Michael Moorcock
Tags: writer, Michael Moorcock, into the media web, multiverse
Michael Moorcock is among the greatest of all writers alive today -- irrespective of genre. Alan Moore wrote, in his introduction to Moorcock’s Into the Media Web, “Look up the word ‘author’ in a dictionary and you’ll find a photograph of Michael Moorcock.” At an age when most are barely learning to drive, Moorcock wrote and edited for magazines. He first attained fame (and notoriety) during his legendary tenure as the editor of the science-fiction magazine New Worlds from 1964 to 1971, and was the center of what many called the “New Wave” of science-fiction writers. The material New Worlds published was often politically radical and wildly experimental, more William S. Burroughs than Robert Heinlein (who, in fact, called it a “‘sick literature’ of ‘neurotics’ and ‘sex maniacs”). New Worlds published Moorcock’s acclaimed novella Behold the Man, the story of a time traveler who steps into the roll of Jesus Christ, along with works by Harlan Ellison, J.G. Ballard, Thomas Disch, and dozens of other influential writers. The best and most interesting science fiction writers today, like China Miéville and the aforementioned Alan Moore, credit Moorcock as a major influence; Indeed Neil Gaiman once wrote him a letter entitled ”I’m Mostly Your Fault”.
Never content with any one genre or form of media, Michael Moorcock has ventured into music (both on his own and with the influential space-rock bands Hawkwind and Blue Öyster Cult), journalism, computer games, comic books, and film. His most popular character is almost certainly Elric of Melniboné, a dark satire of sword-and-sorcery fantasy characters like Conan the Barbarian, and part of the larger idea of the Eternal Champion that links many of Moorcock’s works. Not all of his work is science fiction or fantasy however. Mother London, which follows three mental hospital outpatients through the history of London from the mid-twentieth century to the eighties, and Letter’s From Hollywood, a collection of his correspondence to his friend J.G. Ballard, are just two of his many well-regarded non-science-fiction books. He even wrote the supposed novelization of the Sex Pistols’ film The Great Rock’n’roll Swindle, but, disliking the Pistols’ manager Malcolm McClaren, pulled a truly punk move and told their story through the eyes of Jerry Cornelius, the time-traveling pansexual hipster who is in many ways Moorcock’s signature character. I have been a fan of his ever since my teenage eyes were first drawn to the striking Michael Whelan cover art on The Bane of the Black Sword, and so I felt tremendously lucky when Mike agreed to do an email interview with me for SuicideGirls about Doctor Who, the misuses of power and authority, and how The Beatles are a good analogy for the state of modern science fiction.
Keith Daniels: Mistrust of authority and an advocacy of independence and freedom, anarchy, runs throughout nearly all your work. Is it gratifying, then, to read the news now and see these authoritarian regimes crumbling all over the world and the superpowers who funded and armed these tyrants left with nothing to show for it?
Michael Moorcock: Of course it's gratifying to see citizens rising up to claim their democratic power. However, we have seen so many revolutions, velvet or otherwise, hijacked by corrupt people, that I'm reluctant to begin celebrating immediately. The good thing is that the Western powers, which have so frequently attempted to take advantage of such revolutions, simply can't afford to do it now. Of course some of the peoples of North Africa and the Middle East do have a chance of building stable democracies. People are learning from past mistakes. But human greed is pretty powerful and we're already seeing the Egyptian army beating up protesters, imprisoning them, possibly killing them. The problem is that armies are not by nature democratic. I don't think we'll see a complete falling back to the pre-revolutionary tyrannies. Libya's probably the most problematical situation. Tunisia's most likely to establish a stable democracy, but, of course, there are thousands of Tunisians flooding into Europe because they can't trust the future -- and others, of course, are economic migrants, hoping to stay in Europe and work. It will be a while before we can really begin to celebrate, I think. Few of these countries have the means of building any sturdy democratic infrastructure, and so we have to offer what support we can and hope the will of the people can remain focused. I hope the Muslim Brotherhood can help. They tend to look to Turkey for their best model, and as we know even Turkey isn't completely free of problems. If the best, most tolerant, elements of the Brotherhood remain in power then we could see something good in a year or two.
KD:
How does the year 2011 compare to what you imagined it would be in the '60s? I don't necessarily mean "we don't have flying cars", but rather, did you hope that somehow the world would be a better place now than it was then? Is it?
