Michael Moorcock

Interview by David Kendall and Graham Evans (early 1996)

I read your account of going to the hospital in America [New Statesman and Society].
It's terrible. The social conditions over there are about as advanced as those in Turkey. The social attitudes are about the same. Not much difference between your average Turk and your average Texan really, in terms of what they believe in. Which is basically flogging and hanging. Where we live isn't actually like that, they're all very . . . radical. It's a bunch of old - well it isn't all old but during the seventies a lot of political people moved into the area, so there's quite a high level of sophistication.

Was that the appeal of moving there?
There were various reasons, but they were mainly to do with being near Linda's [Linda Steele, married to MM] family. That's why Neil Gaiman moved to Massachusetts, to be near his wife's family. It's not very profound. It's just what we all do.

But as someone who has written a vast amount about London in one form or another-
Still am.

Do you miss it??
Yes, both of us do actually. Linda, in some ways more than me, has been suffering terrible culture shock. She was over for fifteen years. She was here during the entire Reagan period. So we're back and we look at the media which is wretchedly bad. There isn't a TV channel that's any good really. You sort of hope for something, and say that's alright, but overall, compared to what you can get here in terms of political discussion and background information, it's much worse than in Europe. It's no wonder that these people are still voting as if they were in the seventeenth century.

Well, half of them don't vote.
Well, I mean, the ones that don't vote are largely the ones that ought to. That's the irony of it. They're just so sick of things right now. It's very odd to see a huge country like that, in a sense going through a social change that isn't that different to - no it is different. A social change is pretty radical, you know and they still haven't got it. Europeans really do have a better sense of what's going on in the world and who they're dealing. If you have to start treating with the Pacific Industrial Nations, or whatever, Europeans are much faster at realising that this is something that they have to learn to do. They've got to include this in their world view.

American ego?
No. It's partly that. The English were like that for years for the same reason, because they were the most powerful country. It's decadent when you're no longer powerful but you still have the attitudes. That's really what decadence is. What you're seeing is a country that could really quite easily lose it's power, to the degree that it's being challenged and has no understanding of what's happening. The tendency is in all circles in America, because it's essentially a country founded by the loonies, by visionaries. There's a strong visionary element running through American culture which is attractive. That's what I like about it but that element does turn into apocalyptic witch-hunting on occasions, and there's a danger of that happening right now. Last time the Republicans controlled both Houses you had McCarthy.  

But wasn't Clinton the blip, the exception to the rule? America's being following the right wing for twenty or thirty years.
Yeah. Again, the reason we moved when we did was enough people had voted for Clinton to make us realise that there were people there to vote for Clinton. We didn't think that Clinton was going to do any great good but it meant that there were people there not voting for the rest of the ticket. But by and large it's a bit like deciding to move here because everybody hates the Tories at the moment, sort of negative. Labour is getting an enormous amount of its support because everybody is sick of the Tories, which isn't a very good way of getting support. You wish there were more positive reasons for people doing things. I think there were. I think Clinton made the same mistake which is to use right wing rhetoric, because right wing rhetoric is the controlling rhetoric of the day. Rather than try and impose his own rhetoric of a different kind, a left wing rhetoric, in order to challenge what's going on he's just modified it to sound exactly the same. A lot of those Republicans got in because Democrats weren't voting. They were disappointed in Clinton for not being more radical.

That's the same as the Labour over here. Both parties have taken authoritarian views and thrown out dissenters.
Absolutely. I think it's a disaster to do that. But the accommodation of the right goes on, oddly never in proportion to the real support the right has. It happened in Nazi Germany, it happened in Italy, I mean exactly the same thing, the same thing is taking place. I don't mean exactly the same thing, but where the left began to accommodate the right at the drop of a hat.

