Singular Interviews: MICHAEL MOORCOCK

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Marianne Porter's latest Dragonstairs Press chapbook, Singular Interviews, will be offered for sale at noon Eastern time this coming Saturday, and sell out shortly thereafter. A quarter-century in the making, each of my interviews with a science fiction or fantasy notable is exactly one question long. Meanwhile, here's my favorite of the lot--the single most concise and enlightening summation of Michael Moorcock's oeuvre I've ever encountered. By the man who knows more about it than anyone else.

 

SINGULAR INTERVIEWS:  MICHAEL MOORCOCK

 

QUESTION: When and why did you decide to interconnect all your stories and novels to make of them a single metafiction?

MICHAEL MOORCOCK: I frequently read that my aspiration was to ‘improve’ science fiction in some way by shifting emphasis away from its traditional subject matter and calling for higher standards of writing.  Actually I wanted to introduce the techniques and subject matter of sf and fantasy into ‘literary’ or non-generic work, to broaden the concerns of general fiction which I believed to be moribund.  For all I know this was going to happen anyway so I was perhaps just one of many people trying to do the same but at the time I knew very few people who agreed with me. The likes of Kingsley Amis, in fact, vehemently disagreed with me.  My ambition inspired my criticism and my editorship of NEW WORLDS.  None of this, of course, happened overnight.  It took a few years to develop a coherent sense of exactly how this could be achieved and demonstrated.

I read Zweig’s biography of Balzac when I was 15 and as a journalist learned, like him, to write at high speeds without giving myself time to revise, developing ideas from one story to another rather than refining a single piece, but I was never consciously inspired by him. My first version of The Eternal Champion was written in 1957 when I was 17 and was pretty crudely written but contained the idea, perhaps inspired by Arnold’s Phra the Phoenician, of a protagonist constantly reborn to fight a cause over and over again through different historical periods and locales.  My description of what I called a ‘multiverse’, The Sundered Worlds, a story which looked at a many worlds theory, first explored in fiction by Wells, from as it were the outside as an observable phenomenon, was published in 1963, but I didn’t start to consider my work as one large novel until 1968 when I began A Cure For Cancer, the second Jerry Cornelius book, and realized I could refine ideas over many books by linking them to the same characters in different situations and circumstances. 

I’m not for a moment comparing my work to Balzac’s Human Comedy, but I might have come to it for similar reasons, practical as well as artistic, continuing themes and ideas via the same characters in often very disparate places, historical periods and invented worlds, enabling me to write stories which moved from generic fiction to literary fiction and so break down the barriers between them as editorially I tried to encourage authors to do in New Worlds.  This quickly enabled me to write books which were part realistic and part fantastic and thus carry ideas organically from one sequence of stories, absurdist, fantastic and realistic, to another.  A relatively minor character, such as Colonel Pyat of the Cornelius stories, could become the self-deceiving, unreliable narrator of a realistic examination of the 20^th century roots of the Nazi holocaust, while a character like Elric can appear in a fantasy or a comedy without any apparent incongruity.  They can, like players in a Commedia dell’ Arte sketch, keep their essential personalities and moral character from piece to piece and carry a theme which can be looked at from many different aspects and narratives.  They offer the reader echoes, as it were, which bring a feeling of familiarity without the kind of distracting (and disappointing) rationale which, in my view, frequently ruins a good story.  In this sense they should produce a feeling of resolution more like music than most fiction.  Whether I’ve been successful in this, of course, is for the reader to decide.

 

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