MM:
I'm pretty much of an optimist, so yes I'd hoped the world would have a bit more of the rule of law. You could say I'd anticipated most of this in one story or another, but you describe dystopias in the hope they won't happen. Almost as soon as LBJ and his kind around the world made some progressive laws in much of the world it seemed that big business began scheming about how to grab the power back. Brute instinct which they always dignify as 'natural'.
Gradually they succeeded until with Reagan and Thatcher we'd created one of the most unjust democratic systems since the 1920s. That said, I tend to shoehorn visions of utopia into books like The War Amongst the Angels and King of the City, because I think one might as well show your reader that you think there are goals worth achieving, even when things seem a bit dark. I came across a newspaper piece I'd written in 1991 in which I visualised the computer VR experience of 2011. I was wildly optimistic. I'm hoping that popular demonstrations (we were in the first ones last year in Paris) will bring progressives out all over the world. I'm always amazed by how reluctant Americans generally are to get into the streets -- or put that in the past tense. I'm pleased that at least some Americans are out demonstrating again, even if it took reactionaries to spur them to it. The Tea Party movement is classically reactionary. I don't think they represent the larger public though. Another bit of dystopian vision you hoped wouldn't happen.
Gradually they succeeded until with Reagan and Thatcher we'd created one of the most unjust democratic systems since the 1920s. That said, I tend to shoehorn visions of utopia into books like The War Amongst the Angels and King of the City, because I think one might as well show your reader that you think there are goals worth achieving, even when things seem a bit dark. I came across a newspaper piece I'd written in 1991 in which I visualised the computer VR experience of 2011. I was wildly optimistic. I'm hoping that popular demonstrations (we were in the first ones last year in Paris) will bring progressives out all over the world. I'm always amazed by how reluctant Americans generally are to get into the streets -- or put that in the past tense. I'm pleased that at least some Americans are out demonstrating again, even if it took reactionaries to spur them to it. The Tea Party movement is classically reactionary. I don't think they represent the larger public though. Another bit of dystopian vision you hoped wouldn't happen.
KD:
Your most recent novel is the Doctor Who book Coming of the Terraphiles. In it, you weave the Doctor into your Eternal Champion concept. Doctor Who has run parallel with almost your entire career. Have you long imagined the Doctor as an aspect of the Eternal Champion? Has there often been some cross-pollination between Doctor Who and your ideas of the multiverse and time travel? For example, the Doctor and a Dalek appear in [1977’s] The Condition of Muzak. Is that why you were willing to do a licensed novel based on someone else's work, which is, as far as I know, a first for you?
MM:
Strictly it wasn't a work for hire job. That is, I have pretty much complete ownership of the book. When the Doctor Who people approached my agent they said that they wanted a Michael Moorcock book which had [The Doctor] in it, not a Michael Moorcock Doctor Who novel. The contract let me retain pretty much all rights except of course the BBC names and so on.
I regard [The Doctor] as part of British folklore, like Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake or any one of the other characters mentioned in the Jerry Cornelius list of party-goers -- or sung about by Ian Dury, for instance, in “England's Glory” (a brand of English matches!). Generally, that's characters who have become icons and whose authorship is either unknown or is secondary. I used to say I made my original career in the folk hero business: Tarzan, Sexton Blake, Buck Jones (I didn't know he'd been a real person until long after I'd written comic strips about him), Robin Hood, Dick Turpin, Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill, Billy the Kid, Hereward the Wake and so on.
This was a chance, too, to reclaim or rework ideas of mine which had slipped into the public domain -- that is concepts and tropes which originated from my work, including terms like 'multiverse’. In a sense the book is a rewrite of my first science-fiction novel, The Sundered Worlds, which anticipated stuff like black holes (I mean, of course, anticipated their discovery!) and various other ideas. In it I played with ideas which were actually in the process of discovery ('dark flow') as I wrote it and which I incorporated into the story. I didn't use a conventional Doctor Who plot (which I suppose is why some people thought it wasn't a 'proper' Doctor Who story) and I ran other mythic or folkloric ideas as themes -- Diana, Robin Hood and other stuff involving archery, for instance -- and referring to some of my own characters, such as Cornelius. This way I brought in other narratives, which is one of the things the Eternal Champion concept is about, associated with those story cycles and characters. You'll find this perhaps most obviously dealt with in the Blood cycle -- Blood, Fabulous Harbours and The War Amongst the Angels -- where various folk heroes and heroines are referred to or brought in as characters. I'm dealing this in a more conventional narrative with the novel beginning a new sequence, The Whispering Swarm, I'm currently writing. Like those earlier books, this also contains autobiographical elements, though now much, much closer to my own life, my own story, if you like. [Benoît] Mandelbrot's ideas have helped me clarify many of my own -- as I said at the time his ideas were first published, it was like being handed a map of my own brain.
