Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 (38 page)

In 2008 the Grand Master Award was given to Michael Moorcock, a writer equally adept at creating marvelous worlds in science fiction, fantasy, and mainstream. As editor of the controversial British magazine
New Worlds
from May 1964 until March 1971 062-39333_ch01_4P.indd 271 ½3/09 1:19:39 AM and then again from 1976 to 1996 he was instrumental in the development of the science fiction “New Wave” movement in the UK and the United States.

Kim Newman, a compatriot of Moorcock’s and an admirer of his fiction, provides a tribute.

I
t’s a common complaint that too many favorite writers don’t write enough to satisfy a committed fan. You can swallow all of Jane Austen, John Franklin Bardin, or Dashiell Hammett inside a week. However, others—on the pattern of Dickens or Dumas—produce quality work by the ream, filling shelves with so many books that even a true devotee can store up treats for the future. Michael Moorcock falls into the latter category—reading his work makes for a lifetime relationship, with always more books to come, more branches of the saga awaiting discovery, more fiendishly clever cross-references to be discerned.

I still haven’t got round to seriously tackling the Elric series, which for many of my generation were the major Moorcocks, but I have them on the to-be-read shelf, and eagerly anticipate the gap opening in my schedule when I can take the plunge—rather in the way that a schoolboy sometimes hopes for a bout of flu because a few days in bed with a stack of comics is preferable to dreary afternoons of double geography. In the 1970s, I read and reread
The Warlord of the Air
and
The Land Leviathan
with the passionate delight that comes from discovering books that seem to be written expressly for you (of course, a feeling shared by a large readership); followed the braided, not-quite-a-series Cornelius Chronicles; was awakened to the possibilities of not only the fantastic but the historical by books like
Behold the Man
,
Gloriana
, and the
Dancers at the End of Time
sequence. Later, Moorcock embarked on ambitious epics of the twentieth century, in the linked 062-39333_ch01_4P.indd 273 ½3/09 1:19:40 AM novels
Mother London
and
King of the City
and the Pyat quartet—but has not abandoned the playful, charming, spiky pulp fantasies of
The Metatemporal Detective
.

What first caught my attention in Moorcock’s work—and, shamefully, the first I came to it was
The Final Program
, which I read after seeing the film version he disowned—was the sense that he was writing about a world I inhabited. As an English child in the 1960s, born just about the time Moorcock began writing professionally, I was aware of both the traditions that came from the Empire and the War (a source of mixed pride and revulsion) and the explosion of a multicolored counterculture that made British pop music, fashion, television, and film exciting. Moorcock has a rare sense of the wondrousness and absurdity of the English pop cultural landscape (it’s no coincidence he novelized
The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle
), as well as an appreciation of British traditions (sometimes hideous, sometimes wonderful), which sidesteps the genre of American pulp in interesting ways (even Moorcock’s occasional westerns are influenced by those books and comics turned out by suburban British hacks who never ventured west of Bournemouth while dreaming of the range). Moorcock is the heir of not merely Charles Dickens, H. G. Wells, and H. Rider Haggard, but of lesser-remarked British publishing phenomena like long-serving detective Sexton Blake (with whom Moorcock has a long and complex relationship), C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne (who wrote the Captain Kettle stories in the
Strand Magazine
), and George Griffith (author of
Angel of the Revolution
).

Cultural wars were fought inside and outside the science fiction field (and the House of Commons) around Moorcock’s editorship of
New Worlds
magazine and rankles still run deep in some quarters, but whole swaths of achievement in an interlinked but disparate selection of literary endeavors would literally not have been possible without the enthusiasms, energy, and quixotic determination of Michael Moorcock. He has always been a generous, bountiful creator, producing so much work personally but also inspiring and boosting other writers (he is a great rescuer of reputations) as tirelessly as he lambastes and ridicules those he feels represent a deadening, baneful influence (he is also a great foe of humbug and cant). His anthologies of forgotten, pre-Gernsback British science fiction (
England Invaded
,
Before Armageddon
) are as important as Hugh Greene’s
The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
in preserving a rich literary landscape that was in danger of seeming like a monoculture—not least for rescuing Saki’s masterly novel
When William Came
from obscurity.