There's something about it that makes people want to go along with it. I can't put my finger on it.
I think it's security because essentially it is reactionary. It's sort of saying if we all go back to simple values we'll all be OK, and we all want that, but know it isn't really like that. When Thatcher got in, I was, to some extent, prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt. Labour had too long at it, this had gone wrong, that had gone wrong, maybe she'll shake things up. But the trouble with right wing people who've been dreaming of power for years is they have agendas. Real, formalistic agendas and they just put them into place instantly. Nobody else has an agenda because they just knock down all the opposition. It's all out of proportion to the actual democratic process because they're actually geared up to do it. They know exactly who their enemies are, who they want to get, where they're going to go, while everybody else is still milling around thinking there's still an argument. Every time that's happened the right has managed, often with a proportionally smaller support, to take over the running of the country.

But I think that a lot of the appeal of the right wing is to bypass intellectual and economic arguments and just say don't worry I'll look after you.
I agree. But the weird thing is all this talk of individuality in American politics, which is essentially consumerism rather than political freedom. I mean this is very clearly that they are talking about, which is more power to the corporations. Consumer rights and interests take the place of political rights.

We have the right to choose which products we want to buy.
That's right. I mean I've been censored more in the United States than I've been censored anywhere. It's a peculiar country.

In what way have you been censored?
I've been censored.

I mean in your books, your articles-
In the books they cut huge chunks out. The whole of Byzantium Endures is a mess in the American edition, the stuff that they cut out of it. They cut out the anti-Semitism, which defeats the whole purpose of the book.

Is that PC censorship?
Yes, it's really peculiar how ready people feel to suppress stuff.

Why did you let it come out?
I was demoralised. I didn't have the time to cope with it. It got to the point when it was the last straw, you know. I didn't see what someone had done. I wouldn't let them get away with it in the second one, which they also tried. It's happened before. The Final Programme was censored, changed in the American edition.

I like the bit in Casablanca where you show your articles which were censored by the Daily Telegraph, that was nice.
To be fair they didn't do it after that. I complained immediately, because I like Nicholas Shakespeare and his work. He was editor of the arts page. He said that if he'd felt more certain of his job (he'd only been there a couple of weeks when he did it) he probably wouldn't have done it. He said he wasn't sure how right wing they were. He was actually trying to second guess the paper, while in actual fact the arts/books pages aren't like that at all.

But isn't that what you get in England at the moment, this sort of self-censorship. Everybody is so scared they're going to get censored they do it first.
It's not as bad here as it is in America. It could get that way.

Are they starving in Texas?
Yeah, they're starving all over the United States, the level of malnutrition . . . America has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world, well over that of Albania. It's not pretty what you see out there.

I thought it was just certain areas.
Well, we bought this house, went round the town, which all looked very nice. There are pros to Texas. They're nothing like as racist as they are in other places, in a very weird way. It's a sort of John Wayne thing but actually quite decent thinking: if a man hauls himself up, proves himself as good as you then he is as good as you. There's that sort of attitude which isn't bad. Nobody's been held down in Texas. Nobody thinks they got there through reverse discrimination, they got there by themselves. So there's a developing black middle class and you step over the border, it's almost instantaneous -

Where?
From Louisiana to Texas. You could be in totally different places as far as relationships between the races are concerned. Texas is much better. It's peculiar, it's got the Klan, I'm not saying it's a perfect place but when the Klan comes out to demonstrate as it did just a couple of weeks before we left, there's nine Klan members and about a thousand demonstrating against. So that's a fair sense of how things are.

That's like the French guy Le Pen, who the media had a thing about a few years ago. When he marched, there weren't many of them, a lecturer of mine was there but they didn't show the amount of people marching against him. You do get this impression of massive support for the right wing.
Yes, a friend of mine, Andrea Dworkin, comes for in enormous amounts of misrepresentation. She's perceived as being this kind of reactionary figure trying to censor everything and so on, when in fact she's never stood up for censorship and has never suggested censorship at all. And yet people react against her as if she's this monstrous regiment, they react as if she's this huge organisation and she's being destroyed because people think that. She can't get published in the States at all. She's being silenced and again that goes on in the States. In this it's political correctness on one side, plus the entire Left who've decided that she's some kind of reactionary force and in fact she's far more radical than any of the people that I know, far more progressive, far more humane and far less hating of other people than they are. It's very weird. There's whole books being produced to defeat her, when in fact there's nothing to defeat, she's just making an argument but they see it as being a threat.

