Modem Times 2.0 - Michael Moorcock [37]
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