Modem Times 2.0 (12 page)

I do love the stage. I’d have been a performer if I hadn’t been a writer. I love reading and signing sessions too. I like people. A solo reading is harder work than playing in a band because in a band you have your mates to cover your fluffs.

But when I’m writing, I want the nearest thing to a monk’s cell as possible. A friend once phoned when I was in the middle of a paragraph and I picked up the phone because I thought it might be Linda. “Bugger off!” I told him. “That’s no way to speak to a friend,” he said. “You can’t be a friend,” I said. “A friend wouldn’t be phoning me while I’m working.”

I hate people when I’m writing.

There is a subtheme of incest that runs through the JC (Jerry Cornelius) books. He is in love with his sister (before he kills her), and the deliciously strange Jherek Carnelian is in a romantic relationship with his mom. What gives?

Nothing much. I never had any siblings. Wish fulfilment? I probably just like the romantic/decadent flavour. Jerry also resurrects his sister, don’t forget.

The critic Lorna Sage once said that I had too many “sleeping sisters” in my work (I think she was reviewing
Mother
London
, which has a major female character asleep and dreaming through much of the book) and suggested that I preferred passive women.

A canard. All my women friends are far from passive. Hilary, my first wife, was by no means passive; neither is Linda, far from it; and my female friends like Angela Carter, Andrea Dworkin, and others, are/were all pretty aggressive/active.

The sleeping sister could be a holdover from the screamer-who-needs-rescuing convention of popular fiction.

Besides Elric and Corum, the Eternal Champions, and Cornelius, who seems to be a more high-tech version of the same, there is also Pyat, the cranky Russky of
Byzantium.
How does he fit into your pantheon—or does he?

Cornelius does what fantasy heroes can’t do easily. I wanted him to confront contemporary stuff. He’s far more knowing than standard fantasy heroes. I never regarded him as an SF character, let alone fantasy. The books were never published as fantasy or genre at all in England, but rather as straight “experimental” novels (I preferred to call them unconventional). I used Jerry to look at modern life.

Pyat was designed, or created if you will, for a very different purpose, though he originally appeared as a relatively minor character in the Cornelius quartet. I had felt compelled for some time to confront the Nazi Holocaust full-on (I have my share of survival guilt) and Pyat turned out to be the right guy for the job.

Pyat believes in systems. He sees society as a “correctable” machine. He is a modern man, if you like, in search of a soul. He represents the twentieth century’s belief that society is a machine, which only needs the right engineering approach to make life perfect. In that sense his story riffs off “hard” SF of the kind you used to find in lots of pre-1940s visionary fiction. Wells grew increasingly to write this kind of utopian fantasy, and of course it is in Gernsback and all kinds of American stuff. Not only was society a machine that would respond to the rightengineering—humankind itself was perfectible through the kind of genetic theories to be found in American and European thinking between the two world wars. Hitler based a lot of his “reasoning” on theories prevalent in the United States in particular, just as he based many of his racial laws on ideas first put into practice in America. Stalin had similar ideas and was also inspired by Hitler’s methods. Mussolini, too, thought society and human individuals could be improved just as we improved planes, cars, and trains to go faster, be safer, not to mention more comfortable.

Hell, even Woody Guthrie sang about the power of electricity to improve our lives. The Grand Coulee Dam. Anarchists, too, subscribed to a slightly different and perhaps more humane vision of human society with the “right” systems in place.

It’s against all this that Pyat is playing—as well as his terror, originally infecting him as a Jew in the Ukraine. (I’ve written more about the conception of Pyat in
The Daily Telegraph
, which can be found online at my website, Moorcock’s Miscellany, in the Q&A section under published writing, or at the
Telegraph
site under Books: “A Million Betrayals.”) Pyat was written from a sense of payback, of duty, a compulsion to use my talent to examine what was the single greatest crime of the twentieth century and see how it was allowed to come about.

Pyat claims to be many things that he isn’t—an Aryan, an engineering genius, and so on. He’s an unreliable narrator in a carefully reconstructed version of our own world. Cornelius is not unreliable in that sense (and neither are Elric and Co.) and readers are only invited to examine his actions from their own perspective of events.