I tried to make this clearer in my introduction to Michael Moorcock's Multiverse, the comic book in which I continued to explore the same notions. At its simplest, there are a near-infinite number of alternate worlds like our own only with minuscule differences in which the same characters experience things in slightly different contexts. When the contexts are radically different (vast numbers of alternatives distant from our own) then we can see how we might behave in them. The 'Eternal Champion' is one character dealing with different contexts. It's a way of imagining, “What would you do?” if the context in which you acted was altered. A sort of ‘judge not lest ye be judged' morality -- at its simplest, you are a hero who turns against the people whose hero he is (The Eternal Champion novel); at its most complex you are Colonel Pyat wriggling his way through the Nazi holocaust. I've often said I'm a science-fiction writer pretending to write fantasy, in that I use my books to examine fairly complex moral problems rather than as exercises in nostalgic escapism which so much generic fantasy and, sadly, science fiction has become.
To a degree I see ideas which I used for moral purposes (Warlord of the Air is a good one) turned into 'cool airship stories' -- steampunk, if you like. I think people like me spend a lot of time trying to escape the cages of their own success, where ideas used for specific purposes are co-opted into genre and in that sense corrupted. Good science fiction combined visionary invention with moral examination, whether it was [H.G.] Wells, [Philip] Wylie, [Ray] Bradbury, [Alfred] Bester or [J.G.] Ballard. [Frederik] Pohl and [Cyril] Kornbluth, [Philip K.] Dick or writers like [Michael] Chabon or [Walter] Mosley all wrote within that tradition. Generally, bad science fiction was a corruption of their invention used for escapist or nostalgic purposes. Often the serious stuff is met with cries of outrage by the general audience. Most sci-fi writers of my generation and earlier didn't have much time for Lord of the Rings because they saw it as appealing to nostalgia, as an escapist construct which allowed the reader to avoid the issues of the day. The commercial success of the sci-fi/fantasy genres isn't surprising since it is the work, generally speaking, which plays to a need for nostalgia previously satisfied by historical fiction (including westerns).
It's no surprise that those earlier commercial genres have lost popularity as “fantasy” has gained it. Writers of modern urban fantasy are often trying to combat that tendency but the more successfully it does so the less commercial it usually becomes. The closer China Mieville, for instance, got to discussing current issues in his fantasy the less his readers liked his books. My own experience is the same. You keep trying to do something with the medium, to make it carry a different message, and you keep a core readership, but you usually have to reconcile yourself to losing the mass readership. Or you can take note of this and every so often write an escapist book which keeps the broader readership happy. The more original you try to be, the fewer readers you have -- though enough, certainly, to keep you in business!.
If I'd been cynical with Doctor Who I would have not tried to address any kind of serious theme but piled in all the effects I'm good at. You can play a guitar well, so that a relatively few people appreciate it, or you can keep doing your flashy licks, which are essentially empty in a musical sense, which make the audience squeal and applaud. I know 'guitar heroes' who are often better musicians than they appear to be but know those bent notes up near the body end of the fretboard are the ones which are going to keep the seats wet. I hope I'm not that cynical. I just can't keep giving the reader the mixture as before, even though I use repetition as part of my technique because, as I've often said, without repetition you don't get poetry or music. That's repetition used properly. Repeating versions of the same tune, same riffs, same flashy tricks is using it cynically or because you can't do anything else. I used the Doctor Who novel to try something new within the Eternal Champion context. I'm still not sure how successful I was, though regular readers seemed to 'get' it.
I regard [The Doctor] as part of British folklore, like Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake or any one of the other characters mentioned in the Jerry Cornelius list of party-goers -- or sung about by Ian Dury, for instance, in “England's Glory” (a brand of English matches!). Generally, that's characters who have become icons and whose authorship is either unknown or is secondary. I used to say I made my original career in the folk hero business: Tarzan, Sexton Blake, Buck Jones (I didn't know he'd been a real person until long after I'd written comic strips about him), Robin Hood, Dick Turpin, Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill, Billy the Kid, Hereward the Wake and so on.
