Modem Times 2.0

by Michael Moorcock

  Our tastes in SF were often different. Brian liked Astounding, while I just couldn’t read it. Ballard liked Bradbury. I preferred good pulp like Brackett and Bester. Richard Hamilton, the pop artist, thought all three of us were damaging the kind of stuff he liked. He’d used Robby the Robot at his first important exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery.

  I couldn’t continue today to have the role I had then, because what we hoped would happen has happened. SF methods and subjects are now incorporated into modern fiction in order to deal with modern matters. Nostalgia is largely the preserve of fantasy and so-called Steampunk. (I suggested in a recent review that it really should be called Steam Opera since it has so many lords and ladies in it.)

  Anyway: Then my role was to attack the old and celebrate the new. Now my role is to be careful not to discourage new writers. In my old age I carry a burden, if you like, of gravitas! This makes me a kinder critic.

  An Elric film has been in the works (or not) for years. What’s the current status? Any other Hollywood interest?

  The Weitz brothers and Universal had Elric under option for some time, but I have no idea what’s happening now. Michael Bassett, the English director who made Solomon Kane, is now interested. I’ve corresponded with him a bit, but to be honest, I don’t much care about movies and tend to show little interest when I’m approached. I suspect Bassett would be a good choice, though.

  You started out writing for comics, then dropped it until the mid-1990s (and Multiverse). Do you still like the form? Why?

  I wrote a lot of commercial comics for Fleetway as a kid, but by the 1960s I’d had enough of what I regarded as a primitive medium. I had problems with the low-level racism/stereotyping prevalent at the time and found myself at odds with my bosses— refusing to write World War II comics, for instance. I wrote a bit of picture-journalism attacking what I saw as the trend of grown-ups to elevate juvenile forms, (especially in France) such as Barbarella.

  Of course, I’d dusted off my old comic skills to write the Jerry Cornelius material for International Times in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, and I’d done a Hawkwind strip with Jim Cawthorn for FRENDZ, another underground newspaper. I did quite a lot with the underground in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

  Then along came Alan Moore, and I saw that it was possible to use comics in a fun, adult way in a commercial environment—as long as you had a good collaborator, as I did. By then I was friends with Alan, and you could say it was his example, as well as meeting a bunch of very bright kids at the San Diego Comic Convention, that made me want to get back into the medium.

  So when I was asked to do a comic for DC I decided to try something ambitious, running three main stories at the same time and having them link up at the end.

  That was Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse in which I developed my ideas about a possible multiverse in which context determined identity, utilizing some Chaos Theory and Mandelbrotian notions of self-similarity.

  I really like to carry fairly complex ideas in comics or, say, in the Doctor Who novel I’m just now finishing. Maybe to stop myself taking such notions too seriously. The clockwork multiverse.

  Have you adapted other people’s work for comics?

  Well, only if you count Hal Foster. I “translated” the Spanish version of his Tarzan script back into English, mostly by guesswork, during my first publishing job on Tarzan Adventures. Oh, and I also did a two-part Tom Strong (Alan Moore’s character).

  You used to listen to the Grateful Dead while writing? Who do you listen to now, if anyone?

  Grateful Dead. Messiaen. Mozart. Dylan. Mahler. John Prine. New Riders. John Fogarty. Ravel. Schoenberg. Ives. Chet Baker. Williams. Elgar. Grateful Dead. Robert Johnson. Howlin’ Wolf. Glenn Miller. Noël Coward. Beatles. Gus Elen. Grateful Dead. Next question.

  That last one’s not a group, it’s an exit strategy.

  In one of your novels (I forget which one), Charon, ferryman of the River Styx, explains and justifies himself by saying, “It’s a steady job. “ Have you ever regretted not having a steady nine-to-fiver?

  I started out doing nine-to-five jobs—messenger for a shipping company at fifteen, “junior consultant” (office boy) for a firm of management consultants, and editorial jobs (Tarzan Adventures, Sexton Blake Library, Current Topics). I’ve never regretted it. I’d hate to do it again.

  Ever heard of writer’s block? How do you deal with it? Or do you ever have to?

