"I
am a natural anarchist. I really don't believe in leaders,
though I tend to see the point of parking meters." - M.M.
Michael Moorcock, born in 1939 is best known for his enormous literary
output, especially in the fields of Science Fiction and Fantasy.
He has received numerous awards - incl. the prestigious Nebula Award
for his remarkable twist on a time-travel story 'Behold
the Man'.
By now his literary 'back-catalogue' comprises a great variety of
formats and genres: from classic fantasy novels, to avantgarde fiction,
'standard' and experimental / satirical science fiction, essays,
mainstream novels... - Apart from that, he became the seminal figure
of the British "New Wave" of Sciene - not only as one
of it's prolific writers, but as the editor of it's main forum,
the NEW WORLDS magazine.
The
great thing about having a career as long as mine is that you can
test all these ideas! Stay on the carousel long enough and you go
in and out of fashion like black leather stage costumes. I knew
I could change New Worlds radically,
risk dumping most of the old readership and get a larger new readership,
because I'd done it twice before on Tarzan Adventures [a British
magazine that reprinted the U.S. comic strips] and, with Bill Howard
Baker, on Sexton Blake Library. I'd
learned that familiarity is what people mourn and that something
new quickly becomes familiar...
Less known - and by far less popular in strict commercial terms
- are his equally varied musical activities - which also led to
a number of collaborations btw. Moorcock and Robert Calvert, Hawkwind
a.o. musicians.
On the following pages you'll get an outline of these musical activities
and a few glimpses into his main occupation, his career as a writer.
Out
of the Blitz & into the Brothel
That's my standard advice
to people who want to write fantasy: Stop reading fantasy. I read very
little in the genre and never read as widely as most. I have no special
liking for it, but I do have a talent for it, so I suppose you can say
I took the line of least resistance. (...)
I have never really thought of myself as a fantasy writer or a genre writer,
although I've written plenty of genre, including Westerns. But I began
as a professional journalist and I tend to think of myself as a professional
writer.
A professional writer and editor he certainly is - and he didn't waste
any time developing his various occupations: Moorcock
began editing amateur magazines at eleven, became editor of Tarzan
Adventures at sixteen; later an editor of Sexton
Blake Library. He sold his first stories at age fifteeen and has
earned a living as a writer / editor since - but also his musical career
began early on with a spell as a blues singer / guitarist...and
some strange locations to perform...
"My
two enthusiasms as a kid were rock and roll
and fantasy fiction. They were mine. (...)
I was playing guitar in a whorehouse at the age of 15 not because I was
that good on the guitar or that sexy, but because I got on well with the
girls and they liked me. I was a sort of mascot. Sex, drugs and rock and
roll have, as it were, never been something I had to yearn for. I had
probably enjoyed most of life's sweetest pleasures for quite a lot of
the time by the age of 22 when I got married and settled down. I have
been invited in to the English Literature world, too, but haven't been
very comfortable in their churches."
He may not have been to comfortable in these churches - but surely became
successful in the reading communities. Surely, he received his greatest
commercial succcess with his fantasy genre-work, but surprisingly also
his stranger and more experimental works - like the Cornelius Chronicles
- would attract a great readership.
After all, Moorcock was/is a war-child, and this became and remained an
essential impulse of his work:
"Growing
up during the Blitz, you became used to seeing
whole buildings and streets suddenly disappear. After the Blitz, new buildings
and streets appeared. The world I knew was malleable, populated, violent
and urgent. After the war, everything seemed dull
and certainly the obsessions of most politicians and writers didn't bear
much relevance to my experience. (...)
Our experience simply wasn't dealt with in modernist fiction. You got
stories of how the war affected sensitive middle class people (Heat of
the Day) but nothing which really described what it was like growing up
with nothing else but war. My generation came out of those ruins. To be
honest, the likes of Martin Amis and Ian McEwen, let alone the previous
generation, didn't seem to be addressing my experience any better. (...)
I was lucky in having very little education and a lot of freedom. So my
response was, like my feminism and my 'post-modernism',
spontaneous and visceral rather than intellectual. Since then, of course,
I have given an intellectual gloss of what we've done, but it was gut
response that led to it, not sitting about discussing the crisis of the
novel (though we did that a bit, too, in the early days). The same with
New Worlds run it up the flagpole and
see what comes down was our chief "policy statement." We were
doing Post-Modernism before the name was invented."
