|
PSSST!
Listen. Can you hear it? The grumbles of revolution, or evolution, or whatever you like to call it. It's the
sound of change, and it's heading toward SF and fantasy more quickly than you think. About time, too.
On the fringes of the genre, there is a movement taking place. Out beyond the bookshelves that teeter and
moan beneath the weight of spines that read Robert Jordan, David Eddings, Piers Anthony, and Terry
Brooks, there are OTHER books. Books that you've probably never heard of, by writers that you've never
heard of. It is this movement that is giving speculative fiction new life and vitality.
Don't get me wrong; I am not necessarily against bookshelves that are overloaded with redundant,
derivative reworks of Tolkien. Everything has its place, and far be it from me to bitch and moan about sf
and fantasy writers that are pulling in tons of cash and selling millions of copies of their work. I
congratulate them, actually. They've managed to do something that few writers ever get the opportunity to
experience; they're bestsellers.
But face it; their work isn't exactly ground-breaking. And when you boil it down, cut through the chaff and
the rhetoric, speculative fiction is still the literature of ideas. Science fiction, fantasy... they're uniquely
suited to exploring the radical thoughts and amazing workings of the imagination that puts mankind above
the animals. So it bothers me that so few people are aware of the REAL meat of the genre that is being
produced. Because there is something hopelessly, terribly wrong when a third of the SF section of a
bookstore is given over to Star Wars and Star Trek novels,
until they are spilling out and tainting the genre
pool and killing the lasting works that are hidden not far away...
I call these people the Next Wave, half-nodding to the New Wave that originally injected life into SF and
brought it kicking and screaming out of the delirium of rocket ships and rayguns in the 50s. But these
writers are more the bastard offspring of the New Wave authors, taking their inspiration equally from pop
culture and intelligentsia. They're the writers that use genre conventions to address the world around us,
bringing issues like politics and morality back into speculative fiction where it belongs. Call it magic
realism, call it darkwave, call it whatever the hell you want; labels aren't a necessity, they're a convenience.
Truth is, they're storming onto a scene that is overwhelmingly poised to destroy them beneath the muckery
of commercial works, resigning them to the ditches that sluice the sewage of big house publishing. And this
column is here to let you know that they exist, to urge you to pick up their works, scrub the shit off of them,
and read them for the ideas found within.
Don't take my word for it. I decided to go to one of the sources, seeking out Michael Moorcock, one of the
Founding Fathers of the New Wave, to see what he had to say.
First off, thank you for taking time out to do this interview. For you, it's a matter of course; for me, a
young writer that grew up reading your work, it's akin to having the opportunity to interview Gandhi. I
appreciate it!
Thanks. Happily I'm not on a hunger strike at the moment.
I'd like to talk about modern speculative fiction for a bit. This column is dedicated to exposing the
risk-takers working in SF and fantasy. I call them the Next Wave, in a nod to the obvious influences that the
New Wave writers had upon them. Are there any modern fantasists that you've been following?
How modern? Mary Gentle's good. M.John Harrison. Carroll. Aylett. Gallagher. Miéville. Tim
Etchells (Endland Stories), Rhys Hughes, Jeff VanderMeer. I do my best to support and promote these
writers. I've written pieces on several of them for magazines like New Statesman and The Spectator.
China Miéville is one of my recent favorites, who writes some socially and politically charged novels.
To me, this represents the true strength of speculative fiction; it is, after all, the literature of ideas. Is this
what you and your contemporaries have been pushing for? Have we finally come full-circle and reached
another era of excitement in speculative fiction?
Absolutely. Looks that way to me, pard. I'm increasingly being asked to discuss ideas in fantasy, the
anti-intellectual aspects of hobbitania. Much of it is a continual and temperamental reaction on the part of
certain writers to sentimentalised liberal humanism, if you like. Miéville is one of several outstanding
writers who take their politics seriously. This use of the imagination to examine present problems is what I
always encouraged in New Worlds, of course, and I celebrate it now that a new movement is emerging.
But I think the likes of Star Wars and Star Trek are real enemies of sentience!
Well, you've just reaffirmed a statement that I made earlier in this column; "There is something
hopelessly, horribly wrong when a third of the SF section of a bookstore is given over to
Star Wars and Star Trek
novels." But then, I believe in the idea of integrating genre works alongside 'mainstream' or
'literature' works, though I don't think the chain sellers will ever consider it. But much of your own work
doesn't really belong on genre shelves, does it?