This was a chance, too, to reclaim or rework ideas of mine which had slipped into the public domain -- that is concepts and tropes which originated from my work, including terms like 'multiverse’. In a sense the book is a rewrite of my first science-fiction novel, The Sundered Worlds, which anticipated stuff like black holes (I mean, of course, anticipated their discovery!) and various other ideas. In it I played with ideas which were actually in the process of discovery ('dark flow') as I wrote it and which I incorporated into the story. I didn't use a conventional Doctor Who plot (which I suppose is why some people thought it wasn't a 'proper' Doctor Who story) and I ran other mythic or folkloric ideas as themes -- Diana, Robin Hood and other stuff involving archery, for instance -- and referring to some of my own characters, such as Cornelius. This way I brought in other narratives, which is one of the things the Eternal Champion concept is about, associated with those story cycles and characters. You'll find this perhaps most obviously dealt with in the Blood cycle -- Blood, Fabulous Harbours and The War Amongst the Angels -- where various folk heroes and heroines are referred to or brought in as characters. I'm dealing this in a more conventional narrative with the novel beginning a new sequence, The Whispering Swarm, I'm currently writing. Like those earlier books, this also contains autobiographical elements, though now much, much closer to my own life, my own story, if you like. [Benoît] Mandelbrot's ideas have helped me clarify many of my own -- as I said at the time his ideas were first published, it was like being handed a map of my own brain.
I tried to make this clearer in my introduction to Michael Moorcock's Multiverse, the comic book in which I continued to explore the same notions. At its simplest, there are a near-infinite number of alternate worlds like our own only with minuscule differences in which the same characters experience things in slightly different contexts. When the contexts are radically different (vast numbers of alternatives distant from our own) then we can see how we might behave in them. The 'Eternal Champion' is one character dealing with different contexts. It's a way of imagining, “What would you do?” if the context in which you acted was altered. A sort of ‘judge not lest ye be judged' morality -- at its simplest, you are a hero who turns against the people whose hero he is (The Eternal Champion novel); at its most complex you are Colonel Pyat wriggling his way through the Nazi holocaust. I've often said I'm a science-fiction writer pretending to write fantasy, in that I use my books to examine fairly complex moral problems rather than as exercises in nostalgic escapism which so much generic fantasy and, sadly, science fiction has become.
To a degree I see ideas which I used for moral purposes (Warlord of the Air is a good one) turned into 'cool airship stories' -- steampunk, if you like. I think people like me spend a lot of time trying to escape the cages of their own success, where ideas used for specific purposes are co-opted into genre and in that sense corrupted. Good science fiction combined visionary invention with moral examination, whether it was [H.G.] Wells, [Philip] Wylie, [Ray] Bradbury, [Alfred] Bester or [J.G.] Ballard. [Frederik] Pohl and [Cyril] Kornbluth, [Philip K.] Dick or writers like [Michael] Chabon or [Walter] Mosley all wrote within that tradition. Generally, bad science fiction was a corruption of their invention used for escapist or nostalgic purposes. Often the serious stuff is met with cries of outrage by the general audience. Most sci-fi writers of my generation and earlier didn't have much time for Lord of the Rings because they saw it as appealing to nostalgia, as an escapist construct which allowed the reader to avoid the issues of the day. The commercial success of the sci-fi/fantasy genres isn't surprising since it is the work, generally speaking, which plays to a need for nostalgia previously satisfied by historical fiction (including westerns).
It's no surprise that those earlier commercial genres have lost popularity as “fantasy” has gained it. Writers of modern urban fantasy are often trying to combat that tendency but the more successfully it does so the less commercial it usually becomes. The closer China Mieville, for instance, got to discussing current issues in his fantasy the less his readers liked his books. My own experience is the same. You keep trying to do something with the medium, to make it carry a different message, and you keep a core readership, but you usually have to reconcile yourself to losing the mass readership. Or you can take note of this and every so often write an escapist book which keeps the broader readership happy. The more original you try to be, the fewer readers you have -- though enough, certainly, to keep you in business!.
