{"id":257,"date":"2010-12-19T02:50:22","date_gmt":"2010-12-19T02:50:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.revolutionsf.com\/revblogs\/geekcurmudgeon\/2010\/12\/19\/in-celebration-of-michael-moorcocks-birthday-part-2\/"},"modified":"2012-08-17T05:18:34","modified_gmt":"2012-08-17T05:18:34","slug":"in-celebration-of-michael-moorcocks-birthday-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revolutionsf.com\/revblogs\/geekcurmudgeon\/2010\/12\/19\/in-celebration-of-michael-moorcocks-birthday-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"In celebration of Michael Moorcock’s birthday Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, December 18, is Michael Moorcock<\/a>‘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<\/span> and was reprinted in my 2003 book Geek Confidential<\/span><\/a>. I’m presenting the interview as it originally appeared back in 2001.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\nIn the 60\u2019s 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?<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019re writers with a very broad range of reference. It doesn\u2019t matter whether they\u2019re writing genre work or whether they\u2019re writing literary work or whatever they\u2019re writing. It doesn\u2019t matter because they\u2019re as well educated in genre as they are in high art, if you like, and that\u2019s what I like. There\u2019s a magazine called Modern Word<\/span><\/a> that Jeff VanderMeer writes for, and that\u2019s 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\u2019m most at ease with is somebody who\u2019s a curious reader, who\u2019s well read in all kinds of areas.<\/p>\n

\nIn a piece for Amazon UK, you wrote that Tolkien \u201cwas patient with you as a boy.\u201d What was your relationship with him like?<\/span><\/p>\n

Very good, because in those days, Tolkien didn\u2019t have any fans. I think I might have gotten in touch with him\u2026I knew T.H. White because I\u2019d 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\u2019t 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\u2019m sure. So this is all it was, you know? Just like you or anybody might write to me now. It\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019re 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\u2019t have. It has an element of social commentary to it, and that\u2019s, I think, what people sort of noticed in the beginning. And that\u2019s what this new book has. It\u2019s not just set in Nazi-land because Nazis are nasty people. It\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019t think they are bad for you, depending on the context, but others do. George Orwell predicted that people who read a certain boy\u2019s fiction were automatically going to become fascists. I was absolutely soaked in that stuff and I don\u2019t think anybody\u2019s yet called me a fascist. I found elements in it which encouraged a totally different kind of impulse. <\/p>\n


\nArt by John Picacio<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s always a moral element running in an Elric story. Just like there is in Behold the Man<\/span>. Again, there\u2019s a moral argument. There has to be a moral argument. I can\u2019t write anything else. And the reason for it, I swear this is the truth, and it\u2019s 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\u2019s Progress<\/span>. I read it and I liked it, and it\u2019s a really good moral lesson for us all, regardless of one\u2019s religion. You know, keep striving, so forth. It draws mostly on the common testaments, and there it is and it\u2019s got two meanings: it\u2019s an allegory. There\u2019s the story, and it\u2019s pretty good. There\u2019s the Kingdom of Heaven and all these various fantastic elements going on, but also, it\u2019s 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\u2019m not saying others don\u2019t, but generally speaking, most don\u2019t seem to. They don\u2019t focus in on a social problem, they don\u2019t 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, \u201cIf I were doing a game, could you give me some extra details of the Young Kingdoms?\u201d And I thought about this, and I said, \u201cI\u2019m not a world-maker, I\u2019m a storyteller.\u201d When I travel, I don\u2019t 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\u2019d 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\u2019ve been, but \u2018world-making\u2019 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\u2019re doing is building a world, you\u2019re not navigating that world. I find that very peculiar. All of these are assumptions made by people who\u2019ve come out of the genre itself: Dungeons and Dragons, everything that\u2019s 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\u2019t go into enough detail, the way all these other writers do. Now as far as I\u2019m concerned, those writers are boring farts. They\u2019re wasting my time and killing a tree to boot. That stuff I just skip automatically.<\/p>\n

\n
\nArt by Robert Gould<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\nWhat does the future hold for Elric?<\/span><\/p>\n

The next Elric, which I\u2019m working on at the moment, is called The Skrayling Tree<\/span>. Skrayling is the word that the Vikings used for the Indians they met up in Nova Scotia. It\u2019s in the Edda<\/span>; they called them Skraylings. This is set in America, North Eastern America. It deals with, well, the way Dreamthief\u2019s Daughter<\/span> played against Nazis and Nazi politics, this one plays against American politics.<\/p>\n

\nMore in Part 1<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n