• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 140 0

it. Ballard liked Bradbury. I preferred good pulp like Brackett and Bester. Richard Hamilton, the pop artist, thought all three of us were damaging the kind of stuff he liked. He’d used Robby the Robot at his first important exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery.

I couldn’t continue today to have the role I had then, because what we hoped would happen has happened. SF methods and subjects are now incorporated into modern fiction in order to deal with modern matters. Nostalgia is largely the preserve of fantasy and so-called Steampunk. (I suggested in a recent review that it really should be called Steam Opera since it has so many lords and ladies in it.)

Anyway: Then my role was to attack the old and celebrate the new. Now my role is to be careful not to discourage new writers. In my old age I carry a burden, if you like, of gravitas! This makes me a kinder critic.

An Elric film has been in the works (or not) for years. What’s the current status? Any other Hollywood interest?

The Weitz brothers and Universal had Elric under option for some time, but I have no idea what’s happening now. Michael Bassett, the English director who made Solomon Kane, is now interested. I’ve corresponded with him a bit, but to be honest, I don’t much care about movies and tend to show little interest when I’m approached. I suspect Bassett would be a good choice, though.

You started out writing for comics, then dropped it until the mid-1990s (and Multiverse). Do you still like the form? Why?

I wrote a lot of commercial comics for Fleetway as a kid, but by the 1960s I’d had enough of what I regarded as a primitive medium. I had problems with the low-level racism/stereotyping prevalent at the time and found myself at odds with my bosses— refusing to write World War II comics, for instance. I wrote a bit of picture-journalism attacking what I saw as the trend of grown-ups to elevate juvenile forms, (especially in France) such as Barbarella.

Of course, I’d dusted off my old comic skills to write the Jerry Cornelius material for International Times in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, and I’d done a Hawkwind strip with Jim Cawthorn for FRENDZ, another underground newspaper. I did quite a lot with the underground in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Then along came Alan Moore, and I saw that it was possible to use comics in a fun, adult way in a commercial environment—as long as you had a good collaborator, as I did. By then I was friends with Alan, and you could say it was his example, as well as meeting a bunch of very bright kids at the San Diego Comic Convention, that made me want to get back into the medium.

So when I was asked to do a comic for DC I decided to try something ambitious, running three main stories at the same time and having them link up at the end.

That was Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse in which I developed my ideas about a possible multiverse in which context determined identity, utilizing some Chaos Theory and Mandelbrotian notions of self-similarity.

I really like to carry fairly complex ideas in comics or, say, in the Doctor Who novel I’m just now finishing. Maybe to stop myself taking such notions too seriously. The clockwork multiverse.

Have you adapted other people’s work for comics?

Well, only if you count Hal Foster. I “translated” the Spanish version of his Tarzan script back into English, mostly by guesswork, during my first publishing job on Tarzan Adventures. Oh, and I also did a two-part Tom Strong (Alan Moore’s character).

You used to listen to the Grateful Dead while writing? Who do you listen to now, if anyone?

Grateful Dead. Messiaen. Mozart. Dylan. Mahler. John Prine. New Riders. John Fogarty. Ravel. Schoenberg. Ives. Chet Baker. Williams. Elgar. Grateful Dead. Robert Johnson. Howlin’ Wolf. Glenn Miller. Noël Coward. Beatles. Gus Elen. Grateful Dead. Next question.

That last one’s not a group, it’s an exit strategy.

In one of your novels (I forget which one), Charon, ferryman of the River Styx, explains and justifies himself by saying, “It’s a steady job. “ Have you ever regretted not having a steady nine-to-fiver?