But I think that's a classic case of the moment, where the media, especially the intellectual media, are picking somebody to vent all their fears on and it just happened that she got published and for a brief time was in the press, so she later became a target.
Yes that's right.

She's hard to label. I've read her stuff. She struck me as nothing like what I was expecting.
No. She's a rational person.

It didn't matter what I said about it, people insisted.
She told me a story the other day about a bloke who'd come to visit her. I know that this happens because it's happened to me too. He'd been recommended Intercourse by a friend of his who'd read it and liked it. The bloke who was recommending it spoke to him one day, after all this publicity. It's huge in the states, you get a tiny fraction of it here. The guy says, "Well of course Intercourse says that all sex is rape," and this bloke says, "What? You're the one that recommended it to me. You know that isn't true. Let's go through the book together and you can show me where it says that." It doesn't say it anywhere. Nowhere does it come close. It's just repeated as if it's true.

I've seen the same quotes both in the alternative media and mainstream.
Yes I'll tell you where a lot of it comes from, an awful lot of concerted effort. They've run huge articles in which they've taken her most crazed supporters, and science fiction fans are aware of this process, and represented them as if they were the mainstream. You'll always get some idiot saying "Death to all men, good old Andrea Dworkin." You can't control that. But they'll take that person as being representative of the people, who in my view are ordinary people like me who think she's got something worth saying. Good radical social analysis is how I perceive it, it's feminist but it's legitimate stuff. You don't have to bloody believe it. You can argue against it. You don't have to believe it represents the Anti-Christ.

I think it also plays on the laziness of journalists who'd much rather flick through an article than read the books.
Yes, I'm sure it's happened to other people.

That's something that you deal with in your books, this myth-making process that goes on in society, that can make anything true or believable. If enough people believe, I think you said this yourself, it does become true.
I think it does. It might not come true for that long. The Thousand Year Reich, thirteen years or whatever it was. But for a while, while there's nothing to oppose the notion of what's being said or done, it is effectively true.

It lasted thirteen years, but I suppose the effects outlasted that. Like the First World War, each world war destroyed what went before, the values, the way of life. Which brings us to your upbringing in the bombed London which seems to reappear in a lot of your work.
Yes. It's nostalgia as much as anything, it really is. I loved it. When you're a kid you don't realise you're about to die, the adults are keeping it from you, they're suffering all the strain. They're the ones getting the ulcers, you're knocking about in the ruins and your mother's trying not to sound too worried when she tells you not to play on that bombsite. Because it's life and death people have a stronger sense of real values, so you get a more freedom in a way, particularly if the odds are you're going to cop it the next day or your kid's going to cop it. You tend to be a little bit more thoughtful about how you act.

Hence the nostalgia of old soldiers as well. Living through the Blitz is a form of heightened life.
An awful lot of what I've written, say The Warlord of the Air series, it's almost wholly childhood buzzes of one form or another.

There's also your childhood reading of HG Wells.
I collected toy soldiers a lot. I collected huge numbers of them and would put them in odd groupings. All kids do that. What you've got is all your disparate groups, Knights in armour, Grenadier guards. The Eagle had a tremendous effect. In the first series of The Eagle, electricity had somehow been got rid of on Venus and there's an Earth invasion force set to invade the land of the Treem [Treens]. I can't quite remember why. But anyway, because there's no electricity nothing will work except gliders, so Venus is actually invaded by glider borne divisions of cavalry. So you've got the Mounties riding up ramps into these gliders to be parachuted down into the Venusian jungle, and then riding out to attack these aliens. Now that was a very powerful image.

Like in one of the Jerry Cornelius novels [The English Assassin], when you've got all these Scottish anarchists in the Highlands and they've got dirigibles. It's a wonderful mixture of historical fact, with a sense of . . . play . . .
Romance, really. It's a technological romance. Essentially it's a nineteenth/twentieth century engineering romance, really nice methods of travel of various kinds.