New
Wave & NEW WORLDS
In 1964
Moorcock became the editor of the New
Worlds magazine...
"...suddenly
we found ourselves, innocently, in the position of being rebels
-
we didn't think we were. We thought we were joining the team."
Moorcock changed the NEW WORLDS conventional
star-travellers SF character into a magazine of contemporary and
experimental fiction, poetry and illustrations - to which Robert
Calvert contributed some poems
as well.
'The writers that came out or were associated with
NEW WORLDS were interested in adults and as such it was
impossible to continue that form - they were adults themselves
and grew out of SF.'
Amongst the authors that came out of NEW WORLDS
were such prolific writers as J.G.
Ballard, Thomas M. Disch, Norman Spinrad, Brian Aldiss, Philip
José Farmer and John T. Sladek.
Moorcock also published various anthologies including The
Best SF Stories From New Worlds series and The
Traps Of Time.
His own novels range from fantasy and SF, comedy thrillers to serious
fiction, often utilising unconventional structures - like alternating
histories. Behold The Man for which Moorcock
won the Nebula Award in 1967 is an outstanding
example of this form.
Karl Glogauer, a religious fanatic time-travels to Nazareth, year zero,
of our Lord - only to find out that his holy God's son is a hopeless
imbecile...
- but in order to get (his) history back onto the right track, he gradually
slips more and more into Christ's role - aiming for (his) ultimate fulfilment,
the inevitable catharsis on Golgatha...
"It was one
Easter in Ladbroke Grove. I think we were talking at the kitchen table,
and I said I thought that Jesus was actually the product of the desires
of his society, and that that was how such people are created: Adolf
Hitler, for example. I was quoted in Private Eye shortly after the book,
saying I could easily have picked Hitler instead of Jesus.
They took that out of context, as if there was something daft about
it. In fact, I was talking about demagogues; about people who become
invested with a legend and a power."
Dandyism,
Subversion and J.C.
>> The reason why most
of the classical Science Fiction is infantile is because it can't afford
complex characters - so it's perfectly fair to make them adults - so
the more you are going into that process the more you are losing the
SF elements. <<
Among the many inhabitants
of that MULTIVERSE of his own invention (with Elric
of Melnibone being probably the most popular) - Moorcock is the
inventor of a character named: Jerry Cornelius
- and his many related, similarly named personaes - first published
in the late60's.
"Originally I
was attracted to science fiction and fantasy but I really didn't like
most of it, so I tried to write space operas - but I couldn't really
do it. One of the problems with writing space operas is that you can't
write about character - I think that it's very hard to write about character
in such stories. By the time I started writing about Jerry Cornelius
- once I found my voice - I found enough confidence to start writing
the way I wanted to write, in as style that was my own and a form that
was my own."
Cornelius was described
as a mixture of James Bond, Mick Jagger and a Messiah
(with a capital MESS, I'd say).
Most characters of Moorcock's books are drawn from the densely crowded,
heterogenous population, of his immediate surrounding of Ladbroke Grove,
containing a lot of immigrants from all parts of the world. And like
many others of Moorcock's protagonists, Jerry, the chiqué underground
dandy-subversive, moves around in the adventurous, decaying landscape
of London.
The Cornelius figure was adopted by some other writers like Thomas
Harrisson who expanded and varied the story - and thus became
a sort of cult figure among the growing psychedelic culture; protagonist
of various comic series and a TV-film. A cult-figure of it's time, for
sure - and one, that brought Moorcock a lot of critical appraisal:
"The creator
of Jerry Cornelius has been compared by reviewers to Tolkien and Raymond
Chandler, Wyndham Lewis and Ronald Firbank, Mervyn Peake and Edgar Rice
Burroughs, Charles Dickens and James Joyce. I could throw in Nabokov
and Borges " Sunday Times (U.K.)
No, Mr. Cornelius
is certainly not the love'n'peace messiah - he's an utterly twisted
and subversive dude...