Much of my stuff is fairly pre-generic -- the Elric stories owe something to previous writers of fantasy
adventure fiction, of course, but were written at a time when what we today know as the Fantasy Genre
didn't exist and even Science Fiction was just coming to be understood as an intelligent form (Amis's New
Maps of Hell helped considerably there, though I disagreed radically with the book itself ). Amis
dismissed Peake as a 'bad fantasy writer of maverick status' as I recall.
But it gives you an idea of how marginalised fantasy was before it became Fantasy. The Tolkien industry
is as chiefly responsible for that phenomenon as the
Star Wars/Star Trek industry is chiefly responsible for
the sidetracking and dumbing down of the aspirations of writers who emerged in the 60s writing literary
sf -- Disch, Sladek, Spinrad, Sallis and Co. found themselves once again at the mercy of the easy snobbery
which came back with the attack on liberal values and the rise of Thatcher and Reagan. They changed our
rhetoric and it was a rhetoric in the main which the commercial stuff like Star Wars didn't come close to
challenging. Disch and Sladek challenged it and as a result were virtually silenced. We can all name other
outstandingly good writers who received the same treatment. Happily, they are re-emerging as Vintage
books and as 'Masterworks' as people slowly rediscover the gems of the past. There is a similar revival in
England for 'London' fiction, mostly of working class emphasis. The middle class determines what is
studied. When the well runs dry you have to find some guy in the rice fields to come around with his
willow twig -- you have to hear what Big Mama Thornton and Jimmy Reed are singing and absorb their
vitality so you can make a wider common denominator and call it Elvis. You have to go back into the
wilderness, find your forgotten generals, dust them off and ask their advice.
This is part of a broad, somewhat reflective mood as people begin to realize how ignorant they are of
certain things! People have a habit of getting themselves an education -- once they realize they don't have
one. Nobody has yet told most Americans that they don't have one. Hollywood films, they are realising
slowly, aren't necessarily true. Not every American believes Braveheart and The Patriot to be gospel.
Though, I know, many do. Oddly, they're also the people who voted for George Bush. Thank god they're
the minority. As soon as they realise the truth, mark my words, even some of the ones who voted for Bush
will go and get one. People in the main don't place much value on ignorance, but they do reward people
who tell them they're smart when they're not. Which, unfortunately is the Achilles heel of the US. It suits
the wealthiest interests in a consumerist society to tell people they are smart when they're not. Then they
never know they are making choices from an identical source. It's short term value, of course, when you
find yourself having to import brains from every possible corner of the globe, just to operate the tills in your
supermarkets...
I wonder if Americans haven't been given that stuff Henry Miller believed they gave the Luxembourgians,
to turn them bovine. I've never known such a nation of whiners who never do anything about their situation.
I can't help being reminded that it took an Englishman to get their army up to snuff and that as soon as Tom
Paine started complaining about Congressional corruption, he was vilified and driven back into the margins.
Still, there are signs that's starting to change. Thanks to the internet and people's natural common sense.
There's a lot more bolshy new writers starting to use the fantasy and SF medium again and that's very
encouraging indeed.
If I recall correctly, your extensive piece on Miéville will be featured at the New Worlds website... will
any of your other pieces be reprinted there as well?
It's a review of Perdido Street Station and a general piece on the problems of writers like Miéville,
but it isn't saying anything you wouldn't have said yourself. It will appear there as will a lot of my
journalism which otherwise doesn't get seen by the general reader. The piece on Carroll and a piece on
Robert Irwin are in Tales From The Texas Woods, along with pieces on early cowboy pictures.
Thematically they are about popular fiction. I doubt if the stuff will remain on the main website after we get
more new material coming in, but it's not the first time I've done reprints to try to get some sort of stimulus
running and give a rough idea of the direction we want to go in.
I think that, in particular, fantasy as a genre has finally begun to have some new life injected into it.
Certainly, with the release of The Dreamthief's Daughter you're proving that once more by expanding the
boundaries of the genre. I think that people like China, Matt Stover, Michael Swanwick, J. Gregory
Keyes... they're all working toward the same goal of making fantasy a relevant literary form. Do you think
it will happen? Will quality ever replace the cookie-cutter epic fantasies that cause our bookshelves to
groan in protest?
