"[2]Other dilemmas presented are not that cruel, such as: The novel's first chapter begins in London, with Karl Glogauer travelling through Kensington on his way to the Derry and Tom's Roof Gardens.

There, on a bench in the Spanish Gardens, he fantasises about the past, trying to put "his mother, his childhood as it actually was, [and] the failure of his ambitions" out of his head with an imagined life in Regency-era London, filled with politics, gambling, women and duelling.

His imaginations are interrupted by a "deep, slightly hesitant, husky" voice and a greeting of "Good afternoon" from a dark-skinned man who spends the entirety of the novel unnamed.

He first asks if he may join Glogauer on the bench, and then goes on to explain that he's merely visiting London, and that he hadn't expected to find such a place in the middle of the city.

While he's being photographed, the man explains that he's from Nigeria, attempting to convince the government of England to buy copper at a higher price.

Glogauer closes his eyes, blocking reality out, and begins a fantasy, similar to that which was interrupted by the man in the first chapter.

Though completely new to it, Glogauer quickly sheds all inhibitions and starts acting in an (unspecified) provocative manner, startling the Nigerian: "You know how to be offensive, don't you?

The unnamed Nigerian could be an incarnation of Jerry Cornelius — an urban adventurer and hipster of ambiguous and occasionally polymorphous gender, who appears in several Moorcock books.

(Similarly, Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius is white in The Final Programme but black in A Cure for Cancer.)

Finally: Some editions of the novel were printed with an introduction that contained a hoax about the death of Michael Moorcock, stating that he had "died of lung cancer, aged 31, last year".

The Champion Eternal, a Hero who exists in all dimensions, times and worlds, is the one who is chosen by fate to fight for the Cosmic Balance; however, he often does not know of his role, or, even worse, he struggles against it, never to succeed.

Since his role is to intervene when either Law or Chaos have gained an excess of power, he is always doomed to be surrounded by strife and destruction, although he may go through long periods of relative quiet.

In most depictions by Moorcock all these stories happen in fantasy worlds, but the same would clearly apply to Karl Glogauer's various lives in actual 20th Century situations, as described here.