It’s an ongoing theme, if you like: I’m always asking if Romance is some specific kind of lie.

Your career spans the gap between the typewriter and the word processor. At what point did you make the switch? What was that like?

I was using a Selectric II for years. I still have it. I still have an Imperial 50/60 produced during World War II and a Smith

Corona portable (should electricity fail). All my work from the age of nine was done on the Imperial.

Soon after I got to Texas in 1994, I was asked by ORIGIN, a game company, to write an original game that could also be a movie and a book. I wasn’t sure of the scheme, but I liked the challenge.

At one point they asked me what kind of computer I was using. I told them I didn’t have one. At this, an embarrassed silence fell across the room. At last the guy running the firm cleared his throat and asked, “Would you mind if we got you one?”

“You can get me one,” I said, “but I can’t say I’d use it.”

So it duly arrived and within twenty-four hours, I’d taken to it like a duck to water. They were delighted. I wrote my first story on the computer within two days of getting it (a Cornelius short). They’d gotten me the top of the line, of course, and asked me what I thought of it. I said it was like a non-driver being given a Rolls-Royce and then being asked what he thought of it.

Mandelbrot supplied me with a map of my brain. Word supplied me with new applications.

What’s your relationship to the very lively Austin music scene? Who do you hang out with in Texas? Writers? Rednecks? Ex-prezzes? Out-of-work musicians?

A few of my friends are musicians. Most of the people I know here I met through local politics and suchlike. Leftist activists in Texas really know the score. One of my best friends, Jewell Hodges, is ninety-two and has been involved in civil rights most of her life. She started life working in fields at the age of twelve, shoving cotton into sacks longer than she was tall.

Almost as soon as we got here, Linda was co-opted onto the local Family Crisis Centre board, and with another woman set about transforming it, with accommodation for threatened spouses and children, outreach, education, and so on; and I supported her in that, being an active pro-feminist.

We also got involved with the local food pantry, which Jewell was running when we got here. She asked me how we fedour hungry poor in the UK. I thought for a bit until I realized that we didn’t actually have poverty in the UK of the kind she was battling in Texas.

Texas has no income tax and you feel obliged to involve yourself in activities which, as a European, you believe should be supported by taxes. So I self-tithe to balance that out. I know a few others who do.

Most of my musician friends in Austin start their gigs too late for an old man like me who has a long drive home afterwards! I did perform once or twice with pals in Austin.

I know a few writers—Howard Waldrop, for instance— whom I get on with. Though I have a few friends who are writers, I don’t hang out with them much. It was the same in the UK and in France. I tend to be very loyal to my friends and maybe for that reason I don’t have many close friends. But they’re mostly from different walks of life. I enjoy company but am essentially a loner.

Do you ever go back and loot your works for ideas? Do you read your early stuff at all?

Very rarely. I almost never reread a book. I riff off the fundamental ideas underlying my books—multiverse, eternal champions, context defining characters, and so on. In the old days I’d write one draft in three days and have a friend read it for typos, possible inconsistencies, and I’ve never reread those. I’ve made a few revisions when readers point out plot errors or loopy inconsistencies, of course. A few of those early fantasies got to the bookstores without
anyone
having read them—me, editors, publicists.

I tend to have a good memory for books I’ve done, as if they were memories of my real life, though; so when it comes to sequels I seem to be able to take up a sequel pretty much where I left off. I have a terrible memory yet seem to remember books pretty easily.

Reading my own work is a fast cure for insomnia. Linda will confirm this. When I can’t sleep, I go to get something byme and am dozing within a minute or two. This makes proofreading very hard.

If you were casting a Cornelius movie, who would play Jerry? Did you know he’s from my hometown?

You’re from Notting Hill? Not sure who—but Tilda Swinton is still my favourite choice. Someone did a Photoshop of her as Elric, which also worked very well. That’s in the Image Gallery on my site, I think.

I was thinking about Johnny Depp
.

Him too. But he’s too busy playing pirate these days.

What kind of car do you drive? (I ask this of everyone.) Did you have a car in the Old Country?

We have an old Lexus SUV, which we bought new and cheap when my leg needed more room because of the wound, and that was about the only car that would take me.