It isn't a fight between crap and quality. Crap will always sell better because there is a lower common
denominator involved. But quality will have a reasonable market depending on the demographics -- the New
Wave was attached to a large number of people maturing at the same time and wanting something other
than Asimov or Heinlein as their adult reading -- we tended to sell to university-age and up. We now have
enough people out there to support quality. Could last for ages, given the way it's working out. Assuming
anything lasts at all, of course!
So let's keep it going while we have an audience again! Marx predicted that the modern fairy tale might be
the literature of the future. That's fairly meaningless, since most popular fiction is at least that, if any good
at all. But fantasy is at its best in the hands of witty, idiosyncratic moralists!
Mr. Moorcock is a writer's writer. The author of an amazingly long list of novels and short stories,
Moorcock is an acknowledged master of the form. For those of us that are young and just starting out in our
writing careers, we've no doubt been influenced by his work. Many of the Next Wave authors are obviously
more students of Moorcock than of Tolkien. Which isn't a bad thing, considering Moorcock is still as
prolific now as when he started out writing. He is currently at work on a new cycle of Elric tales, based
upon the enormously popular albino warrior with the soul-eating broadsword, Stormbringer... So I took the
opportunity to talk to him about writing in general, and some of his work in particular.
You have a massive following of extremely dedicated readers. Does that knowledge affect you when
you sit down to write? In particular, you're in the midst of a new cycle of Elric tales that are quite different
from your earlier Elric stories. Are you concerned with the reactions from those fans that have only read
your Elric saga?
I'm more interested in making a good, lasting piece of furniture, if you like, than worrying about the
customer who will buy it. I owe it to my regulars to go on producing decent work, because they trust me to
do it. If they like a new style, fine, but they might prefer an older style. That's a matter of their taste. I've
been familiar with negative reactions to my stuff since I started getting reviews in fanzines and you could
almost argue that it's become a habit to maintain a slightly edgy position, so my steady readers tend to like
me for that quality, I think. I meet academics who wrote their first literary essay at the age of eleven on,
say, Weird of the White Wolf. I know that some of my readers will stop at the sword and sorcery, and I'm
glad they like it. They help support the other readers who want to read the other stuff -- i.e. the other stuff is
often more easily available because the s&s is popular. And often a reader will begin with Elric and wind
up with Pyat.
You've created a mythos that has been mined by countless writers, until what you've created have
become the tropes that others explore. Yet, you continue to create within that mythos, though by all
accounts your Eternal Champion stories were written as a reaction AGAINST the tropes of the day. Why
do you keep returning to the Eternal Champion? Do you worry at all about your work being seen as a
parody of itself, simply because its setting has almost become a cliché?
Of course I worry about self-parody. Every popular and productive writer does. But I have to rely
on the critics. So far nobody has said I'm doing that, though some think I'm past my prime as an innovator
in the fantasy field. Could be true, but I do my best to keep the quality high. I do this partly by setting
myself higher, often private, targets within the books. This helps keep their tensions, I think. But some
reactions are always going to be over the top, others are going to be very blasé. It is weird to see reviews
from people who don't know that half the stuff they're reading comes via me (I have many influences) and
the other half seems to come from Tolkien. But I don't read them. I never read much fantasy or SF and even
today I prefer, say, Elizabeth Bowen to Lord Dunsany. Also I tend to judge myself by writers I admire and
so I'm not much bothered by a review which says I'm not as good as Raymond E. Feist.
I know that you probably get this one at least once per interview, but I almost HAVE to do it. You're
amazingly prolific, almost frighteningly so. How do you do it? Are there really multiple Michael
Moorcocks scattered around the Multiverse, all writing novels for us?
I've written a whole book about this with Colin Greenland, Death Is No Obstacle. I do a lot of
sitting around and thinking and making notes before I begin. I believe the secret is in knowing instinctively
how to structure, the way Mozart could. Of course there are a lot of people using the structures I
developed now, so it might not look very original, and I have to modify them, but I believe if you get the
structure right, the resonances all right, it's fairly plain sailing. I believe structure also contains a narrative
and that the narrative has a moral quality -- it 'says' something to the reader.
But I'm not that fast on Pyat, for instance, especially these days. I'm getting about 1000 words a day on
average -- about a chapter a week on Pyat -- though I'm still faster than that on Elric, even though I tend to try
to make them harder to do. I'm a very clinical writer to begin with. Then, once everything's in place, I
usually engage and just go until it's done, making some modifications to the narrative and plot, but never to
the fundamental structure. Mother London was a complex structure, using a duodecimal system to give it
more flexibility!