If I'd been cynical with Doctor Who I would have not tried to address any kind of serious theme but piled in all the effects I'm good at. You can play a guitar well, so that a relatively few people appreciate it, or you can keep doing your flashy licks, which are essentially empty in a musical sense, which make the audience squeal and applaud. I know 'guitar heroes' who are often better musicians than they appear to be but know those bent notes up near the body end of the fretboard are the ones which are going to keep the seats wet. I hope I'm not that cynical. I just can't keep giving the reader the mixture as before, even though I use repetition as part of my technique because, as I've often said, without repetition you don't get poetry or music. That's repetition used properly. Repeating versions of the same tune, same riffs, same flashy tricks is using it cynically or because you can't do anything else. I used the Doctor Who novel to try something new within the Eternal Champion context. I'm still not sure how successful I was, though regular readers seemed to 'get' it.
KD:
I can imagine how Mandelbrot's ideas would appeal to you: this beautiful mathematical order in something that at a glance appears random and chaotic. Is that how you see it?
MM:
Absolutely. I've tried to reproduce that in books like Mother London which gives an impression of chaos but is actually very carefully and thoroughly organized. The Cornelius books are also very carefully constructed to give that effect.
KD:
Do you feel there is something distasteful about nostalgia and escapism?
MM:
Of course not! I read tons of old pulp stuff, especially Sexton Blake authors. I believe there's a lot wrong with stuff which pretends to analyze and challenge, which much science fiction and some fantasy seems to do. Maybe the fact that people seem to distinguish between literary ([Margaret] Atwood, [Cormac] McCarthy, Chabon) and non-literary science fiction is that literary science fiction is perceived as engaging with serious issues while generic science fiction is perceived as escapism which fails in that engagement? I know much of this is mere snobbery, of course, and don't agree with the distinction, but maybe that's what the snobbery is based on. I do hate nostalgia, and I'm pretty sure I don't read for that in those pulps. What I get most out of it is popular social attitudes which [are] more easily discovered in popular fiction than in literary fiction.
KD:
What can you tell us about The Whispering Swarm and the planned Sanctuary of the White Friars cycle? You mentioned that it is more autobiographical.
MM:
It's an attempt to see for myself how much escapism, romanticism etc. influenced my own decisions, and allowed me to act in ways I really disapproved of at the time, let alone now.
So much of the autobiographical material is about my marriages, some about New Worlds and my writing career, and so on. The fantasy element concerns 'Alsacia', [which] used to be a real part of London between Blackfriars and the Temple and was a thieves's sanctuary -- one of several in London. This Alsacia has survived (it was pulled down in the 19th century) and continues to act as a sanctuary. I'm invited there by one of the White Friars (Carmelites). Nominally Christians, these guys have a very odd brand of Christianity involving a few decided heresies. We learn more about what and who their Abbey shelters, including chief rabbi of London, there since the expulsion of the Jews from England. So it's about religion, too -- particularly as it relates to 'the people of the book'. One of the reasons I'm rereading so much stuff from my boyhood -- [P.G] Wodehouse, [Edgar Rice] Burroughs, [George Bernard] Shaw, Charles Hamilton, Sexton Blake, etc -- is that it helps me recall what I was doing and thinking then.
So much of the autobiographical material is about my marriages, some about New Worlds and my writing career, and so on. The fantasy element concerns 'Alsacia', [which] used to be a real part of London between Blackfriars and the Temple and was a thieves's sanctuary -- one of several in London. This Alsacia has survived (it was pulled down in the 19th century) and continues to act as a sanctuary. I'm invited there by one of the White Friars (Carmelites). Nominally Christians, these guys have a very odd brand of Christianity involving a few decided heresies. We learn more about what and who their Abbey shelters, including chief rabbi of London, there since the expulsion of the Jews from England. So it's about religion, too -- particularly as it relates to 'the people of the book'. One of the reasons I'm rereading so much stuff from my boyhood -- [P.G] Wodehouse, [Edgar Rice] Burroughs, [George Bernard] Shaw, Charles Hamilton, Sexton Blake, etc -- is that it helps me recall what I was doing and thinking then.
KD:
How does one avoid nostalgia while writing autobiographical material?
MM:
I see nostalgia [as] a memory sentimentalized, fictionalized in certain ways, and if memory is history the same is true. The more you sentimentalize, the more you simplify. The more you simplify, the more you lie. That's why poetry and fiction which tries to mirror complexity in as concentrated way as possible is what I like to read and try to write.
KD:
When you say "allowed me to act in ways I really disapproved of at the time, let alone now", what are you thinking of?
