Modem Times 2.0 - Michael Moorcock [40]
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.
You once said that your first approach to SF was a determination not to be marginalized. Was that the idea behind New Worlds? Did it work?
To a degree. I’m far less marginalized in the UK, I think, where a lot more of my non-generic fiction has been published, won prizes and so forth. I get lengthy reviews for books that aren’t presented as generic. I’m certainly not marginalized in that sense.
My first hardcovers in England generally got good reviews. Behold the Man and The Final Programme weren’t reviewed as genre fiction. Only with the flood of fantasy paperbacks did people begin to get confused, I think. But Gloriana was extensively reviewed as non-generic.
I tend to get treated according to the level of ambition people see in my books. I can be included, for instance, in a Times list of the fifty best writers since the end of World War II but still condescended to as some kind of literary barbarian by academics unfamiliar with my stuff. I’m comfortable with that.
I think I make some critics and academics a bit uneasy. If you look at a copy of New Worlds from 1967 on you’ll see that a general audience is consistently addressed. I wouldn’t let contributors address the “SF field.” Reviewers reviewed Ballard and Borges together, but had to address the general reader. We never spoke of that “field” in which I always imagined a bunch of sheep chewing and rechewing the same grass.
Many readers didn’t know New Worlds had ever been a genre magazine. We were accepted almost from the start as a literary magazine. Ballard, Aldiss, Disch, and myself were frequently on radio and TV speaking for what the critics termed “the new SF.” An anthology was prepared with this name. It attracted a wide readership amongst what you could call the English intelligentsia, particularly those who had liked, say, Galaxy, but needed something a bit posher in appearance to legitimize their enthusiasm.
We were fashionable in the 1960s the way the pop artists (some of whom were featured in New Worlds) and modern poets were fashionable. It was strange to come to the United States and find science fiction still marginalized, still condescended to. Snobbery seems much stronger in the United States, especially in New York.
But it’s the same with rock and roll, I think. In the UK rock and SF were often linked —lots of musicians read SF, some writers performed in bands. I think we can see a major improvement even in America now, though. Writers like Michael Chabon have done much to force snobs to revalue—though I notice he’s been attacked here for his enthusiasm for generic fiction.
I sometimes think America is now the old World as far as the arts and politics and social ideas are concerned.
Did you line edit at New Worlds?