The Cornelius books are also fairly complex. The fantasy romances are not complex, even at their most
elaborate. Makes for faster writing.
You've often broken down the so-called "fourth wall" in your writing several times, notably in your
Oswald Bastable stories and your Michael Moorcock's Multiverse comic series for DC Comics. Tell me,
do you do this for fun? Or would you say that it is simply another layer of the Multiverse mythos being
incorporated into your work?
You'll have to clarify this one. I don't know what the so-called fourth wall is! If it's about time -- I
believe Time is a field with its own qualities -- not simply a dimension of space -- so conceivably everything
can be happening at an identical moment...
Actually, I was speaking of the fourth wall in writing, where you bring yourself into the story, blurring
the line between reality and fantasy. In your Oswald Bastable stories, you state that they are manuscripts
alternately found in your grandfather's possession, and also brought to you... and in the comics, there was
the appearance of yourself and artist Walt Simonson in the story...
Gotcher. But then I didn't know what meta-fiction was until someone told me I'd been doing it for
ages. And now I've forgotten what it is again. As you can tell, I rely on my readers being more
sophisticated and better educated than me. I do it to add a further dimension to something or I simply use it
as an established literary device inherited from everyone, including Edgar Rice Burroughs and Joseph
Conrad. Conrad was a larger influence than Burroughs on the Bastable series and in a sense I was just
establishing the reality, as it were, in the same way you might set the scene for Marlowe to tell an unlikely
tale or for Burroughs to receive news of Pellucidar via 'The Gridley Wave'. These are frequently simply
established devices to give your narrative a certain kind of authority.
The book needed something like that to frame it to make it work best -- it was an Edwardian utopia I was
describing, with all the idealism of imperialism apparently working well. I was taking British cultural
assumptions of the day (they are now changing for the better) and putting them in the mouths of people who
thought they were basically decent chaps. It is, of course, harder to hate a bumbling British civil servant
who means well than some swaggering Belgian slave-driver, but the effect tends to be similar on the
occupied peoples. In fact you could argue that benign imperialism is imperialism at its most refined and
hypocritical. Canadians must understand that! They live between the two most rapacious imperial nations
on earth. But with the Multiverse comic, I was dealing specifically with layered realities and it seemed
natural to bring us both in, since we were the creators of Jack, Rose and the rest and Jack, Rose and the rest
might have been our creators. The great cycle of creation indeed! Not so much offering narrative depth as
narrative dimension, if that makes sense. Just taking the logic as far as you can. The comic was War
Amongst the Angels taken even further along that course. I'm not much interested in examining the
author's relation to his fiction, but I am interested in how fiction turns itself into fact and vice versa.
Mr. Moorcock is also noted as the longtime editor of New Worlds magazine, which ran for many years in
England. New Worlds was the focal point of the New Wave movement, and provided an outlet for works
that were much more stylistically ornate than what was being published in other genre magazines. As such,
Mr. Moorcock has long been the center of the maelstrom of fringe SF and fantasy, and still is today.
On another note -- whether we like it or not, and whether we ADMIT it or not, technology is definitely
changing the publishing industry. More and more publishers have been cutting back on their marketing
departments... possibly because of the internet, and the vast community of readers and writers that are active
on the web. You have a strong presence online as well, with
www.multiverse.org and
www.newworldsmagazine.com. Where do
you think the internet is taking the industry? Is the
web ever going to reduce the need for the big publishing houses?
I think so. We are fragmenting in one sense and, as we do, producing coherent systems to
compensate. I like it because I've always anticipated it. I've embraced it because it seems such a natural
medium for me. I'm willing to take whatever risks are involved and I'm sure we'll work out a way in which
we can all make a living and expand the possibilities and change the whole nature of publishing. It has
happened before. In 1895, the introduction of the six shilling single volume novel brought in modernist
fiction. Movies, radio, telegraph all have a strong effect and are absorbed, utilised in every possible way,
both as devices in fiction and instruments of telling stories. Big publishing houses have been dinosaurs for
a number of years. It takes dinosaurs a long time to die because they are powerful enough to alter reality -
or stave it off anyway -- for a bit longer than most of us could. We are cybermarmosets, if you like, running
about all over creation, finding out how all this stuff works for us. The dinosaurs lumber towards extinction
and we begin a rapid evolution...
