The Dancers at the End of Time](http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_Dancers_at_the_End_of_Time)
- [Multiverse.org: Gloriana, or the Unfulfill'd Queen](http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=Gloriana,_or_The_Unfulfill%E2%80%99d_Queen)
- [Multiverse.org: The Metatemporal Detective](http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_Metatemporal_Detective_%28collection%29)
- [Text of "The Murderer's Song", a Jerry Cornelius story by Michael Moorcock](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10237560/Moorcock%2C%20Michael%20-%20The%20Murderers%20Song.pdf)
- [Text of "Everything Blowing Up", a Jerry Cornelius(ish) story by Hilary Bailey](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10237560/Bailey%2C%20Hilary%20-%20Everything%20Blowing%20Up.pdf)
**Setting:**
> The Moorcock Multiverse consists of nearly the entirety of the man's body of work, canon-welded (by him; [TV Tropes used to call canon-welding "the Moorcock effect"](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CanonWelding?from=Main.TheMoorcockEffect)) over the years into a massive intersecting web of parallel and alternate timelines, intertextual references, characters with multiple incarnations and resurrections, and a crap-ton of retcons and revisions that make things a bit headachy for those of us who have been following the books for a long time. An example of one of the annoyances: the Cornelius quartet was revised in later editions to retcon Una Persson as a character in *The Final Programme* and *A Cure for Cancer*, whereas originally she didn't show up in that series until *The English Assassin*-a fact of which I was unaware until fairly recently. (Until further notice, I'm sticking with the canon of the earlier edition with which I'm most familiar.) (Supposedly Gollancz is going to be publishing a definitive edition of the Cornelius books later this year.)
>
> Anyway, Una's references are linked and balanced in such a way that it seems pretty clear that every Una Persson we encounter is the same woman. (Apart from the Una/Oone/Oona controversy, which as I said I'm going to avoid by sticking to the books where the connections are the clearest.) (I think the guys at Multiverse.org are dead wrong on Una=Oona and I'm *convinced* that Una=Oone the Dreamthief, but that's another rant for another day.)
>
> Two of the dominant motifs of the books are the figure of the Eternal Champion and the concept of the Cosmic Balance. The Eternal Champion is a figure who has been incarnated in many forms throughout the Multiverse, usually as a doomed hero with some manner of sword or weapon-often a black sword. Elric is one manifestation, as are Jerry Cornelius and Jherek Carnelian. Some people would argue that Una is a manifestation as well. Others claim that she is a manifestation of a sort of "Eternal Companion", the foil/sidekick that the Champion always seems to require.
>
> The Cosmic Balance is both a metaphor and an actual mystical concept/object that represents the interplay of the forces of Law and Chaos that keep the Multiverse ticking along. Neither is good or evil in and of themselves, but excesses of either lead to stagnation, and Una tries to ply her efforts in ways that will avert the domination of one or the other. Early Moorcock coded Chaos as explicitly evil, but as his ideas have evolved, the moral designations have gotten cloudier; it is, after all, possible for Law to take on evil manifestations in authoritarian systems. In the end, equal give-and-take between the two forces is the most important thing.
>
> With that being established, here is Ms. Persson's place in the Moorcock Multiverse, starting with a general overview and then going (very roughly) in publication order of the novels.
>
> **Overview**
>
> Una's origins are lost in time; she's spun tales of a Swedish father and an English mother, long dead (killed in a tragic ballooning accident, she once claimed), and she has vague memories of childhood, but they may very well be notions of what one should remember, based on images in film and books.
>
> What is known, then: After an initial career as an actress and music-hall singer, Una became a politician, activist, and revolutionary. Every now and then she goes back to the theatre, but inevitably throws it over again to get back into the revolution game. The exact order of her adventures is unclear, but her biographer, friend, and collaborator Mr Moorcock writes in the introduction to *The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century* that as far as he knows, her accounts of events are "the most objective, the most accurate." (Moorcock writes an avatar of himself into his books; in one book she actually visits him and his wife at their house in Lost Pines, TX. It's a metafiction thing.)
>
> At some point she became a member of the League of Temporal Adventurers. This loose group of scientists and adventurers explore the Multiverse and keep track of the flow of time and dimension (the "chronoflow" and the "megaflow"). Occasionally they are called to fish rogue travellers out of time streams where they shouldn't be, or to facilitate repairs in the megaflow. Her friends and associates in the League include the time traveller who calls himself Lord Jagged of Canaria, Lt. Alvarez, Karl Glogauer, Oswald Bastable, and Sir Seaton Begg. All of these individuals appear to be quasi-immortal, to a certain extent; they do not age, and if you were add up the years that their adventures encompass, it would get to be a big number fairly quickly. Though it does appear that they can be killed, and so don't risk life or limb casually.
>
> (Personal headcanon is that she was born in the late 1930s and grew up in London during the Blitz; in her early twenties she got lost in Time much as Bastable did and was found by Lord Jagged. This is based on the fact that she seems to treat him as a mentor/senior agent in *Elric at the End of Time*.)
>
> **The Nomad of the Time Streams**
>
> Readers of Moorcock's books first meet Una in *The Warlord of the Air*, where she is associated with a group of anarchists encountered by unwilling time-traveller Oswald Bastable in the 1970s of a world dominated by a British empire that never fell. After he is displaced from that time-stream by an atomic blast, he encounters her again in the post-apocalyptic alternate world of *The Land Leviathan*, where she is a companion to Cicero Hood, the African ruler of the New Ashanti Empire; she is his ally as he conquers Europe and the US and liberates the black population in a kind of benign reverse colonialism. She and Bastable meet again in *The Steel Tsar*, where she is trying to stop a war being waged by Josef Djugashvili; at the end of this book, she invites Bastable to join the League of Temporal Adventurers.