I briefly owned a beautiful Citroën classic convertible with running boards and stuff. In the 1970s, I had a massive Nash (that’s what I conquered the Pennine Way in), which in England was like driving a bus. I bought it because it could take a load of children and a load of band members.

But after our Fiat, we mostly had a Honda Civic in the UK. Linda made me stop driving when she discovered I didn’t have a license. I’m useless at tests and exams. So although the driving instructor said all I needed were a couple of lessons and I’d sail through, I got worse and worse as we went along and gave it up as a lost cause.

Texas is littered with Lost Causes.

We mostly used public transport in London and we still use mostly public transport in France and the rest of Europe. I’m still an advocate for good public systems. One of my reasons formoving to Texas was because the then Democratic state governor wanted to bring a TGV to Texas and a light rail system for Austin.

I was
very
disappointed when Bush became governor.

You floated an interesting concept in
Gloriana
when you said that modern art’s relentless demand for novelty made bad artists worse, but good artists better. How does that work?

I don’t remember writing that! I can see how it might work, though. I think there are plenty of good journeyman painters and scriveners whose talents are wasted by attempted novelty. I was probably thinking of what happened on
New Worlds
when perfectly good run-of-the-mill writers tried to produce what they thought were New Wave stories and came up with crap, whereas good writers who were encouraged to expand (Disch, Aldiss, Ballard) produced superb stuff.

Do you regard the fact that SF is still a commercially viable literature a help or a hindrance?

It doesn’t matter a lot. I liked it better before publishers didn’t know what sold. There was a good patch that lasted into the 1980s even, when publishers were so uncertain about what the public liked that they were willing to give almost anything a go. By the 1990s, they’d worked out what sold and what didn’t, and you saw a slowing down of interesting offbeat material and a tendency for categories and sub-categories of generic stuff to become the norm.

I think it gets harder and harder to sell new stuff—stuff that breaks conventions —because now publishers and booksellers “know the market” and know what will sell (i.e., what
did
sell). So the chances of selling an offbeat novel masquerading in a commercial form get slimmer all the time.

I liked SF precisely for that potential for masquerade— avant-garde pretending to be space opera …

Ever get through
The Faerie Queene? Ulysses?

Yes.
Gloriana
riffed off
The Faerie Queene. Ulysses
is best enjoyed when read aloud, as is Proust. But if you can read
Pamela
by Richardson or
One of Our Conquerors
by Meredith, you can probably read anything. It’s books like
Dune
or
Lord of the Rings
that I find almost unreadable.

You are one of SF’s most “literary” writers, and at the same time a militant populist in literature, opposed to high-canon thinking. How do you reconcile those roles?

By demonstration.

An innovative artist must create his own audience as he goes. Do you see yourself as an educator or an entertainer? (“Both” is a cheat.)

Both. I have been both most of my life. I’ve had magazines in which I could present arguments, publish examples. I used to say that the whole
New Worlds
thing was designed to create an audience for the kind of stuff that Ballard, myself, and others wanted to write.

I think we did that.

My entertainments always contain some sort of confrontational elements; my more confrontational stories have large elements of comedy in particular, and I’d say that was reasonably entertaining.

What do you think of McEwan? Austen? Wells?

McEwan, who is vaguely interesting for his subject matter, tends to dodge the issues like much middlebrow fiction and can be a bloody awful writer. As I can be. Austen’s a joy.

Wells is brilliant, often irritating. I have pretty much an entire collection of Wells, most of them firsts and in the originalmagazines from
The Time Machine
on. I have all of Austen in a nice edition. I have no McEwan, Amis
(fils
or
père)
, and no Rushdie. I have all of Elizabeth Bowen, Angus Wilson, Colette, and plenty of Elizabeth Taylor, Rose MacAulay, and lots of Edwardian realists; all of Meredith, Eliot, Dickens; all of Stevenson, Conrad, lots of Ford Maddox Ford, Jack London, Howells, Harte, Twain, California writers who could listen to the eloquence of the streets; a fair amount of Saul Bellow, and a bunch of contemporary writers. Today’s English pantheon is pretty miserable in comparison.