  I’ve heard of it. Never really had it. My answer is to go into a different character, scene, etc. If you determine your scheme first, you usually know what’s supposed to go where and when. Structure informs plot elements. Get the “music” right, too: what you hear in your mind. I tried to talk about some of this in Death Is No Obstacle, the interview I did with Colin Greenland in the 1990s.

  Where the hell is the Multiverse? Are there entrances? What about exits?

  It’s everywhere. We’re in it. No way in. No way out. No centre and near-infinite centres. Just points of entrance through the Second Ether. I first mentioned it in “The Sundered Worlds” in SF Adventures, 1962. Black Holes, but I didn’t call them that. I don’t like too much explication generally, but I’ve done quite a bit in my Doctor Who novel due out in October 2010.

  Have you had run-ins with censorship? Or is SF too far under the literary radar? (I liked your comment about Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: “Why bother to burn books when you can make them disappear?”)

  I’ve been censored in America more than anywhere else. First by Avon in The Final Programme (1967). The worst was by Random House in Byzantium Endures when they slashed a lot of the antisemitism from a book that is primarily about the Nazi Holocaust. NAL got nervous and made me change Reagan to Eagan in their version of The Warlord of the Air. Their lawyers got on it and did what lawyers do. Of course Byzantium isn’t SF and I didn’t regard the Cornelius stuff as SF, either.

  Oh, and there’s a version of The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius which was very thoroughly censored, along with another book whose title I forget, by the publisher. America has a free speech clause in her Constitution, unlike Britain, but Americans tend to self-censor in ways not generally found in France and England.

  What do you do for fun? (besides write …)

  Due to my wounded foot, in recent years I’ve talked, eaten, and gone to movies (I live part of the time in Paris, where movies are worth going to).

  Now that my foot’s better, I’ll add “walking” (though these days I’m more a flaneur than a fifteen-mile-hiker). I usedto enjoy mountain climbing a lot and “fell-driving,” in which you take a big, preferably high-powered sedan up onto what are commonly considered hiking trails.

  I am especially proud of being one of the only three people to drive England’s Pennine Way in an on-road (2WD) vehicle. The other two were in the same car with me—Jon Trux and Bob Calvert. Hikers used to get outraged and curse us as we roared past.

  RE: Your time with the band Hawkwind: You once spoke of what a pleasure it was to walk out on stage and see a whole crowd of people eagerly awaiting your appearance. Do you ever have that experience as a writer? Or is it the opposite?

  I do love the stage. I’d have been a performer if I hadn’t been a writer. I love reading and signing sessions too. I like people. A solo reading is harder work than playing in a band because in a band you have your mates to cover your fluffs.

  But when I’m writing, I want the nearest thing to a monk’s cell as possible. A friend once phoned when I was in the middle of a paragraph and I picked up the phone because I thought it might be Linda. “Bugger off!” I told him. “That’s no way to speak to a friend,” he said. “You can’t be a friend,” I said. “A friend wouldn’t be phoning me while I’m working.”

  I hate people when I’m writing.

  There is a subtheme of incest that runs through the JC (Jerry Cornelius) books. He is in love with his sister (before he kills her), and the deliciously strange Jherek Carnelian is in a romantic relation
ship with his mom. What gives?

  Nothing much. I never had any siblings. Wish fulfilment? I probably just like the romantic/decadent flavour. Jerry also resurrects his sister, don’t forget.

  The critic Lorna Sage once said that I had too many “sleeping sisters” in my work (I think she was reviewing Mother London, which has a major female character asleep and dreaming through much of the book) and suggested that I preferred passive women.

  A canard. All my women friends are far from passive. Hilary, my first wife, was by no means passive; neither is Linda, far from it; and my female friends like Angela Carter, Andrea Dworkin, and others, are/were all pretty aggressive/active.

  The sleeping sister could be a holdover from the screamer-who-needs-rescuing convention of popular fiction.

  Besides Elric and Corum, the Eternal Champions, and Cornelius, who seems to be a more high-tech version of the same, there is also Pyat, the cranky Russky of Byzantium. How does he fit into your pantheon—or does he?

