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. In the coming week, I'll be posting three of the interviews on this blog. Here's the third of them:

 

SINGULARINTERVIEWS:  MICHAEL MOORCOCK

 

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

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

I read Zweig’s biography of Balzac when I was 15 and as ajournalist learned, like him, to write at high speeds without giving myselftime to revise, developing ideas from one story to another rather than refininga single piece, but I was never consciously inspired by him. My first versionof The Eternal Champion was written in 1957 when I was 17 and was pretty crudelywritten but contained the idea, perhaps inspired by Arnold’s Phra thePhoenician, of a protagonistconstantly reborn to fight a cause over and over again through differenthistorical periods and locales.  My description of what I called a‘multiverse’, The Sundered Worlds, a story which looked at a many worlds theory, firstexplored in fiction by Wells, from as it were the outside as an observablephenomenon, was published in 1963,but I didn’t start to consider my work as one large novel until 1968 when Ibegan A Cure For Cancer, the second Jerry Cornelius book, and realized I couldrefine ideas over many books by linking them to the same characters in differentsituations 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, practicalas well as artistic, continuing themes and ideas via the same characters inoften very disparate places, historical periods and invented worlds, enablingme to write stories which moved from generic fiction to literary fiction and sobreak down the barriers between them as editorially I tried to encourageauthors to do in New Worlds.  This quickly enabled me to write bookswhich were part realistic and part fantastic and thus carry ideas organicallyfrom one sequence of stories, absurdist, fantastic and realistic, toanother.  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 20th centuryroots of the Nazi holocaust, while a character like Elric can appear in afantasy 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 pieceto piece and carry a theme which can be looked at from many different aspectsand narratives.  They offer the readerechoes, as it were, which bring a feeling of familiarity without the kind ofdistracting (and disappointing) rationale which, in my view, frequently ruins agood story.  In this sense they shouldproduce a feeling of resolution more like music than most fiction.  Whether I’ve been successful in this, ofcourse, is for the reader to decide.

 

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