>
> **Jerry Cornelius**
>
> Meanwhile, in various alternate versions of the late twentieth century she becomes acquainted with Jerry Cornelius. In *The English Assassin*, we see glimpses of her career on stage-at one point she's a performer at a music-hall that gets blown up by terrorists; later she is the renowned star of a piece of lightweight musical comedy. At various points in time and space throughout the novel, we also see looking after Jerry's catatonic body, traveling to South Africa with Jerry and his sister/lover Catherine, fighting the bitter end of a war in a post-apocalyptic England, and being captured and assaulted in a small English village during a civil war.
>
> Next, in *The Condition of Muzak*, she's a mercenary in a Canada that is being invaded by the Russians, an officer in the personal guard of the ruler of one of an alternate UK's fragmented city-states (where Jerry rules London as Pierrot, and where Una, as Harlequin, wakes Catherine from a death-like sleep), and an actress who becomes the friend and lover of a grubby rock musician version of Jerry and his sister Catherine. In *The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century*, she and Catherine leave a pleasant holiday in 1930s America to go on adventures in Time. Una begins with the failed defence of the Winter Palace by the First Petrograd Women's Battalion and then journeys through a twentieth century increasingly divergent from our own, where she fights revolutionary causes in opposition to authoritarian powers; on the rare occasion her side wins, she ducks out before she can get stuck in a position of leadership.
>
> In "Everything Blowing Up" (written by Moorcock's then-wife Hilary Bailey, included in one of the Jerry Cornelius compilations, and featuring a character who seems to be Jerry under another name) she travels across a post-apocalyptic Europe, bringing word of what she saw to unwilling listeners back in England and not incidentally attempting to reconcile time and space within herself to restore her own sanity and the time stream's stability. (I have a tenuous theory that this is either her native time-stream, given the relics of her past that she encounters, or some kind of vision-quest/dream experience.)
>
> Later adventures with the Cornelius set see her continuing to move across space and time as a revolutionary and activist, including a fight against the Thatcher-esque Miss Brunner in "The Alchemist's Question". The most recent Cornelius adventures include the short story "The Spencer Inheritance" and the novella "Firing the Cathedral", where she travels with Jerry Cornelius across an alternate twenty-first century. Here, Britain is fragmented after the death of Princess Diana, with factions warring over her corpse; in the US, the events of 9/11/2001 have been theme-parked, and a group of Texans have tried to conquer the country and failed. Meanwhile a new Ice Age is beginning.
>
> **Dancers at the End of Time, Gloriana, and the Metatemporal Detective**
>
> MEANWHILE (again), she also helps the League of Temporal Adventurers handle other travelers who have gotten lost in time, such as End of Time denizen Jherek Carnelian and his Victorian beloved Amelia Underwood. In *The End of All Songs*, she and Oswald Bastable rescue them when they become stranded in the Lower Devonian era and return them to the End of Time. She also helps return Elric of Melniboné to his own era after he is displaced in the End of Time in some kind of metatemporal accident, this time with the help of Lord Jagged. She also lives for some number of years in Albion, the alternate Tudor England ruled by the queen Gloriana; here, Una is Gloriana's close friend and confidante and Countess of Scaith, and she helps protect her friend against a conspiracy against her life and the throne of Albion.
>
> She also appears in the stories included in *The Metatemporal Detective*, as an ally to both Sir Seaton Begg and his nemesis Count Zenith. At this point in time she is resident in Sir Seaton Begg's quasi-Edwardian London. She is not retired, but she is taking a little bit of a holiday, and has returned to the stage to perform in musical theatre and music-hall. Every now and then, though, she still gets pulled into Begg's and Zenith's intrigues-the latest one, "The Flaneur des Arcades de l'Opera", involving the foiling of a trans-temporal Nazi plot under the city of Paris-and there are places in this world where temporal barriers get very thin indeed. Possibly it's through one of these that she's drawn into the world of Tu Shanshu.
**Personality:**
> [This passage from *The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century](http://una-persson.dreamwidth.org/25863.html) is my favourite touchstone for Una's character and personality; much of who she is and what she believes is distilled into this conversation. There's more, though, and I'll try and tackle it all here.
>
> More than a lot of the other characters she encounters in Moorcock's novels, Una generally projects a solid aura of calm and competence, quite often appearing the be the proverbial "last sane person in the room". She is intelligent, adaptable, and a quick study. She is gentle in her handling of people displaced in time, like Bastable, and understands how to help them get adjusted, and how to reveal information to them in such a way that it won't drive them any more insane than they already are. When it comes to Jerry Cornelius, she is his double and his foil; in a lot of ways she helps keep him glued together and moving forward, and has had to pry him out of the wreckage of his own existence more than once. She loves Catherine Cornelius dearly; the two women are probably one another's closest friends.
>
> It helps to remember, though, that Una is an actress, and the cool, Emma Peel-like adventuress is as much of a role as any other that she plays. Sometimes she will put on a self-consciously theatrical, superficial manner for effect or for her own amusement. She can easily pretend to be on the side of the bad guys if it seems necessary for her efforts to foil them. Her masks conceal and reveal a wealth of strengths, weaknesses, uncertainties, even neuroses.
>
> She's described in "Firing the Cathedral" as being "designed for crisis"-the kind of person who needs constant excitement (even in the form of misadventure or catastrophe) to feel properly alive. The good thing about this is that it means she's very level-headed when things are going pear-shaped. It explains as well to a certain extent why she so often finds herself on the losing side in the conflicts in which she fights.
>
> She has a profound, deeply ingrained distrust of authority; she resists being in positions of authority for very long (she gave up the stage when she became successful) and prefers always to act in opposition to it-to a certain extent, the exact nature of the authority doesn't really matter. She tells her friend Major Nye at one point that, "I had unspecific revolutionary fervour-a sympathy for the underdog, a romantic admiration for wild-eyed orators, a hatred of injustice." In short, you can always find her on the barricades, literally or figuratively.