  Cornelius does what fantasy heroes can’t do easily. I wanted him to confront contemporary stuff. He’s far more knowing than standard fantasy heroes. I never regarded him as an SF character, let alone fantasy. The books were never published as fantasy or genre at all in England, but rather as straight “experimental” novels (I preferred to call them unconventional). I used Jerry to look at modern life.

  Pyat was designed, or created if you will, for a very different purpose, though he originally appeared as a relatively minor character in the Cornelius quartet. I had felt compelled for some time to confront the Nazi Holocaust full-on (I have my share of survival guilt) and Pyat turned out to be the right guy for the job.

  Pyat believes in systems. He sees society as a “correctable” machine. He is a modern man, if you like, in search of a soul. He represents the twentieth century’s belief that society is a machine, which only needs the right engineering approach to make life perfect. In that sense his story riffs off “hard” SF of the kind you used to find in lots of pre-1940s visionary fiction. Wells grew increasingly to write this kind of utopian fantasy, and of course it is in Gernsback and all kinds of American stuff. Not only was society a machine that would respond to the rightengineering—humankind itself was perfectible through the kind of genetic theories to be found in American and European thinking between the two world wars. Hitler based a lot of his “reasoning” on theories prevalent in the United States in particular, just as he based many of his racial laws on ideas first put into practice in America. Stalin had similar ideas and was also inspired by Hitler’s methods. Mussolini, too, thought society and human individuals could be improved just as we improved planes, cars, and trains to go faster, be safer, not to mention more comfortable.

  Hell, even Woody Guthrie sang about the power of electricity to improve our lives. The Grand Coulee Dam. Anarchists, too, subscribed to a slightly different and perhaps more humane vision of human society with the “right” systems in place.

  It’s against all this that Pyat is playing—as well as his terror, originally infecting him as a Jew in the Ukraine. (I’ve written more about the conception of Pyat in The Daily Telegraph, which can be found online at my website, Moorcock’s Miscellany, in the Q&A section under published writing, or at the Telegraph site under Books: “A Million Betrayals.”) Pyat was written from a sense of payback, of duty, a compulsion to use my talent to examine what was the single greatest crime of the twentieth century and see how it was allowed to come about.

  Pyat claims to be many things that he isn’t—an Aryan, an engineering genius, and so on. He’s an unreliable narrator in a carefully reconstructed version of our own world. Cornelius is not unreliable in that sense (and neither are Elric and Co.) and readers are only invited to examine his actions from their own perspective of events.

  It’s an ongoing theme, if you like: I’m always asking if Romance is some specific kind of lie.

  Your career spans the gap between the typewriter and the word processor. At what point did you make the switch? What was that like?

  I was using a Selectric II for years. I still have it. I still have an Imperial 50/60 produced during World War II and a Smith

  Corona portable (should electricity fail). All my work from the age of nine was done on the Imperial.

  Soon after I got to Texas in 1994, I was asked by ORIGIN, a game company, to write an original game that could also be a movie and a book. I wasn’t sure of the scheme, but I liked the challenge.

  At one point they asked me what kind of computer I was using. I told them I didn’t have one. At this, an embarrassed silence fell across the room. At last the guy running the firm cleared his throat and asked, “Would you mind if we got you one?”

  “You can get me one,” I said, “but I can’t say I’d use it.”

  So it duly arrived and within twenty-four hours, I’d taken to it like a duck to water. They were delighted. I wrote my first story on the computer within two days of getting it (a Cornelius short). They’d gotten me the top of the line, of course, and asked me what I thought of it. I said it was like a non-driver being given a Rolls-Royce and then being asked what he thought of it.

  Mandelbrot supplied me with a map of my brain. Word supplied me with new applications.

  What’s your relationship to the very lively Austin music scene? Who do you hang out with in Texas? Writers? Rednecks? Ex-prezzes? Out-of-work musicians?