Others have written in disparate genres, and managed to straddle popular culture (i.e., science fiction and fantasy) and literary fiction (i.e., taken seriously and given prizes that don’t look like spaceships), but Moorcock invented the canny notion—later appropriated by Stephen King, Philip José Farmer, and others (I plead guilty)—of tying together everything he writes into what the other Mike in the
New Worlds
gang (M. John Harrison) called a “meta-series.” On a commercial level, and the author who dedicated
The Steel Tsar
to his creditors for making its writing necessary certainly understands the commercial realities of a life of letters, this encourages the readers who like one of the books to track down everything Moorcock has ever written as if they were jigsaw pieces that have to be bought individually. But there’s also a true egalitarianism to the approach that gives a “straight” (more properly, otherly crooked) novel like
Mother London
the engaging, stimulating, detailed readability of the best genre fiction while allowing for seriousness of intent, wryly self-deprecating humor, and graceful prose even in the most rapidly written and disposably published fantasy paperback. Graham Greene divided his work into “novels” and “entertainments”—it’s a fair bet you’ll derive more from the latter than the former these days—but Moorcock has never been so dismissive of his work or his readers, and you’d need a mosaic or crazy-paving to map out the separate subsets and variant approaches of everything he’s ever written. You’d be best advised just to read it all, and sort it out later.

“THE PLEASURE GARDEN OF FELIPE SAGITTARIUS
”

Reality, I suggested, might be merely what each one
of us says it is. Does that idea make you feel lonely, Mr.
Cornelius?

LOBKOWITZ
Recollected Dialogues

 

 

T
he air was still and warm, the sun bright, and the sky blue above the ruins of Berlin as I clambered over piles of weed-covered brick and broken concrete on my way to investigate the murder of an unknown man in the garden of Police Chief Bismarck.

My name is Sam Begg, Metatemporal Investigator, and this job was going to be a tough one, I knew.

Don’t ask me the location or the date. I never bother to find out things like that. They only confuse me. With me it’s instinct, win or lose.

They’d given me all the information there was. The dead man had already had an autopsy. Nothing unusual about him except that he had paper disposable lungs. That pinned him down a little. The only place I knew of where they still used paper lungs was Rome. What was a Roman doing in Berlin? Why was he murdered in Police Chief Bismarck’s garden? He’d been strangled, that I’d been told. It wasn’t hard to strangle a man with paper lungs; it didn’t take long. But who and why were harder questions to answer right then.

It was a long way across the ruins to Bismarck’s place. Rubble stretched in all directions, and only here and there could you see a landmark—what was left of the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, the Brechtsmuseum, and a few other places like that.

I stopped to lean on the only remaining wall of a house, took off my jacket and loosened my tie, wiped my forehead and neck with my handkerchief, and lit a cheroot. The wall gave me some shade and I felt a little cooler by the time I was ready to get going again.

As I mounted a big heap of brick on which a lot of blue weeds grew I saw the Bismarck place ahead. Built of heavy, black-veined marble, in the kind of Valhalla/Olympus mixture they went in for, it was fronted by a smooth, green lawn and backed by a garden surrounded by such a high wall I only glimpsed the leaves of some of the foliage even though I was looking down on the place. The thick Grecian columns flanking the porch were topped by a baroque facade covered in bas-reliefs showing hairy men in horned helmets killing dragons and one another apparently indiscriminately.

I picked my way down to the lawn and walked across it, then up some steps until I reached the front door. It was big and heavy, bronze I guessed, with more bas-reliefs, this time of clean-shaven characters in ornate and complicated armour with two-handed swords and riding horses. Some had lances and axes. I pulled the bell and waited.

I had plenty of time to study the pictures before one of the doors swung open and an old man in a semi-military suit, holding himself straight by an effort, raised a white eyebrow at me.

I told him my name, and he let me in to a cool, dark hall full of the same kinds of armour the men outside had been wearing. He opened a door on the right and told me to wait. The room was all iron and leather—weapons on the walls and hide-covered furniture on the carpet. Thick velvet curtains were drawn back from the window, and I stood looking out over the quiet ruins, smoked another stick, popped the butt in a green pot, and put my jacket back on.

The old man came in again and I followed him out of that room, along the hall, up one flight of the wide stairs, and into a huge, less cluttered room where I found the guy I’d come to see.

He stood in the middle of the carpet. He was wearing a heavily ornamented helmet with a spike on the top, a deep blue uniform covered in badges, gold and black epaulettes, shiny jack-boots, and steel spurs. He looked about seventy and very tough. He had bushy grey eyebrows and a big, carefully combed moustache. As I came in he grunted and put one arm into a horizontal position, pointing at me.

“Herr Begg. I am Otto von Bismarck, Chief of Berlin’s police.”

I shook the hand. Actually it shook me, all over.

“Quite a turn up,” I said. “A murder in the garden of the man who’s supposed to prevent murders.”

His face must have been paralyzed or something because it didn’t move except when he spoke, and even then it didn’t move much.

“Quite so,” he said. “We were reluctant to call you in, of course. But I think this is your speciality. Devilish work.”