>
> Una is an anarchist to a certain degree; her thinking is, like her creator's, largely influenced by Kropotkin. She believes in the "mutual aid" model of anarchism, and she wants people to realise their own potential, to throw off the shackles put upon them and, more importantly, those they put upon themselves. Over the course of her long life, she has failed or been thwarted as often as she has succeeded (if not more so), but she doesn't stop trying to pursue her ideals: "pursuing her lonely, optimistic, explorations; searching for one world where tolerance and intelligence were paramount and where they existed by design rather than accident."
>
> She is also deeply suspicious of the lure of demagoguery. She is all too aware of how easy it is to give over one's identity to what she calls (with some hyperbole) "slavery": "Oh, if I could only give myself up to slavery-to a cause, to another individual, to enmesh myself so deeply that I could blame all ills, all frustrations, on a specific government, a particular sex, a class, a phenomenon." But she is too stubborn, too self-willed and individualistic, to do so. She insists on facing down the terror that is absolute free will without the safety nets of any ideology besides that hatred of injustice and authority. There are intellectual inconsistencies in her approach, she knows, but she depends on her commitment to effecting change to see her through. Occasionally, though, this *has* led to terrible mistakes that weigh on her conscience. She doesn't dwell on her failures, but she also doesn't forget them, as she doesn't want to get cocky.
>
> The downside of being "designed for crisis" is that she gets terribly, terribly bored when all is well and she has nothing else to do. She can also be a dreadful cynic when she gets into a low mood. At such times, she has groused that people in the main are thick and sheeplike, that democracy is a scam, and civilisations would be better served by a government composed of the intellectual elite. Sometimes she even sounds like she really believes this-but nevertheless, her struggles in various times and places have always been driven by the idea that people can and should be better than they are.
>
> She has the perspective that comes with having lived for a very long time and seen a lot of the world and humanity: "I've fought in a thousand wars and have served many individuals and have been as depressed to witness the behaviour of those individuals in periods of enlightenment as I have been impressed by the nobility of men and women during periods of darkness. I cannot believe that temperaments are changed by conditions, only that they are modified.". She is a defender of the Cosmic Balance who sometimes plays for the forces of Law, other times for Chaos. Being an anarchist, she's a little more Chaotic than Lawful by nature, but she can put that tendency aside for the larger good of the Balance.
>
> Philosophical/revolutionary nature and general cool-headedness aside, she can be a real jerk when she's in a bad mood. She will deliberately taunt people with their weaknesses or troll them by pretending to wholeheartedly espouse views that she normally despises. While generally slow to anger, she will shout a lot when she's upset with someone. She has a tendency to believe that everything would go more smoothly if the people around her would just bloody well do what she says. She can be moody, waspish, and sometimes just a little bit mad.
>
> Oswald Bastable says of her at one point that she is "not an easy woman to comfort". When she's upset, she hates to be fussed over and would rather cry or sulk by herself than suffer someone to tell her things are going to be okay. (She also doesn't deal in meaningless bromides; if things *aren't* going to be okay, she'll tell you, and would just as soon you returned the favour.) She will try to cover her distress as much as possible, putting on a "good, brave" smile and pretending that she's really going to be just fine, thanks very much. Eventually all of this repression will out-if possible, she will have herself a good cry on a close friend's shoulder when it happens. Or she'll sing offensive music-hall songs, or pretend to be brittle and shallow, or indulge her senses. Eventually she finds some way to get it together again. She rarely gives into despair; she considers herself an optimist, having "seen far too much, been involved in far too many failures, to be anything else."
>
> She is prone to fits of memory slippage and amnesia, a possible side-effect of being a time-traveller (linked, perhaps, to a psychic defence mechanism that allows a traveller to assimilate fully into whatever era they're visiting); this can manifest as a kind of personal vagueness or forgetfulness or confusion of where she is in time and space. Large parts of her past (her childhood in particular) are forgotten or only patchily remembered, and sometimes when she arrives in a new timestream, her memories are addled to a greater or lesser degree. (Thus the events of the extended Elric series can be safely left aside for now.) Sometimes she'll make up memories to cover over the holes. She doesn't always remember the previous worlds and lives in which she has existed, and acknowledges, ruefully, the obnoxious confusion that results in one's life from completely failing to live in a linear mode.
>
> Una is bisexual and has lived in a menage a trois with Jerry and Catherine more than once. Her taste in men seems to be most easily summarised as dangerous, doomed, or preferably both-Jerry is certainly that, and at least one of her lovers in *The Adventures ... in the Twentieth Century* is fairly hapless and ends up dead. Arguably she has better taste in women, although Catherine sometimes falls in the "doomed" category. (Catherine ends up dead or in some kind of suspended animation *a lot*.) She's not quite as hedonistic as Jerry can sometimes be, but she does indulge herself occasionally, and is fairly unapologetic about what she likes.
>
> She is a singer with a beautiful voice, and is particularly fond of music-hall and songbook standards; she has been known to occasionally burst into song just for the hell of it. (Sometimes this is not a good thing; the worse her mood, the more bawdy, raucous, and politically incorrect her song choices get.) The theatre is very much in her blood, and you could argue that her passions-politics and acting-are really just two types of performance.
>
> Una's background as a metatemporal adventuress means that the turtle won't really faze her-"oh, it's a transdimensional-metatemporal nexus; how interesting!" She will be very interested in the activities relating to the metaplot and the politics; she will want to know what's going on, and will very quickly end up taking the side of the Opposition. If there's a barricade to be found, she will be on it.