Which comes out in Blood with the steam boat and the flying boat. What is it about travel that sets you off? These old modes of transport?
I just like travelling. I love travelling. I hate flying, jet flying, I'm scared of it. Every time I land I think I've got another lease of life. I really get on knowing I've had it. I'm just reconciled to instant death. But put me in anything else, like an old seaplane which is rattling and everything is falling off it, and I'm perfectly happy.

In Blood, Von Bek's flying boat is kitted out like Captain Nemo's Nautilus, all wonderfully ornate, gaudy and incredibly comfortable-
Yes. Somehow the economics of those days managed to make it possible, I'm not quite sure what's gone wrong really. Linda gave me a birthday treat one time, took me to Cardington, where the airships were built and the little airships still are. We went up in one of those and it was tremendous, a marvellous little airship. It's a great shame - Alan Bond, the Australian millionaire underwrote it, so they stopped selling shares and relied on Bond to basically it. Bond went bankrupt and that's why we don't have a British airship anymore. Great shame.

Your PR flyer says that Blood's the first of three books, which are an "accumulation of ideas and themes of your work since 1961".
Yes. I noticed that too! In a sense it's legitimate to put it there. Caroline would have written the copy. I haven't actually seen the flyer but there have been questions. It is fairly true, I just didn't realise that was going to be emphasised. And it's an attempt to produce a resolution to all the various ideas that have gone through The Eternal Champion [series] and also to emphasise the metaphorical aspects.

That comes over very strongly. In fact after reading Blood, I felt almost as if I'd been bombarded with theory. The story seemed to take second place and your allegories had taken the main stage.
Well, it's a possibility, I don't know. Most people who've read it, read it two or three times which is unusual and they find it works differently every time. I didn't think I was pushing theory that much but you could be right.

It's just that, I mean starting with the drilling of the Ultraverse and the energy comes from colour, the big chaos fault, which struck me as a great metaphor for post-modern theory. You were taking all your references from your own work.
And from chaos theory which is the other thing. Chaos theory is a distinct help in that, it provides a logic system which means you can develop fiction more readily. The more tools you've got the more you can structure something. Chaos theory has helped me enormously with that, it's very handy for swift structuring of non-linear structuring.

The melting of the two narratives reminded me of William Burroughs in Cities of the Red Night, where he melts the very distinct narratives into one.
The weird thing is the Warwick Colvin episodes that run through it. People keep calling them space opera. I haven't read much space opera so it may be true, I don't know. It wasn't intended to be. I'd just gone for the joy of fractals as it were, and the notion of superwoven carbon creating a wall around the universe. I just liked that.

Were you also recycling your earlier Renark of the Rim?
That's right. I have actually rewritten that, there is a resemblance. There's two things I was trying to do -

There's a lot more irony there now, an incredible amount of irony in Blood.
That's true. What I'm trying to do is, essentially I've got characters now that I can move in and out of realistic or fantastic fiction. What I want are people/characters that can feel easy in either situation and who will interact as social fiction or interact within a completely fantastic fiction. Fabulous Harbours, which is a story sequence, not really a novel, the sequel to Blood, tends to do that too.

That just adds to it.
After the last Pyat book, I was working on a big book called Sporting Club Square which I've already introduced in Lunching with the Anti-Christ and other places. Sporting Club Square is Mother London plus Gloriana plus -

That's something I was going to ask. Gloriana is probably my favourite novel. You rewrote that didn't you?
I rewrote one chapter. A number of women suggested it provided a rationale for rape. I just didn't want to have it in there. The allegory had to remain the same, I just had to change the scene so it didn't justify rape. It didn't need an awful lot. I kept everything running in the same direction. I just didn't say something I didn't need to say.

Anyway, Sporting Club Square. I'm already moving towards that and a lot of the characters who are in these stories will be in that. I'm also working on War Amongst the Angels [third in the trilogy begun with Blood and continued with Fabulous Harbours] but that might well not have much of a fantastic element. It will have the same characters and refer to the same conflict as Blood, but it might be relatively ordinary people interacting in an ordinary way. It might not - it depends how it goes.

Are these carefully written and rewritten books? Or pot boilers?
No, I'm not doing that any more. Basically what's happening is I can only write so much of a Pyat book before I go nuts.

