Modem Times 2.0 (11 page)

For all those years I lived around the Portobello Road, I learned that what people want more than authenticity is a provenance, a narrative. It wasn’t enough to sell a modern flowery chamber pot as “Victorian,” it had to be Oscar Wilde’s chamber pot. The developers and remodelers soon learned this lesson. The formica signs were stripped away and old buildings were made to look older.

Good, innovative writers like Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd with
White Chapell, Scarlet Tracings
, and
Hawksmoor
, aware of our need for authentic as well as virtual memory, linked the past with the present to show how the city shaped us. The media, particularly TV, picked up on the idea and soon had created “London,” the character: golden-hearted London, whose dark spine was the Thames, whose dark soul was the Thames. This character appeared again and again, in all those sequels to famous Victorian novels or pastiches that spoke fruit-ily of Limehouse and Wapping.

Ackroyd played into this image, filmed for TV, lit from below, a bearded Dickens impersonator trotting in his wake, but Sinclair was having none of it. The first of London’s psycho-geographers, he headed for the M25, daring anyone who followed him to make something romantic from motorway cafes and discarded Big Mac boxes. While Ballard reflected on the curve of the Westway mirrored in suburban reservoirs, Sinclair peered into the bays underneath, searching for the remains of the population.

The rise of psychogeography was in some ways an impulse to rediscover those old natural paths I and others like me had trodden through the ruins, to find ways of rediscovering serious memory, something which Peter Ackroyd, Alan Moore, and Will Self understood.

As well as friends and relatives, who are also memory, weare equally dependent on the geography of our cities for the myths and rituals by which we live. Without conscious ritual we have only buried tram tracks, some vague ideas of what still lies under the steel and concrete cladding, and a few bits of film.

I have nothing against virtuality. We create virtual identities for London. We create them for ourselves. We seek options allowing us to survive and, with luck, be happy. Jerry Cornelius knows, as he strolls in clothes just recently back in fashion, through virtual ruins, virtual futures, that it’s the only way we’ll survive,
as long as we’re fully conscious
, so that when fashions like Dickens World cease to suit the tourists, we’ll have another city standing by. I’m hoping for a London that neither swings nor sags, is neither grim nor gay, but rises defiantly, a fresh guarantee against the dying of our memories.

NOTES

1
. South African comic actor known mainly for playing a London cockney.

2
. But can’t the same be said of Elizabeth Bennet?

MICHAEL MOORCOCK INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON

Why Texas?

I was on the run. Looking for some fresh mythology.

You have played a central role in science fiction since the editorship
of New Worlds
magazine in the 1960s. How has that role changed from then to now?

I suppose I was more of a gadfly in those days where SF was concerned. I’d read almost none of the so-called “Golden Age” (1950s) SF. I bought a long run of
Astounding
when I became editor of
New Worlds
because I thought I ought to look at it, and found most of it dull and unreadable. This was also the experience of J. G. Ballard and others who had expected far more of American SF than it actually delivered (apart from a relatively small amount found mostly in
Galaxy)
.

American 1960s “New Wave” was about improving the quality of SF, but we Brits were less interested in that than we were in using SF methodology to look at the contemporary world. SF magazines were the only ones that liked our ideas, but we had to provide rationalizations to those stories, more or less. Explication dulled down the vision.

Fritz Leiber, whom I greatly admired, told me that he and several of his contemporaries like Bloch and Kuttner had thesame problem in their day. So you’d write, say, an absurdist story but you could only sell it if you added: “On Mars …” or “In the future …” and then stuck in a boring rationalization.

Anyway, we could only really publish in the SF magazines.

But we also felt contemporary fiction was anaemic and had lost the momentum modernism had given it. Most fiction we saw had no way it could usefully confront modern concerns— the H-bomb, computers, engineering and communications advances, space travel—not to mention changing social conventions and consequently language, politics, warfare, the altered psyche in the face of so much novelty of experience.

Almost all the literary fiction we read was actually retrospective (Durrell, Heller, Roth, or Bellow) or only pretending to tackle contemporary issues in a novel way (Selby, B. S. Johnson, the Beats, and others who saw themselves as the most interesting subject matter).

The reason we liked William Burroughs
(Naked Lunch)
was because his language focused on modern times and drew much of its vitality from modern idiom. We were inspired by him and Borges rather than influenced by them.

Many of our heroes (French existentialists,
nouvelle vague
movies) read SF and the
Galaxy
writers in particular (Bester, Dick, Sheckley, Pohl and Kornbluth, and, of course, Bradbury). In the 1950s there was far more acceptance of American SF in European intellectual circles than in the United States itself, where that retrospective tone spells “literature” to the
New Yorker
reader and in my view is the bane of American fiction, especially when linked to regionalism/provincialism.

Emerging from World War II into Austerity Britain, it was easy for us to see
1984
all around us. The three
New Worlds
writers generally linked in those days (and I was even then more writer than editor) were myself, Ballard, and Brian Aldiss. I’d come out of the London Blitz, Ballard from the Japanese civilian prison camps, and Aldiss from the war in Malaya, and we all had reason to welcome the A-bomb, perceiving it with far more ambiguity than most.

Post-1946 modernity was a bit on the grim side, but we felt that as writers we’d been given an amazing box of tools, an array of subjects never before available to literature, and we used those tools and subjects in ways that tended to celebrate postwar experience rather than denigrate it.

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?