**Appearance:**
> Una is a beautiful woman with chestnut-brown hair, fair skin, and grey eyes. She's tall-probably about 5'9", taller in boots-with a slender, boyish figure. She appears to be in her early- to mid-thirties, although sometimes she might seem much older, or much younger. She is generally well-dressed in the stylish clothes of the era in which she happens to be; in the twentieth century, she favours classic designs like Chanel, Balenciaga, and Dior. She'll arrive at Tu Vishan wearing her standard time-travelling clothes: a dark-green military overcoat with red detailing over a knee-length tweed skirt and Irish sweater, and sturdy leather boots.
>
> Her PB is Charlotte Rampling, a famous English brunette beauty with striking grey eyes. Una's hair is inconsistently described across the books, but in recent volumes it's been described as a pageboy bob. There being next to no images of Ms. Rampling with that kind of a haircut, we'll just say that Una has shoulder-length hair and have done with it.
**Abilities:**
> A skilled actress and star of the stage in certain eras and time continuua, a political activist, a hardened soldier, and revolutionary. She's a good shot, has solid survival and defence skills, and has planned military and terrorist actions.
>
> She is also a seasoned time- and dimension-traveller. Moorcock writes in one book that she is "vague" about her precise methods, but in at least a couple of stories we've seen her use a Royal Albert gentleman's bicycle, though she won't have it at Tu Shanshu (at least not at first). Part of her psychic gift as a time-traveller is the ability to fit comfortably, even invisibly into almost any era; however, the side effect of this gift is a certain amount of amnesia, as discussed above.
>
> (Her time travel ability is probably as good as useless in this setting, to be honest, unless something comes up in the metaplot that might make it helpful. Also, since the world of Tu Shanshu is a kind of metatemporal nexus, she doesn't need the "psychic camouflage" and as such will essentially be her default self, patchy memory, mysterious background, and all.)
**Inventory:**
> Clothes as described above. An instrument on her wrist that looks like a chunky men's chronometer wristwatch, but which is in fact one of the navigational instruments she uses to orient herself in Time. A Smith & Wesson revolver, loaded and worn in a shoulder holster under her coat. In her pocket, a case containing Egyptian cigarettes and a WWI-style brass lighter. A small leather travelling valise that contains: a box of ammunition for said revolver, a small, battered notebook that is the latest volume of her diary, a Sheffield clasp knife, assorted toiletries, handkerchiefs, etc.
**Suite:**
> Una could easily be a good fit anywhere in Keeliai, but given what I expect she'll want to do and the kind of people she will gravitate towards, she'll do well in the Wood sector with the other revolutionaries. A one-floor suite will suffice; she likes to be comfortable, but she doesn't need a lot of space.
***In-Character Samples:***
**Third Person:**
> Una had decided that the risk of going through a dodgy neighbourhood in the Metal sector was acceptable compared to the risk of being caught by Evandau's men with the goods in her possession. In actual fact both options were terrible, but it wasn't as if she had a real choice.
>
> She heard them before she saw them: a small gang of men-barely more than boys, she thought-wearing metal masks and carrying knives, strange bits of metal clinking on their clothes. The kind of gang that depended on intimidation rather than subtlety. She doubted they were associated with any of the organised gangs in the area-she really felt like they were simply too *obvious*. And she was completely unimpressed at their threats and unsubtle innuendos. They weren't frightening; they were a nuisance, and they were in the way, and she really needed to get off the streets sooner rather than later.
>
> She tried to just walk away, but then one of them got into her face and she was forced to knock him down, and everything went pear-shaped after that. She was more than capable of handling herself in a fight, and perhaps they were dismayed by the fact that she was going to fight back-but then in the midst of it all she felt one of them cut through the strap of her bag, and then he was off and running with it, the others who were still on their feet following.
>
> Well *sod*.
>
> No way was she showing up at the rendezvous without the bag, and gods help her if it ever got traced back to her. Ignoring the pain from a shallow knife wound in her side, she began running after them.
**Network:**
> [The feed switches on to show Una, entirely at ease in her suite in the Wood sector. She has a cut-glass British accent, though her manner isn't especially posh; she is smiling and seemingly quite relaxed, as if washing up on the back of a giant turtle is the sort of thing that happens to her every day.]
>
>Hello, ladies and gentlemen and others. My name's Una Persson, and I'm newly arrived from the twentieth century. It's certainly a very interesting place you have here, and the locals are quite helpful.
>
>Though they didn't see fit to tell me where a lady can get a decent cup of coffee, or whatever the local equivalent is, so I hope I can prevail upon my fellow expatriates for a recommendation? And I should also really like an overview of the local current events; I'd hate to be uninformed and say or do something to cause trouble.
>
>[Though there's something about the way she says it and the gleam in her grey eyes that suggests that causing trouble is *precisely* what she's interested in.]
[Originally posted at http://una-persson.dreamwidth.org/99539.html - comments go there.]
***Player Information:***
**Name:** Karin
**Age:** Plenty old.
**Contact:**
finalprogramme
**Game Cast:** Lord Henry Wotton
***Character Information:***
**Name:** Una Persson
**Canon:** Michael Moorcock's Multiverse (multiple novel series; see below).
**Canon Point:** After the events of *The Metatemporal Detective*. She's returning to London from Paris after the adventure in "The Flaneur des Arcades de l'Opera", and has gotten somewhat waylaid. For simplicity's sake, I'm putting her "history" in order of book publication, restricting myself to a few key Moorcock series and stories (see Reference) and completely dodging the controversy about her identity in the extended Elric series (which you'll see on her Multiverse.org wiki page) (and justifying it ICly with the argument that she has temporarily forgotten those parts of her history). All is explained in Setting and Personality.