Suspicious even to those, who have been compared to him....or were offered
to act as him: "Jerry Cornelius
English assassin, Jewish cockney, rock star, physicist, time
traveler, and messiah to the Age of Science has been hailed as
the first cyberpunk anti-hero. A political non-conformist and ardent
feminist, Cornelius ranks among the most complex characters in modern
fantasy fiction.
Once considered shocking - Mick Jagger,
offered the part of Jerry Cornelius by the filmmaker David Putnam, turned
down the role because it was "too freaky"
- the Cornelius saga was written between 1965 and 1976. The books were
originally banned in Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada, Spain,
Italy, and Burma, among other places, due to the highly sexed, violent,
and seeming amoral antics of their central protagonist. Moorcock's hero
later became the inspiration for the film The Crow, the Luther Arkwright
graphic novels, and Alan Moore's "Watchmen" graphic novels,
among many other cutting-edge endeavors."
(from a PR-text on the current re-print of the Cornelius books)
CG: But in Corneliana, vice an virtue are very much in question.
MM: There are still goodies and baddies. I can tell the difference,
even if you can't.
CG: Well, you may not think so now, but I think you were actually
in the business of confusing simple liberal moralities - I mean,
of transcribing the moral confusion of that period.
MM: Moral confusion, granted, but there are still goodies and baddies.
The good are the people who are happy to accept that there is confusion
and live with it. The bad are the people who are just as confused, but
are trying to impose their own version of things on the world.
CG: But our hero is 'The English Assassin', who goes through the story
picking off victims from a shopping list and shooting them...
MM: True.
CG: ...crucifying them; setting fire to them...
MM: He does a little bit of that. But he's not a bad lad underneath.
'Ironic
reversal and parody was a basic method', as Harrisson
put it - 'saying we may take it all too far or in the wrong direction
- like the ecology movement; that's why Cornelius was wearing a panda
fur suit.'
Moorcock:
" The
Cornelius books were attacking various media strategies - especially
the way they spoke about Science and New Media - all Cornelius was saying
is, take it easy, it's only technology, you can use
it. (...)
I don't think we ever
felt threatened by the modern worldjust the politicians who were
messing it up. New Worlds and Jerry Cornelius embraced
computers when in fact they were far too big to embrace and needed
specially cooled buildings. Polite society meanwhile continued to worry
about "computers taking us over". We were curious to see what
you could do with them. That was probably what the cyberpunks saw in
the English "new wave" (not a term we used ourselves). What
we saw was variety, proliferation, possibility. It was far more exciting
to us than moon-shots."
HAWKWIND
& CALVERT
This particular interest, this attitude about new technologies - also
musical technologies - certainly was a good link to a band like HAWKWIND
- and Moorcock, who lived in London's Ladbroke Grove at the time, was
bound to run into them and ask them to share some stage time.
Dave Brock: "I
used to read all his books - The Jewel in the Skull and all that series.
For him to come along and say, 'Is it all right to come and do some
poetry?' - fucking hell, what an honour!" - and a time of
various collaborations was afoot.
What
I liked about Hawkwind
was that they seemed like the crazed crew
of a spaceship that didn't quite know how everything worked but
nevertheless wanted to try everything out. - M. Moorcock
In the early 70's Moorcock
began his collaboration with Hawkwind
- whose members used to hang out at the famous 'Mountain Grill' cafe in
Ladbroke Grove where Moorcock was living at
the time. The band employed SF motives from very early on and soon Calvert
and Moorcock became their main contributors in
that field. Calvert was becoming a more
or less regular
performer with Hawkwind as their 'resident
poet' introducing more and more of his conceptual ideas. He started
with the occasional recitation of his own poetry and
later on also performed texts by Moorcock and began to contribute his
own music. The best document for this unique mixture
of music, poetry and electronic sound-collages is Hawkwind's live
Space Ritual - the
initial idea for this came from Calvert as well.
This Hawkwind classic also contains two substantial text-contributions
of Mike Moorcock:Sonic Attack and 'The
Black Corridor'
-
the former remained a classic HW number up to now - performed, - in
those days, by Calvert moving through a wide scale of emotions: from
subtle, threatening whisper to a furious screaming outburst of paranoid
commands.
>
Read (and hear) the full text of SONIC
ATTACK - incl. 2 different live-versions
>
go to part II of the Calvert &
Moorcock Collab-Relations pages