Speaking of evolution, have you been keeping an eye on the quantum physics and Chaos Theorists
lately? It seems that the common views of what constitutes 'reality' has been moving steadily closer to your
own vision. How do you feel about that? Does it impact you in any way, knowing that the multiverse is
possible?
You always work together. I have good friends who I hardly realise are as brainy as they are. You
mention their names in their own circles and people gasp stuff about Nobel Prizes and so forth when you've
merely mentioned that they know how to crack a good joke. Both Greg and Jim Benford were characters
(speaking of such things) in my early Tarzan Adventures strips. In those days, they were American
schoolboys living on an army base in Germany. Now they are both very sophisticated and widely read
physicists. A friend I used to climb with is regarded as the leading economic geographer in the world, but
we met originally through an enthusiasm for Mervyn Peake.
Someone wrote in the New Statesman a year or so ago that 'multiverse' was a term invented by physicists
to describe interlocking physical realities etc. I wrote and said that I, in fact, first used the term in that
respect and that physicists were famous SF and comic readers... Most SF writers are used to their ideas
creeping into the consciousness of the scientific community and from them back into the real world. I have
actually reached the point where I will deliberately introduce an idea (about the nature of time, say) into a
piece like the one I did recently for NATURE and then sit back and watch the boffins turn it all into
formulae and possibility. You provide the poetics, they provide the rationale. This has been going on
forever. You only have to read some of the writings of the first A-bomb team to see that. And morality is a
dimension frequently considered by such people. As I wrote to Arthur Clarke recently --- sixty years ago
Willy Ley was trying to kill us both. Now Willy's rocket and Arthur's satellite bring us both the
life-saving full-strength BBC as we get less terrestrially mobile.
I live in a personal world without divided cultures. My friends are scientists who read Proust and poets
who read about engineering problems. The only reason science isn't as popular as the arts amongst the
chattering classes is that you have to know a bit about what you're saying with science while you can
bullshit and exhibit the most appalling snobbery where the arts are concerned and nobody can call you on it.
Science requires actual study and understanding. But I know a lot more scientists who have read James
Joyce than literary novelists who have read Mandelbrot. Mandelbrot's the basis you start with, I think, for
Chaos Theory. Brings it back to the original mathematical ideas. The few writers who do read Mandelbrot
as much as Melville you generally find working in the margins. New Worlds was designed for the properly
educated reader! To me a good education involves all aspects of culture and understanding. That kind of
reader is as familiar with popular culture as they are with intellectual culture. I see myself very much in the
old tradition of Wells and even Priestley --- a breed that now is only recognised in France --- the popular
intellectual. In France it's possible to talk about these things quite easily, but that tradition has stayed alive,
I suspect, in a way it hasn't in the Anglophone world. A rejection of Reaganomics has more than simple
financial and quality of life benefits!
Finally... since this column is meant to expose the quality fringes of fantasy and sf, can you tell us
about your plans for New Worlds Magazine's online version? Is there finally going to be a place for people
to get good, cutting-edge fantasy and SF on the web?
This might not start properly until next year but I'm asking for input from other enthusiasts. My idea
is to make it cyber-specific, encouraging narrative forms which utilize the internet and possibly can't even
exist without it. Since my policy on NW was the same, I shall also publish outstanding conventional work if
there is nowhere else for it to be published. But we are still working out method, payment and so on and I
am determined on one thing only -- that I shan't wind up paying for it. This is a bad time to launch a new
cyber-magazine, but I'm not sure I would have used advertising as a financing method, anyway. There are
secondary means of funding it, but I haven't looked into anything very thoroughly yet. But remember this
please -- New Worlds was presented and sold not as an SF or fantasy magazine -- but as 'renaissance'
magazine -- dealing equally with science, art and literature. We even had a bit of social commentary in
there occasionally. We deliberately aimed the magazine at a general public and from what we can tell, it
had more influence on the general literary scene than it did on sf. Fantasy is not a genre. It is an attitude of
mind.
And that, folks, is exactly it: fantasy is an attitude of mind. And if you want attitude in your fantasy, keep
reading this column. Dislocated Fictions will feature all the writers that are bashing their heads against the
monoliths of publishing in the hopes of having their own particular brand of ideas read by people like you;
people that are discriminating in their readings. So here's hoping that their books keep coming out, and
continue to gain readers, so that this column lasts a long time. It would only be right.
|