**Age:** Difficult to pin down, but she appears to be in her early- to mid-thirties.
**Reference:** (I am really sorry for being constitutionally incapable of apping characters without a ton of canon baggage.)
* [TVTropes: Michael Moorcock](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/MichaelMoorcock?from=Main.MichaelMoorcock)
* [Publication history](http://una-persson.dreamwidth.org/310.html)
* [Assorted quotes and excerpts that I've scanned in over the years](http://una-persson.dreamwidth.org/98566.html)
* [Multiverse.org: Una Persson](http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=Una_Persson): Includes a crapton of speculation about her identity vis-a-vis characters in the extended Elric series, which I'm going to avoid completely by restricting myself to her appearances in the following series/stories:
- [Multiverse.org: Jerry Cornelius](http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=Cornelius_%28series%29)
- [Multiverse.org: Nomad of the Time Streams](http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=A_Nomad_of_the_Time_Streams)
- [Multiverse.org: The Dancers at the End of Time](http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_Dancers_at_the_End_of_Time)
- [Multiverse.org: Gloriana, or the Unfulfill'd Queen](http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=Gloriana,_or_The_Unfulfill%E2%80%99d_Queen)
- [Multiverse.org: The Metatemporal Detective](http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_Metatemporal_Detective_%28collection%29)
- [Text of "The Murderer's Song", a Jerry Cornelius story by Michael Moorcock](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10237560/Moorcock%2C%20Michael%20-%20The%20Murderers%20Song.pdf)
- [Text of "Everything Blowing Up", a Jerry Cornelius(ish) story by Hilary Bailey](https://dl.dropbox.com/u/10237560/Bailey%2C%20Hilary%20-%20Everything%20Blowing%20Up.pdf)
**Setting:**
> The Moorcock Multiverse consists of nearly the entirety of the man's body of work, canon-welded (by him; [TV Tropes used to call canon-welding "the Moorcock effect"](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CanonWelding?from=Main.TheMoorcockEffect)) over the years into a massive intersecting web of parallel and alternate timelines, intertextual references, characters with multiple incarnations and resurrections, and a crap-ton of retcons and revisions that make things a bit headachy for those of us who have been following the books for a long time. An example of one of the annoyances: the Cornelius quartet was revised in later editions to retcon Una Persson as a character in *The Final Programme* and *A Cure for Cancer*, whereas originally she didn't show up in that series until *The English Assassin*-a fact of which I was unaware until fairly recently. (Until further notice, I'm sticking with the canon of the earlier edition with which I'm most familiar.) (Supposedly Gollancz is going to be publishing a definitive edition of the Cornelius books later this year.)
>
> Anyway, Una's references are linked and balanced in such a way that it seems pretty clear that every Una Persson we encounter is the same woman. (Apart from the Una/Oone/Oona controversy, which as I said I'm going to avoid by sticking to the books where the connections are the clearest.) (I think the guys at Multiverse.org are dead wrong on Una=Oona and I'm *convinced* that Una=Oone the Dreamthief, but that's another rant for another day.)
>
> Two of the dominant motifs of the books are the figure of the Eternal Champion and the concept of the Cosmic Balance. The Eternal Champion is a figure who has been incarnated in many forms throughout the Multiverse, usually as a doomed hero with some manner of sword or weapon-often a black sword. Elric is one manifestation, as are Jerry Cornelius and Jherek Carnelian. Some people would argue that Una is a manifestation as well. Others claim that she is a manifestation of a sort of "Eternal Companion", the foil/sidekick that the Champion always seems to require.
>
> The Cosmic Balance is both a metaphor and an actual mystical concept/object that represents the interplay of the forces of Law and Chaos that keep the Multiverse ticking along. Neither is good or evil in and of themselves, but excesses of either lead to stagnation, and Una tries to ply her efforts in ways that will avert the domination of one or the other. Early Moorcock coded Chaos as explicitly evil, but as his ideas have evolved, the moral designations have gotten cloudier; it is, after all, possible for Law to take on evil manifestations in authoritarian systems. In the end, equal give-and-take between the two forces is the most important thing.
>
> With that being established, here is Ms. Persson's place in the Moorcock Multiverse, starting with a general overview and then going (very roughly) in publication order of the novels.
>
> **Overview**
>
> Una's origins are lost in time; she's spun tales of a Swedish father and an English mother, long dead (killed in a tragic ballooning accident, she once claimed), and she has vague memories of childhood, but they may very well be notions of what one should remember, based on images in film and books.
>
> What is known, then: After an initial career as an actress and music-hall singer, Una became a politician, activist, and revolutionary. Every now and then she goes back to the theatre, but inevitably throws it over again to get back into the revolution game. The exact order of her adventures is unclear, but her biographer, friend, and collaborator Mr Moorcock writes in the introduction to *The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century* that as far as he knows, her accounts of events are "the most objective, the most accurate." (Moorcock writes an avatar of himself into his books; in one book she actually visits him and his wife at their house in Lost Pines, TX. It's a metafiction thing.)
>
> At some point she became a member of the League of Temporal Adventurers. This loose group of scientists and adventurers explore the Multiverse and keep track of the flow of time and dimension (the "chronoflow" and the "megaflow"). Occasionally they are called to fish rogue travellers out of time streams where they shouldn't be, or to facilitate repairs in the megaflow. Her friends and associates in the League include the time traveller who calls himself Lord Jagged of Canaria, Lt. Alvarez, Karl Glogauer, Oswald Bastable, and Sir Seaton Begg. All of these individuals appear to be quasi-immortal, to a certain extent; they do not age, and if you were add up the years that their adventures encompass, it would get to be a big number fairly quickly. Though it does appear that they can be killed, and so don't risk life or limb casually.