I can only read so much-
Exactly, it's true. I would say it's the same for reading them. Now I'm actually dealing with Hitler and Mussolini, I'd held off researching them closely until these last couple of years. When I started doing it, it overwhelmed me. I was so sickened and horrified by - What you're doing, you turn people like Hitler and Mussolini into comic figures and distance them, it's the only way any human being can rationally continue when we've got monsters of that size. You turn them into something you can deal with. When you actually start dealing with their ordinary, deeply ordinary sentimental private lives in which they are just crap. I mean they're just the crappiest sort of people you could not wish to meet, but fairly ordinary. They're not stupid but not that bright. They've got this hideous ambition and then you've got something like, and this is almost like a telling point to me: Mussolini, quite a comic figure, you know, you don't think he was quite as bad a Hitler because he didn't do so much, and then you read that Mussolini, because he was feeling agreeable towards Hitler who he loved dearly - and Hitler found him rather embarrassing, this Eye-tie mate of his who was a bit emotional - in order to show how much he loved Hitler, you know, a gesture of real friendship, mate to mate, he gave Hitler all the Italian Jews. He wasn't asked to.

But isn't that the real horror of all this, that one person's socially malfunctioning personality can mobilise three million people or whatever.
Yeah, that's how easy it is. That's how frightening it is too, that's the other thing that becomes clear to you, it could happen any day. It could very readily happen. It could come from somewhere we weren't quite ready for. But essentially the break-up of a left-wing ethic, a real idea of how things should be and a way of behaving, which you get usually when the Left has had a lot of power, is part of the problem in the States now. There's huge civil rights legislation, they put all sorts of things in place but they didn't fund it so the whole thing disappoints, so the Right fills this vacuum.

Left-wing governments also have the tendency to put in massive bureaucracy that soaks up all the money.
That's true, and the Right does that too. It's the subject matter, in effect you're saying there but for the grace of God - I wouldn't have wanted to have made any of those moral decisions. I don't know how we would have behaved in those circumstances, where you're terrified out of your mind. You know what it's like just on the tube and somebody starts yelling at you, that's bad enough. While here these are the people who've got all the authority as well, there isn't anybody else. I don't blame people for behaving how they did but it does colour your view of human nature horribly, so you lose a lot of the things that keep you going, the normal ideals and optimism that would keep you functioning, avoiding the void as it were. But you can't avoid the void, that sounds terrible, but your logic takes you inextricably towards something which is unbelievable, almost impossible to contain inside your own head; people couldn't at the time. I was just seeing last week the Liberation programme and people didn't want to know that could happen. And these people (Allied troops) were sort of forced to see it, they didn't have any choice and they were still trying to believe it wasn't true, wanting someone to tell them that this was an isolated case.

I'll do a bit of a Pyat, reach a point where I can't go on and stay sane. It's pretty evident because I start being a righteous bastard to live with. I'm not a naturally suspicious or paranoid person but I do get awful. Anything Linda says I suspect, anything anybody says I suspect. So what I've been doing is writing bits of Pyat and then writing bits of Blood. Normally I wouldn't do that quite so much. I would probably write bits of Pyat and then Blood and then another bit of Pyat, as I did with Revenge of the Rose. But it also means you're geared up to a high literary level of expectation, so the fantasy novel is going to have an awful lot of the same complex language.

Certainly, I thought the last two Elric novels that I read, Fortress of the Pearl and Revenge of the Rose, were literary-
One of the things that I said on the radio yesterday is that if you think of all the different meanings of the word 'Blood', that's what the book is about; it's about machismo, race and notions of honour, and that all is in a sense a spin off from Pyat. It's not the same thing not the same expression of it but a lot of the underlying stuff is the same.

