Modem Times 2.0 - Michael Moorcock [41]
Not really. There’s a different approach in the UK and the United States, I think. American editing tends to come out of the newspaper tradition and seems excessive to me. If we had a problem I’d usually xerox the page or pages in question and underline queries to see what the author felt.
A curmudgeon (MM) once said that today’s SF had gotten too sophisticated to take chances. Do you still make that charge?
Well, I always drew my inspiration from pulp and never much liked the movement to make SF “respectable” (whichmight seem odd, reading the above). I hated that as much as I hated the movement to make black people whiter. My attitude was “like this or prove yourself a backward idiot.”
So if we’re talking about sophistication as respectability, I have to say it makes me miserable. The more invisible you are, the more chances you feel able to take. Rock ‘n’ roll, SF, and comics always show this, I think. Most artistic innovation comes through popular media or at least through obscure media. I chose SF and R&R precisely because there was no one looking over your shoulder when you did it—no critical magazines to study it.
Not when I started, anyway. There was just Crawdaddy.
You once suggested that anyone who wants to write fantasy should quit reading your stuff and read Mervyn Peake instead. Does that career plan still hold?
I didn’t say Peake in particular, but yes, it still holds. If you want to write SF/fantasy, read everything but those genres. Peake is in many ways more in the absurdist tradition I’ve always liked—Peacock, Jarry, Firbank, Vian, Peake. Even William Burroughs is an absurdist first, I think.
You’re a musician as well as a writer. Do you still play? What? What was the state of popular music in England in the 1960s? Did “modern” (Miles, Monk, Mingus) jazz play a role in your postmodern liberation, or was it all rock?
It was all rock and modern composers like Messiaen. In the ‘60s it was still possible not to have to book tickets for Schoenberg, he was so unpopular. This changed during that decade.
I didn’t much care for jazz after a brief craze for it in the ‘50s, when in Paris you could hear a dozen greats in bars up and down one tiny street. Now I appreciate it much more and like it better. My tastes have broadened. I used to think only string quartets were worth listening to.
SF has been swamped by Fantasy. Are you partly to blame for that or do your consider your work a counterforce?
I write fantasy with more of an SF sensibility, I think. I write anti-fantasy. When Tolkien and I were really the only games in town, we both got our own nametag in bookstores, separate from the SF shelves. When Tolkienesque fantasy began to dominate I was knocked off the shelves by a bunch of Terries (nothing personal to you or Pratchett). That is, I sold when there wasn’t a more escapist, comfortable brand.
Now I still sell pretty well, but it seems to be more to fantasy readers who don’t much like Tolkien (or at least his clones).
The change in the United States came really when Donald Wollheim pirated the Lord of the Rings books and also found that A Princess of Mars wasn’t in copyright. Larry Shaw at Lancer liked Jack Vance and me and was the first to publish my fantasy in the United States. I think my stuff probably is a counterforce at some level.
I don’t think I’m to blame for Prof. T. My influences among modern writers were almost wholly American—Poul Anderson, Sprague de Camp, Fritz Leiber, C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance.
Tolkien question here. The answer is “certainly. “ You provide the question.
Is Tolkien a sentimentalist who, like many writers (Sherriff, Deeping, etc.) emerging from World War I needed to mystify and sentimentalize that conflict and/or their part in it. To make “sacrifice” noble. Are you sympathetic to but irritated by such attitudes which spilled over into the English middle-class sensibility so that they lasted (via BBC drama, for instance) long after the end of World War II?
Rowling question here. The answer is “perhaps. “ You provide the question.