>
> (Personal headcanon is that she was born in the late 1930s and grew up in London during the Blitz; in her early twenties she got lost in Time much as Bastable did and was found by Lord Jagged. This is based on the fact that she seems to treat him as a mentor/senior agent in *Elric at the End of Time*.)
>
> **The Nomad of the Time Streams**
>
> Readers of Moorcock's books first meet Una in *The Warlord of the Air*, where she is associated with a group of anarchists encountered by unwilling time-traveller Oswald Bastable in the 1970s of a world dominated by a British empire that never fell. After he is displaced from that time-stream by an atomic blast, he encounters her again in the post-apocalyptic alternate world of *The Land Leviathan*, where she is a companion to Cicero Hood, the African ruler of the New Ashanti Empire; she is his ally as he conquers Europe and the US and liberates the black population in a kind of benign reverse colonialism. She and Bastable meet again in *The Steel Tsar*, where she is trying to stop a war being waged by Josef Djugashvili; at the end of this book, she invites Bastable to join the League of Temporal Adventurers.
>
> **Jerry Cornelius**
>
> Meanwhile, in various alternate versions of the late twentieth century she becomes acquainted with Jerry Cornelius. In *The English Assassin*, we see glimpses of her career on stage-at one point she's a performer at a music-hall that gets blown up by terrorists; later she is the renowned star of a piece of lightweight musical comedy. At various points in time and space throughout the novel, we also see looking after Jerry's catatonic body, traveling to South Africa with Jerry and his sister/lover Catherine, fighting the bitter end of a war in a post-apocalyptic England, and being captured and assaulted in a small English village during a civil war.
>
> Next, in *The Condition of Muzak*, she's a mercenary in a Canada that is being invaded by the Russians, an officer in the personal guard of the ruler of one of an alternate UK's fragmented city-states (where Jerry rules London as Pierrot, and where Una, as Harlequin, wakes Catherine from a death-like sleep), and an actress who becomes the friend and lover of a grubby rock musician version of Jerry and his sister Catherine. In *The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century*, she and Catherine leave a pleasant holiday in 1930s America to go on adventures in Time. Una begins with the failed defence of the Winter Palace by the First Petrograd Women's Battalion and then journeys through a twentieth century increasingly divergent from our own, where she fights revolutionary causes in opposition to authoritarian powers; on the rare occasion her side wins, she ducks out before she can get stuck in a position of leadership.
>
> In "Everything Blowing Up" (written by Moorcock's then-wife Hilary Bailey, included in one of the Jerry Cornelius compilations, and featuring a character who seems to be Jerry under another name) she travels across a post-apocalyptic Europe, bringing word of what she saw to unwilling listeners back in England and not incidentally attempting to reconcile time and space within herself to restore her own sanity and the time stream's stability. (I have a tenuous theory that this is either her native time-stream, given the relics of her past that she encounters, or some kind of vision-quest/dream experience.)
>
> Later adventures with the Cornelius set see her continuing to move across space and time as a revolutionary and activist, including a fight against the Thatcher-esque Miss Brunner in "The Alchemist's Question". The most recent Cornelius adventures include the short story "The Spencer Inheritance" and the novella "Firing the Cathedral", where she travels with Jerry Cornelius across an alternate twenty-first century. Here, Britain is fragmented after the death of Princess Diana, with factions warring over her corpse; in the US, the events of 9/11/2001 have been theme-parked, and a group of Texans have tried to conquer the country and failed. Meanwhile a new Ice Age is beginning.
>
> **Dancers at the End of Time, Gloriana, and the Metatemporal Detective**
>
> MEANWHILE (again), she also helps the League of Temporal Adventurers handle other travelers who have gotten lost in time, such as End of Time denizen Jherek Carnelian and his Victorian beloved Amelia Underwood. In *The End of All Songs*, she and Oswald Bastable rescue them when they become stranded in the Lower Devonian era and return them to the End of Time. She also helps return Elric of Melniboné to his own era after he is displaced in the End of Time in some kind of metatemporal accident, this time with the help of Lord Jagged. She also lives for some number of years in Albion, the alternate Tudor England ruled by the queen Gloriana; here, Una is Gloriana's close friend and confidante and Countess of Scaith, and she helps protect her friend against a conspiracy against her life and the throne of Albion.
>
> She also appears in the stories included in *The Metatemporal Detective*, as an ally to both Sir Seaton Begg and his nemesis Count Zenith. At this point in time she is resident in Sir Seaton Begg's quasi-Edwardian London. She is not retired, but she is taking a little bit of a holiday, and has returned to the stage to perform in musical theatre and music-hall. Every now and then, though, she still gets pulled into Begg's and Zenith's intrigues-the latest one, "The Flaneur des Arcades de l'Opera", involving the foiling of a trans-temporal Nazi plot under the city of Paris-and there are places in this world where temporal barriers get very thin indeed. Possibly it's through one of these that she's drawn into the world of Tu Shanshu.
**Personality:**
> [This passage from *The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the Twentieth Century](http://una-persson.dreamwidth.org/25863.html) is my favourite touchstone for Una's character and personality; much of who she is and what she believes is distilled into this conversation. There's more, though, and I'll try and tackle it all here.
>
> More than a lot of the other characters she encounters in Moorcock's novels, Una generally projects a solid aura of calm and competence, quite often appearing the be the proverbial "last sane person in the room". She is intelligent, adaptable, and a quick study. She is gentle in her handling of people displaced in time, like Bastable, and understands how to help them get adjusted, and how to reveal information to them in such a way that it won't drive them any more insane than they already are. When it comes to Jerry Cornelius, she is his double and his foil; in a lot of ways she helps keep him glued together and moving forward, and has had to pry him out of the wreckage of his own existence more than once. She loves Catherine Cornelius dearly; the two women are probably one another's closest friends.