  A few of my friends are musicians. Most of the people I know here I met through local politics and suchlike. Leftist activists in Texas really know the score. One of my best friends, Jewell Hodges, is ninety-two and has been involved in civil rights most of her life. She started life working in fields at the age of twelve, shoving cotton into sacks longer than she was tall.

  Almost as soon as we got here, Linda was co-opted onto the local Family Crisis Centre board, and with another woman set about transforming it, with accommodation for threatened spouses and children, outreach, education, and so on; and I supported her in that, being an active pro-feminist.

  We also got involved with the local food pantry, which Jewell was running when we got here. She asked me how we fedour hungry poor in the UK. I thought for a bit until I realized that we didn’t actually have poverty in the UK of the kind she was battling in Texas.

  Texas has no income tax and you feel obliged to involve yourself in activities which, as a European, you believe should be supported by taxes. So I self-tithe to balance that out. I know a few others who do.

  Most of my musician friends in Austin start their gigs too late for an old man like me who has a long drive home afterwards! I did perform once or twice with pals in Austin.

  I know a few writers—Howard Waldrop, for instance— whom I get on with. Though I have a few friends who are writers, I don’t hang out with them much. It was the same in the UK and in France. I tend to be very loyal to my friends and maybe for that reason I don’t have many close friends. But they’re mostly from different walks of life. I enjoy company but am essentially a loner.

  Do you ever go back and loot your works for ideas? Do you read your early stuff at all?

  Very rarely. I almost never reread a book. I riff off the fundamental ideas underlying my books—multiverse, eternal champions, context defining characters, and so on. In the old days I’d write one draft in three days and have a friend read it for typos, possible inconsistencies, and I’ve never reread those. I’ve made a few revisions when readers point out plot errors or loopy inconsistencies, of course. A few of those early fantasies got to the bookstores without anyone having read them—me, editors, publicists.

  I tend to have a good memory for books I’ve done, as if they were memories of my real life, though; so when it comes to sequels I seem to be able to take up a sequel pretty much where I left off. I have a terrible memory yet seem to remember books pretty easily.

  Reading my own work is a fast cure for insomnia. Linda will confirm this. When I can’t sleep, I go to get something byme and am dozing within a min
ute or two. This makes proofreading very hard.

  If you were casting a Cornelius movie, who would play Jerry? Did you know he’s from my hometown?

  You’re from Notting Hill? Not sure who—but Tilda Swinton is still my favourite choice. Someone did a Photoshop of her as Elric, which also worked very well. That’s in the Image Gallery on my site, I think.

  I was thinking about Johnny Depp.

  Him too. But he’s too busy playing pirate these days.

  What kind of car do you drive? (I ask this of everyone.) Did you have a car in the Old Country?

  We have an old Lexus SUV, which we bought new and cheap when my leg needed more room because of the wound, and that was about the only car that would take me.

  I briefly owned a beautiful Citroën classic convertible with running boards and stuff. In the 1970s, I had a massive Nash (that’s what I conquered the Pennine Way in), which in England was like driving a bus. I bought it because it could take a load of children and a load of band members.

  But after our Fiat, we mostly had a Honda Civic in the UK. Linda made me stop driving when she discovered I didn’t have a license. I’m useless at tests and exams. So although the driving instructor said all I needed were a couple of lessons and I’d sail through, I got worse and worse as we went along and gave it up as a lost cause.

  Texas is littered with Lost Causes.

  We mostly used public transport in London and we still use mostly public transport in France and the rest of Europe. I’m still an advocate for good public systems. One of my reasons formoving to Texas was because the then Democratic state governor wanted to bring a TGV to Texas and a light rail system for Austin.

  I was very disappointed when Bush became governor.

  You floated an interesting concept in Gloriana when you said that modern art’s relentless demand for novelty made bad artists worse, but good artists better. How does that work?

  I don’t remember writing that! I can see how it might work, though. I think there are plenty of good journeyman painters and scriveners whose talents are wasted by attempted novelty. I was probably thinking of what happened on New Worlds when perfectly good run-of-the-mill writers tried to produce what they thought were New Wave stories and came up with crap, whereas good writers who were encouraged to expand (Disch, Aldiss, Ballard) produced superb stuff.