Modem Times 2.0 - Michael Moorcock [34]
NOTES
1. South African comic actor known mainly for playing a London cockney.
2. But can’t the same be said of Elizabeth Bennet?
“GET THE MUSIC RIGHT”
MICHAEL MOORCOCK INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON
Why Texas?
I was on the run. Looking for some fresh mythology.
You have played a central role in science fiction since the editorship of New Worlds magazine in the 1960s. How has that role changed from then to now?
I suppose I was more of a gadfly in those days where SF was concerned. I’d read almost none of the so-called “Golden Age” (1950s) SF. I bought a long run of Astounding when I became editor of New Worlds because I thought I ought to look at it, and found most of it dull and unreadable. This was also the experience of J. G. Ballard and others who had expected far more of American SF than it actually delivered (apart from a relatively small amount found mostly in Galaxy).
American 1960s “New Wave” was about improving the quality of SF, but we Brits were less interested in that than we were in using SF methodology to look at the contemporary world. SF magazines were the only ones that liked our ideas, but we had to provide rationalizations to those stories, more or less. Explication dulled down the vision.
Fritz Leiber, whom I greatly admired, told me that he and several of his contemporaries like Bloch and Kuttner had thesame problem in their day. So you’d write, say, an absurdist story but you could only sell it if you added: “On Mars …” or “In the future …” and then stuck in a boring rationalization.
Anyway, we could only really publish in the SF magazines.
But we also felt contemporary fiction was anaemic and had lost the momentum modernism had given it. Most fiction we saw had no way it could usefully confront modern concerns— the H-bomb, computers, engineering and communications advances, space travel—not to mention changing social conventions and consequently language, politics, warfare, the altered psyche in the face of so much novelty of experience.
Almost all the literary fiction we read was actually retrospective (Durrell, Heller, Roth, or Bellow) or only pretending to tackle contemporary issues in a novel way (Selby, B. S. Johnson, the Beats, and others who saw themselves as the most interesting subject matter).
The reason we liked William Burroughs (Naked Lunch) was because his language focused on modern times and drew much of its vitality from modern idiom. We were inspired by him and Borges rather than influenced by them.
Many of our heroes (French existentialists, nouvelle vague movies) read SF and the Galaxy writers in particular (Bester, Dick, Sheckley, Pohl and Kornbluth, and, of course, Bradbury). In the 1950s there was far more acceptance of American SF in European intellectual circles than in the United States itself, where that retrospective tone spells “literature” to the New Yorker reader and in my view is the bane of American fiction, especially when linked to regionalism/provincialism.
Emerging from World War II into Austerity Britain, it was easy for us to see 1984 all around us. The three New Worlds writers generally linked in those days (and I was even then more writer than editor) were myself, Ballard, and Brian Aldiss. I’d come out of the London Blitz, Ballard from the Japanese civilian prison camps, and Aldiss from the war in Malaya, and we all had reason to welcome the A-bomb, perceiving it with far more ambiguity than most.
Post-1946 modernity was a bit on the grim side, but we felt that as writers we’d been given an amazing box of tools, an array of subjects never before available to literature, and we used those tools and subjects in ways that tended to celebrate postwar experience rather than denigrate it.
Our tastes in SF were often different. Brian liked Astounding, while I just couldn’t read