>
> It helps to remember, though, that Una is an actress, and the cool, Emma Peel-like adventuress is as much of a role as any other that she plays. Sometimes she will put on a self-consciously theatrical, superficial manner for effect or for her own amusement. She can easily pretend to be on the side of the bad guys if it seems necessary for her efforts to foil them. Her masks conceal and reveal a wealth of strengths, weaknesses, uncertainties, even neuroses.
>
> She's described in "Firing the Cathedral" as being "designed for crisis"-the kind of person who needs constant excitement (even in the form of misadventure or catastrophe) to feel properly alive. The good thing about this is that it means she's very level-headed when things are going pear-shaped. It explains as well to a certain extent why she so often finds herself on the losing side in the conflicts in which she fights.
>
> She has a profound, deeply ingrained distrust of authority; she resists being in positions of authority for very long (she gave up the stage when she became successful) and prefers always to act in opposition to it-to a certain extent, the exact nature of the authority doesn't really matter. She tells her friend Major Nye at one point that, "I had unspecific revolutionary fervour-a sympathy for the underdog, a romantic admiration for wild-eyed orators, a hatred of injustice." In short, you can always find her on the barricades, literally or figuratively.
>
> Una is an anarchist to a certain degree; her thinking is, like her creator's, largely influenced by Kropotkin. She believes in the "mutual aid" model of anarchism, and she wants people to realise their own potential, to throw off the shackles put upon them and, more importantly, those they put upon themselves. Over the course of her long life, she has failed or been thwarted as often as she has succeeded (if not more so), but she doesn't stop trying to pursue her ideals: "pursuing her lonely, optimistic, explorations; searching for one world where tolerance and intelligence were paramount and where they existed by design rather than accident."
>
> She is also deeply suspicious of the lure of demagoguery. She is all too aware of how easy it is to give over one's identity to what she calls (with some hyperbole) "slavery": "Oh, if I could only give myself up to slavery-to a cause, to another individual, to enmesh myself so deeply that I could blame all ills, all frustrations, on a specific government, a particular sex, a class, a phenomenon." But she is too stubborn, too self-willed and individualistic, to do so. She insists on facing down the terror that is absolute free will without the safety nets of any ideology besides that hatred of injustice and authority. There are intellectual inconsistencies in her approach, she knows, but she depends on her commitment to effecting change to see her through. Occasionally, though, this *has* led to terrible mistakes that weigh on her conscience. She doesn't dwell on her failures, but she also doesn't forget them, as she doesn't want to get cocky.
>
> The downside of being "designed for crisis" is that she gets terribly, terribly bored when all is well and she has nothing else to do. She can also be a dreadful cynic when she gets into a low mood. At such times, she has groused that people in the main are thick and sheeplike, that democracy is a scam, and civilisations would be better served by a government composed of the intellectual elite. Sometimes she even sounds like she really believes this-but nevertheless, her struggles in various times and places have always been driven by the idea that people can and should be better than they are.
>
> She has the perspective that comes with having lived for a very long time and seen a lot of the world and humanity: "I've fought in a thousand wars and have served many individuals and have been as depressed to witness the behaviour of those individuals in periods of enlightenment as I have been impressed by the nobility of men and women during periods of darkness. I cannot believe that temperaments are changed by conditions, only that they are modified.". She is a defender of the Cosmic Balance who sometimes plays for the forces of Law, other times for Chaos. Being an anarchist, she's a little more Chaotic than Lawful by nature, but she can put that tendency aside for the larger good of the Balance.
>
> Philosophical/revolutionary nature and general cool-headedness aside, she can be a real jerk when she's in a bad mood. She will deliberately taunt people with their weaknesses or troll them by pretending to wholeheartedly espouse views that she normally despises. While generally slow to anger, she will shout a lot when she's upset with someone. She has a tendency to believe that everything would go more smoothly if the people around her would just bloody well do what she says. She can be moody, waspish, and sometimes just a little bit mad.
>
> Oswald Bastable says of her at one point that she is "not an easy woman to comfort". When she's upset, she hates to be fussed over and would rather cry or sulk by herself than suffer someone to tell her things are going to be okay. (She also doesn't deal in meaningless bromides; if things *aren't* going to be okay, she'll tell you, and would just as soon you returned the favour.) She will try to cover her distress as much as possible, putting on a "good, brave" smile and pretending that she's really going to be just fine, thanks very much. Eventually all of this repression will out-if possible, she will have herself a good cry on a close friend's shoulder when it happens. Or she'll sing offensive music-hall songs, or pretend to be brittle and shallow, or indulge her senses. Eventually she finds some way to get it together again. She rarely gives into despair; she considers herself an optimist, having "seen far too much, been involved in far too many failures, to be anything else."
>
> She is prone to fits of memory slippage and amnesia, a possible side-effect of being a time-traveller (linked, perhaps, to a psychic defence mechanism that allows a traveller to assimilate fully into whatever era they're visiting); this can manifest as a kind of personal vagueness or forgetfulness or confusion of where she is in time and space. Large parts of her past (her childhood in particular) are forgotten or only patchily remembered, and sometimes when she arrives in a new timestream, her memories are addled to a greater or lesser degree. (Thus the events of the extended Elric series can be safely left aside for now.) Sometimes she'll make up memories to cover over the holes. She doesn't always remember the previous worlds and lives in which she has existed, and acknowledges, ruefully, the obnoxious confusion that results in one's life from completely failing to live in a linear mode.
>
> Una is bisexual and has lived in a menage a trois with Jerry and Catherine more than once. Her taste in men seems to be most easily summarised as dangerous, doomed, or preferably both-Jerry is certainly that, and at least one of her lovers in *The Adventures ... in the Twentieth Century* is fairly hapless and ends up dead. Arguably she has better taste in women, although Catherine sometimes falls in the "doomed" category. (Catherine ends up dead or in some kind of suspended animation *a lot*.) She's not quite as hedonistic as Jerry can sometimes be, but she does indulge herself occasionally, and is fairly unapologetic about what she likes.