MM:
My actions in relationships are what I'm thinking of, my failures of empathy, my corrosive sentimentality (or 'romance'). I believe people of a Romantic disposition have more to discipline both in work and life.
KD:
The White Friars sound fascinating. Two books I read as a boy that profoundly altered my course in life were The Gnostic Gospels and The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels. They both concern the apocrypha and the early Christian heretics. They made me realize that the Bible I was presented with was in no way the whole story. Some of your most celebrated works concern religion, especially Behold the Man, the Von Bek series... why does religion continue to have such a grip on our imaginations even long after we've abandoned its tenets?
MM:
I grew up understanding the Bible to be myth. I had almost no religious background, even when I went to a Steiner school, so wasn't kicking against received ideas in Behold the Man. I wanted to look at the pact which exists between 'the crowd' and the demagogue. That said, I am fascinated by religion and metaphysics. My two books were [Sir James Frazer’s] The Golden Bough and [Robert Graves] The White Goddess. The Perennial Philosophy by [Aldous] Huxley was another great ally! I had so much power from a young age that I became fascinated by ideas of what you did with it. I try to spread it around to those who need it, but that's not necessarily the best use for it. I have a kind of religious faith, but I understand it to be a useful construct just as one constructs God from one's own conscience.
KD:
What is the best way to use power or influence?
MM:
I think the best way is to extend whatever you have to benefit as many people as possible. I'm by no means the only person in the world to have this attitude. By some fluke I was born with a certain talent and the chance to develop it. Few people have that. Also, by nature and background I'm of an egalitarian disposition. I like to share my good fortune, though I'd be happiest living in a country where taxes were fairer and the money better spent. I believe in high standards of social services, good wages for public servants, but also high standards of public responsibility. I ultimately believe in personal responsibility and little or no government under the rule of law.
KD:
The idea of sanctuary runs through Modem Times 2.0 as well. There is a universe where the things that made Ladbroke Grove special still exist as they once were and keep the outside world at bay. Another where a character laments that the old idea of a "little cottage in the country" is almost impossible now. "That whimpering sound you heard was the sound of cowards finding it harder and harder to discover sanctuary." Was the idea of a sanctuary on your mind because you were working on The Whispering Swarm, or has the idea of sanctuary been on your mind lately? In your books, sanctuaries often come to a bad end: the Melnibonéans [in Elric of Melniboné], the Vadhagh [in the Corum books], the people hiding in the Underground during WW2 in Modem Times...
MM:
I've used sanctuaries a lot, it's true. Derry and Tom's roof garden in the Cornelius stories was one of my real sanctuaries where I could go for a couple of hours; parts of Holland Park and so on... I had a lot of places where I could be in the heart of the city and yet still effectively alone. That's my favourite kind of place and often where I've chose to live.
Queen's Club Gardens became Sporting Club Square in my fiction but we lived there a long time until it was 'discovered' by yuppies. Nobody knew this wonderful square full of trees, with a little park and tennis courts for the residents, entirely surrounded by what were essentially working class public housing -- what Americans call projects -- of a typically ugly kind. One of these 'estates' (the English word) was reckoned to be dangerous. Of course, it wasn't. It allowed us to live there for just over a decade before it was overrun with rude, pushy people. Until then it had been mostly rent-controlled Victorian apartments with a wide range of people living there. I miss the flat, but only as it was. It was becoming hell to live there. That's the problem with sanctuaries -- you find one and the people you're trying to get away from will eventually find it, too. I call it my lizard theory of human behaviour. One smart, curious lizard find the best, sunniest spot on the rock and the other lizards all come and climb on top of him.
Queen's Club Gardens became Sporting Club Square in my fiction but we lived there a long time until it was 'discovered' by yuppies. Nobody knew this wonderful square full of trees, with a little park and tennis courts for the residents, entirely surrounded by what were essentially working class public housing -- what Americans call projects -- of a typically ugly kind. One of these 'estates' (the English word) was reckoned to be dangerous. Of course, it wasn't. It allowed us to live there for just over a decade before it was overrun with rude, pushy people. Until then it had been mostly rent-controlled Victorian apartments with a wide range of people living there. I miss the flat, but only as it was. It was becoming hell to live there. That's the problem with sanctuaries -- you find one and the people you're trying to get away from will eventually find it, too. I call it my lizard theory of human behaviour. One smart, curious lizard find the best, sunniest spot on the rock and the other lizards all come and climb on top of him.
