Today, December 18, is Michael Moorcock‘s birthday. In celebration of this event, I am re-publishing (in two parts) my lengthy interview with Mooorcock. The piece originally appeared as part of the defunct Scifi.com webzine Science Fiction Weekly and was reprinted in my 2003 book Geek Confidential. I’m presenting the interview as it originally appeared back in 2001.
In the 60’s you were well known for hanging out with other writers that wrote similar things. You know, Fritz Leiber and Mervyn Peake, and these were writers that you were associated with. Are there writers writing today that you do associate with?
To some extent, the kind of writers I hung out with then are the very same kind of writers I hang out with now. They’re writers with a very broad range of reference. It doesn’t matter whether they’re writing genre work or whether they’re writing literary work or whatever they’re writing. It doesn’t matter because they’re as well educated in genre as they are in high art, if you like, and that’s what I like. There’s a magazine called Modern Word that Jeff VanderMeer writes for, and that’s a very kind of highbrow magazine that includes people like Philip K. Dick, i.e., it includes genre writers as cheerfully as it includes people like Pynchon and Don DeLillo and that kind of writer. So really what I’m most at ease with is somebody who’s a curious reader, who’s well read in all kinds of areas.
In a piece for Amazon UK, you wrote that Tolkien “was patient with you as a boy.” What was your relationship with him like?
Very good, because in those days, Tolkien didn’t have any fans. I think I might have gotten in touch with him…I knew T.H. White because I’d written an article on him in my fanzine. I ran a fanzine that was originally started as an Edgar Rice Burroughs fanzine, but it became a kind of general fantasy fanzine. So I did interviews with various people, and anybody, in fact, who was still alive and had written a fantasy novel, there were only about three or four, as a boy I got in touch with. I was also interested in folk music, so I was corresponding with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seegar. This may seem strange to people these days, but in those days those poor bastards didn’t have any fans. They were only too grateful for the odd person like myself to come along. I had a wonderful correspondence with T. H. White. I mean, these days, these people would be inundated, I’m sure. So this is all it was, you know? Just like you or anybody might write to me now. It’s just that in those days there were only about six readers and writers all together in the world: 3 in America and 3 in Britain. There were the odd writers like Leiber and myself who were interested in that, but generally speaking, Science Fiction was the dominant genre form. All of the science fiction writers, the likes of Damon Knight and Co., the intelligent science fiction writers, absolutely loathed fantasy and still do. Their hatred of Tolkien isn’t really the same as mine, because they hated it all. Whereas I grew up reading science fantasy: Leigh Brackett and stuff like that, which, to me, is the perfect combination. You have magic and science, throw it all in. Why have just one when you can have it all? So I had a very different view of it. But these science guys, generally speaking, are a lot more austere. They’re still pretty good, but they believed you had to have some kind of serious social subject. Pohl and Kornbluth, Damon Knight, Philip K. Dick, all these people had a focus; an actual point. The weird thing is, of course, that my fantasy does have that. It has what most fantasy doesn’t have. It has an element of social commentary to it, and that’s, I think, what people sort of noticed in the beginning. And that’s what this new book has. It’s not just set in Nazi-land because Nazis are nasty people. It’s set in Nazi-land because I had a letter from a young woman who was raped by someone calling himself Elric, which upset me considerably. I can’t control people, but I can control my own books, and so I began to consider the fascistic underlying elements of sword and sorcery fiction: the elements of feudalism and simplified, sentimentalised ideas of heroism, and so on, which a lot of people regard as being rather bad for you. I don’t think they are bad for you, depending on the context, but others do. George Orwell predicted that people who read a certain boy’s fiction were automatically going to become fascists. I was absolutely soaked in that stuff and I don’t think anybody’s yet called me a fascist. I found elements in it which encouraged a totally different kind of impulse.
Art by John Picacio
There’s always a moral element running in an Elric story. Just like there is in Behold the Man. Again, there’s a moral argument. There has to be a moral argument. I can’t write anything else. And the reason for it, I swear this is the truth, and it’s stupid, but the real reason is that first book I bought as a kid with my own money, and really because I thought it looked like a good fantasy adventure was The Pilgrim’s Progress. I read it and I liked it, and it’s a really good moral lesson for us all, regardless of one’s religion. You know, keep striving, so forth. It draws mostly on the common testaments, and there it is and it’s got two meanings: it’s an allegory. There’s the story, and it’s pretty good. There’s the Kingdom of Heaven and all these various fantastic elements going on, but also, it’s about somebody resolving their spiritual journey. Narratives give birth, as it were, to other narratives. So I thought that any story for adults had to have two meanings. That was part of the deal. Part of the job you learned was to have an allegorical or symbolic meaning running through it. A moral argument. These fantasies of mine, they actually do have a symbolic meaning. I’m not saying others don’t, but generally speaking, most don’t seem to. They don’t focus in on a social problem, they don’t resonate between the modern world and that invented world. And the other thing that somebody asked me, they just asked me on the net today, “If I were doing a game, could you give me some extra details of the Young Kingdoms?” And I thought about this, and I said, “I’m not a world-maker, I’m a storyteller.” When I travel, I don’t know every detail of history and economics and culture of the places I travel to. The stories come out of both people and landscape. I get as much of the world as the story needs. The rest of that world, I know no more about it than about economics in Madagascar. If I set a story on the island, I’d learn a little bit about the island. But just enough to tell the story. As it is I tend to take my stories from the places I’ve been, but ‘world-making’ as a pastime is meaningless to me. I know that there are people out there who do this all the time, but it sort of stops you in your tracks, because all you’re doing is building a world, you’re not navigating that world. I find that very peculiar. All of these are assumptions made by people who’ve come out of the genre itself: Dungeons and Dragons, everything that’s come since me. Most of that stuff is fairly strange to me. Younger readers will complain that my books are all right, but I don’t go into enough detail, the way all these other writers do. Now as far as I’m concerned, those writers are boring farts. They’re wasting my time and killing a tree to boot. That stuff I just skip automatically.
Art by Robert Gould
What does the future hold for Elric?
The next Elric, which I’m working on at the moment, is called The Skrayling Tree. Skrayling is the word that the Vikings used for the Indians they met up in Nova Scotia. It’s in the Edda; they called them Skraylings. This is set in America, North Eastern America. It deals with, well, the way Dreamthief’s Daughter played against Nazis and Nazi politics, this one plays against American politics.