>
> She is a singer with a beautiful voice, and is particularly fond of music-hall and songbook standards; she has been known to occasionally burst into song just for the hell of it. (Sometimes this is not a good thing; the worse her mood, the more bawdy, raucous, and politically incorrect her song choices get.) The theatre is very much in her blood, and you could argue that her passions-politics and acting-are really just two types of performance.
>
> Una's background as a metatemporal adventuress means that the turtle won't really faze her-"oh, it's a transdimensional-metatemporal nexus; how interesting!" She will be very interested in the activities relating to the metaplot and the politics; she will want to know what's going on, and will very quickly end up taking the side of the Opposition. If there's a barricade to be found, she will be on it.
**Appearance:**
> Una is a beautiful woman with chestnut-brown hair, fair skin, and grey eyes. She's tall-probably about 5'9", taller in boots-with a slender, boyish figure. She appears to be in her early- to mid-thirties, although sometimes she might seem much older, or much younger. She is generally well-dressed in the stylish clothes of the era in which she happens to be; in the twentieth century, she favours classic designs like Chanel, Balenciaga, and Dior. She'll arrive at Tu Vishan wearing her standard time-travelling clothes: a dark-green military overcoat with red detailing over a knee-length tweed skirt and Irish sweater, and sturdy leather boots.
>
> Her PB is Charlotte Rampling, a famous English brunette beauty with striking grey eyes. Una's hair is inconsistently described across the books, but in recent volumes it's been described as a pageboy bob. There being next to no images of Ms. Rampling with that kind of a haircut, we'll just say that Una has shoulder-length hair and have done with it.
**Abilities:**
> A skilled actress and star of the stage in certain eras and time continuua, a political activist, a hardened soldier, and revolutionary. She's a good shot, has solid survival and defence skills, and has planned military and terrorist actions.
>
> She is also a seasoned time- and dimension-traveller. Moorcock writes in one book that she is "vague" about her precise methods, but in at least a couple of stories we've seen her use a Royal Albert gentleman's bicycle, though she won't have it at Tu Shanshu (at least not at first). Part of her psychic gift as a time-traveller is the ability to fit comfortably, even invisibly into almost any era; however, the side effect of this gift is a certain amount of amnesia, as discussed above.
>
> (Her time travel ability is probably as good as useless in this setting, to be honest, unless something comes up in the metaplot that might make it helpful. Also, since the world of Tu Shanshu is a kind of metatemporal nexus, she doesn't need the "psychic camouflage" and as such will essentially be her default self, patchy memory, mysterious background, and all.)
**Inventory:**
> Clothes as described above. An instrument on her wrist that looks like a chunky men's chronometer wristwatch, but which is in fact one of the navigational instruments she uses to orient herself in Time. A Smith & Wesson revolver, loaded and worn in a shoulder holster under her coat. In her pocket, a case containing Egyptian cigarettes and a WWI-style brass lighter. A small leather travelling valise that contains: a box of ammunition for said revolver, a small, battered notebook that is the latest volume of her diary, a Sheffield clasp knife, assorted toiletries, handkerchiefs, etc.
**Suite:**
> Una could easily be a good fit anywhere in Keeliai, but given what I expect she'll want to do and the kind of people she will gravitate towards, she'll do well in the Wood sector with the other revolutionaries. A one-floor suite will suffice; she likes to be comfortable, but she doesn't need a lot of space.
***In-Character Samples:***
**Third Person:**
> Una had decided that the risk of going through a dodgy neighbourhood in the Metal sector was acceptable compared to the risk of being caught by Evandau's men with the goods in her possession. In actual fact both options were terrible, but it wasn't as if she had a real choice.
>
> She heard them before she saw them: a small gang of men-barely more than boys, she thought-wearing metal masks and carrying knives, strange bits of metal clinking on their clothes. The kind of gang that depended on intimidation rather than subtlety. She doubted they were associated with any of the organised gangs in the area-she really felt like they were simply too *obvious*. And she was completely unimpressed at their threats and unsubtle innuendos. They weren't frightening; they were a nuisance, and they were in the way, and she really needed to get off the streets sooner rather than later.
>
> She tried to just walk away, but then one of them got into her face and she was forced to knock him down, and everything went pear-shaped after that. She was more than capable of handling herself in a fight, and perhaps they were dismayed by the fact that she was going to fight back-but then in the midst of it all she felt one of them cut through the strap of her bag, and then he was off and running with it, the others who were still on their feet following.
>
> Well *sod*.
>
> No way was she showing up at the rendezvous without the bag, and gods help her if it ever got traced back to her. Ignoring the pain from a shallow knife wound in her side, she began running after them.
**Network:**
> [The feed switches on to show Una, entirely at ease in her suite in the Wood sector. She has a cut-glass British accent, though her manner isn't especially posh; she is smiling and seemingly quite relaxed, as if washing up on the back of a giant turtle is the sort of thing that happens to her every day.]
>
>Hello, ladies and gentlemen and others. My name's Una Persson, and I'm newly arrived from the twentieth century. It's certainly a very interesting place you have here, and the locals are quite helpful.
>
>Though they didn't see fit to tell me where a lady can get a decent cup of coffee, or whatever the local equivalent is, so I hope I can prevail upon my fellow expatriates for a recommendation? And I should also really like an overview of the local current events; I'd hate to be uninformed and say or do something to cause trouble.
>
>[Though there's something about the way she says it and the gleam in her grey eyes that suggests that causing trouble is *precisely* what she's interested in.]
[Originally posted at http://una-persson.dreamwidth.org/99539.html - comments go there.]