KD:
You talked about your love of pulp. In the interview in the back of Modem Times you allude to the idea that science fiction becoming "respectable" wasn't necessarily a good thing. It reminded me of something [I think] Neil Gaiman said about people who insist on calling comic books "graphic novels". Do you feel like when a genre becomes too celebrated, when there's a Hall of Fame, prestigious awards, academic scrutiny, etc, that it takes all the fun and experimentation out of it? For example, I once read an interesting argument that the Beatles destroyed rock'n'roll as much as they influenced it by being the band that made rock'n'roll Serious Music.
MM:
Rock and roll used to be at its most vital when you went into a studio -- usually for a day or two -- without knowing what would come out. And usually the people who went in were already tight, good musicians. There were no rules and very few people in the early days looking over your shoulder, making you self-conscious. No criticism, no magazines devoted to rock and roll and so on. Writing science fiction was like that. Nobody to tell you what it was, how it was done, and so on. You were free to do what you liked, and the readers would tell you if they did or didn't like it. Too many good writers get ruined by becoming self-conscious and it was the main problem I had as an editor working with well-educated people.
My first wife Hilary Bailey got a good degree at Cambridge and said she couldn't work for years because of everything she'd been taught about English Literature. She wasn't the only one who found a kind of freedom in science fiction, something which resonated for her. Her first long published story was a sci-fi novella in New Worlds, The Fall of Frenchy Steiner. I still know very smart, very good writers, good academics, who find they are science-fiction writers. There's a friend of mine at the moment, seriously well published poet and novelist, who wrote some stories he didn't know what to do with and I suggested he send them to Asimov's who bought them. He was delighted. "I'm a science-fiction writer and I didn't know it. Great!" was his response.
Well, by and large we've lost that exciting, experimental feeling and you're right, it was the same impulse which drove the Beatles and you can see them on The White Album striving to get back to their roots. Same in Let It Be. Johnny Lennon was a natural musician. I'm not knocking the others, but without Lennon they couldn't have lasted and become so great. You have to keep in touch with those roots, even as you keep pushing the envelope. You can't leave pulp behind without losing the vitality originally informing your work. I agree with Neil entirely. I wrote and write comics and I collect toy soldiers, not models or miniatures or figurines. When I write science fiction I like to say so. Ballard was exactly the same. Not everything you write is science fiction, but when you write it you don't need to spiff it up with another name for it. Also, that sense of curiosity disappears when publishers can tell you what does and doesn't sell. It was great when they didn't know what sold!
My first wife Hilary Bailey got a good degree at Cambridge and said she couldn't work for years because of everything she'd been taught about English Literature. She wasn't the only one who found a kind of freedom in science fiction, something which resonated for her. Her first long published story was a sci-fi novella in New Worlds, The Fall of Frenchy Steiner. I still know very smart, very good writers, good academics, who find they are science-fiction writers. There's a friend of mine at the moment, seriously well published poet and novelist, who wrote some stories he didn't know what to do with and I suggested he send them to Asimov's who bought them. He was delighted. "I'm a science-fiction writer and I didn't know it. Great!" was his response.
Well, by and large we've lost that exciting, experimental feeling and you're right, it was the same impulse which drove the Beatles and you can see them on The White Album striving to get back to their roots. Same in Let It Be. Johnny Lennon was a natural musician. I'm not knocking the others, but without Lennon they couldn't have lasted and become so great. You have to keep in touch with those roots, even as you keep pushing the envelope. You can't leave pulp behind without losing the vitality originally informing your work. I agree with Neil entirely. I wrote and write comics and I collect toy soldiers, not models or miniatures or figurines. When I write science fiction I like to say so. Ballard was exactly the same. Not everything you write is science fiction, but when you write it you don't need to spiff it up with another name for it. Also, that sense of curiosity disappears when publishers can tell you what does and doesn't sell. It was great when they didn't know what sold!
KD:
So many of your stories end with the moral that people should be their own masters and serve neither Gods nor authorities. Why is that idea so important?
MM:
I think it's the real American dream! It's what we grow up with in the 'old democracies'. Every individual to be their own master, answering to a generally agree morality and law which embodies that morality. Obviously I believe in fewer laws and lawyers! And I think that American ideal has been thoroughly hijacked by the wealthy.
Michael Moorcock’s official website is: multiverse.org.
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