In Blood, there's virtual reality games and the notion of a real character taking the place of a virtual character. The confusion of one for the other, both are equally real. Do you ever feel that you're identified with your characters more than yourself?
No I don't think I get much of that, it doesn't last very long because I'm who I am. If I was more into that then that would probably happen. The good thing is, unless they're really nuts, few people do make that sort of mistake. It is possible. I was doing a Hawkwind gig and I was sitting in the usual foul dressing room, no bigger than this [this interview took place in a small office in the basement of the New Oxford Street Forbidden Planet; five people were present] but with three hundred people in it. There's some Scottish roadie saying "You can't come in!" sort of stuff. And then there's this, "Hello Mike, got a lady here for you." And there's this young little thing, a lovely little thing, I wouldn't . . . like me own daughter. She sort of rushes in and she's got some poems she wants to give me but she says, "You're Hawkmoon aren't you?" And here I am, I'm stinking, fat and horrible. I said, "What do you think?" And she said, "Oh yes, you are." I thought there's the power of the imagination over reality for you. So yes I am interested in that, partly I think you get interested because it's self-involvement. I think the same sort of things happened with Philip Dick because you're always questioning that idea of what you can invent -

Yeah, the games the gamblers play (in Blood) read more like your ideas about writing.
Yes that's exactly what they are. It's like D & D or a good complicated interactive game. They're essentially a lot more to do with the creative process than an old fashioned arcade game. Not that I play them.

Lots of rulebooks. They strike me as very silly.
Well, most of them are very primitive. I'm working with a games company now who did Wing Commander Three, which is a live action, interactive game. It's still basically a flying and knocking out targets sort of game, except it introduces relationships. Your ability to fly these planes has to do with your relationship with your co-pilot or what's been going on that day. For me it's enough to interest me in doing one. Because structure is so necessary to those things it's very easy to produce them. The people who do this game are called Origins. They're actually very moral and interesting. They're all very young, very rich and all very good at doing those things, but as they mature, their ambitions mature. The technology improves too so you can do a lot more with it.

So what do you work on now? A word-processor?
No. I've got a fountain pen and a notebook. Then I've got an IBM typewriter which is the finest typewriter to be made. It is, it's the last of the actual mechanical typewriters to be made.

But you don't do a lot of rewriting do you?
Yes, I do. Nowadays I do an enormous amount of revision. Not necessarily massive rewriting of particular pages. Something like Blood has gone through far more drafts than, well I didn't rewrite the Elric books admittedly -

Revenge of the Rose?
Yeah, I didn't rewrite The Revenge of the Rose.

I was doing an interview with Lawrence James-
Oh yes.

He was telling me about the myths that surrounded your speed of writing.
They're not myths.

Not untruths, but they become myths that everybody knows, instant recall sort of thing. He was telling me about a time when you were typing so fast that the guy who was arranging the sheets on the floor couldn't keep up.
Hang on. Lang Jones.

That's him.
Yes, he reminded me of that himself when he came to a signing I did. I'd forgotten that. This only happened once, it was sometime in the night and it took me two days, whereas every other book took me three days. This is a short book.

One thing I wanted to ask, I read that you said you wanted to get everything sorted out by the time you were thirty, to get yourself set up and your writing sorted out.
I wanted myself sorted out. Breakfast in the Ruins is a perfect example. I deliberately set myself to face my demons in Breakfast in The Ruins and look at certain realities and certain unsolvable realities, so the What would you do? section in that, which I actually borrowed from a set of things I used to write for Boy's World, whenever it was, are impossible situations, you haven't got any choice. Which is true for a lot of us. It's that sense of mortality in a way, which is why I said I died of lung cancer and all that, but it's actually admitting that mortality which you then start to think about, we all do it some time. Also I knew, I've said this before, I was fuelled by certain demons and I'd seen the example in particular in Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon. Both extremely talented writers but they didn't really develop after thirty-four. There's later work but it's not what is considered mature work. I decided I had to look at what was making me write.

The other thing in Blood is your emphasis on the organic nature of the swamp, against the machine/Cyberpunk technology.
It's the location really, based on my own actual descriptions of the swamps and things that I'd experienced. The other thing is, I'm even doing this with the game I'm producing, you find coherent kinds of images out of a general pool. They tend to be of a similar kind, that's what gives a lot of coherence to a fantasy. They're not immediately the same themes, but you can do little goes on twins for instance, or metal turning into flesh, so you have all these things running through as consistent themes, which I think fantasy should have.

Any novel?
Oh yeah, absolutely.