ichael Moorcock is one of the most prominent, prolific and popular writers in the Western world. His prodigious output includes rock songs, comics, screenplays, essays and over 70 novels. Best known for his multiverse of interlocking heroic fantasy characters, Moorcock was recently awarded the World Fantasy Grandmaster Award for life achievement and is the recipient of many literary awards.
Several years ago, Moorcock moved from London to Lost Pines, Texas. Science Fiction Weekly recently caught up with him at his home to discuss the latest Elric novel, The Dreamthief's Daughter. What we got was oh, so much more.
How has the response been to The Dreamthief's Daughter?
Moorcock: Oh, it's been brilliant. So far, everybody who's read it has loved it. The weird thing about it is that every woman who's read it, and this is really strange, has had vivid dreams as a result of reading it. Not bad dreams, just very vivid dreams.
Why do you think that is?
Moorcock: I have no idea. A writer never knows when he's hit the chord. I mean, they know when they've done a good job, but they don't know when they've hit the chord with the public. You never know that. I mean, you can think you've done it, and you publish it and wait for applause and the public says, "Bugger off, you sad old fool." I mean, I thought I did that with The Final Programme, and it took about 20 years for it to get through. I thought, "Wow! They'll love this," and they thought, "What the hell is this?" So you never know. All I can really say is that the people who really like furry animal stories are still not going to like this any better. It's not going to be a happy, sentimental tale of how a lot of really nice people get together to solve a problem against a lot of really, really nasty people. All the villains are nicer than the heroes.
It's been nearly a decade since the last Elric novel, Revenge of the Rose. What made you decide to come back to Elric?
Moorcock: It's a bit like a homing instinct. About once every 10 years, I write a couple of Elric novels. This time I'm doing three. I seem to get fresh ideas for Elric novels about once every decade. It's as simple as that. To some extent, the ideas for these novels came out of working on the comic [Michael Moorcock's Multiverse]. You know, doing an Elric story for the multiverse comic and thinking about that and sort of locking that in to real historical periods, I realized that I could develop that a bit. And so, in a sense, a lot of my recent stuff, you can find a sort of template for it in that multiverse comic. It's where I tried out a lot of ideas.
So you would suggest the Multiverse comic for your fans, then?
Moorcock: Well, not really, no. They're completely baffled by it. But from my point of view, it's a kind of seedbed where a lot of the other stuff has been coming out of. And certainly you can look back to the Elric story in the Multiverse comic and see some of the ideas that are beginning to ... Also, in Tales From the Texas Woods there's a kind of an Elric story which refers to the same underground world, and so I developed some of those ideas further. In a way, it's bringing together a number of ideas I've been working on, knocking around for some years.
Why do you think it's Elric that you keep coming back to, as opposed to your other fantasy characters?
Moorcock: Elric simply does work on more levels than any of the other characters. When you think about it, there's more Elric figurines, more Elric comics, more Elric product. And when you look at Amazon, it's all Elric. The best-selling books of mine are all Elric books. So clearly there's a lot, you know. He's certainly a character I identify with much more closely that any of the others, personally. I really do. And no matter how many people say, "I prefer Corum," or, "I really prefer Hawkwind," I always think, "Well, they're all right, but here's my best lad. Here's Elric." And Jerry Cornelius is really a version of Elric more than he is a version of Corum or anyone else.
So again, Elric is really one of the dominant figures in the whole thing. Someone asked me about Elric, and I said, you know, in a way he's Pierrot. A romantic, tragic but, from another viewpoint, a comic figure. In commedia dell'arte, Pierrot is essentially someone who's constantly striving for something and constantly failing, so that's why your sympathies are with him. A failed trickster. On one level that's what Jerry Cornelius is, and that's what Elric is, i.e., their failures are magnificent. What that says, what that's constantly saying to the reader, is that it is worth striving to do things, but there's a price you pay for things. There's always a price, and my characters always have to pay a price. They don't come home in the end and everybody gets a piece of cake, a nice cup of tea and they all say, "Hooray, hooray, we've saved the day. The rings are all back in the box or whatever and we're a finer, wiser and happier people since saving the world from this terrible evil of people who speak with funny, bellowing voices and thus immediately identify themselves as baddies."
Why do you think Elric has remained popular for almost 40 years?
Moorcock: I think that he is probably, of all of my fantasy heroes, all of my epic heroes, he's the one who most embodies my own ideas, my own struggles, my own sort of psyche ... my own moral questions and that sort of thing. And he remains a very modern, existential sort of hero. He can quite easily develop as I develop. There's still plenty of development in Elric's character, because he's set up right. He's already asking the questions, he's already dealing with the problems. It's odd, really.
I don't know of very much work of this particular kind that does that, except for science fiction. Science fiction, oddly enough, does a lot more of what I tend to do in fantasy. I've noticed I don't read a lot of fantasy--I never did. I just started writing it. I just happened to have the facility. Pretty much all the other stuff in that form has been published since I started writing it. So I'm not particularly interested in it as a genre. I didn't start writing it because there was a big genre out there to write into. There was me and Tolkien. Basically, at the beginning, me and Tolkien were selling about the same, which was very, very few. Tolkien was regarded as just another writer, like [Mervyn] Peake, who had an enthusiastic following, but wasn't in any way mainstream or likely to take off.
In a sense, I started writing Elric as much in contrast to Tolkien as I was writing it in contrast to Conan. I didn't like Tolkien because it had a fairy-story quality. It didn't have what I would regard as a properly tragic quality. It was too sentimental for my taste. I'm attracted to lyrical, romantic, tragic kind of stuff, rather than the five-people-solve-a-problem-together, which is essentially the Tolkien formula. It's the formula which most people prefer. It's the one that goes into RPG games and stuff like that. I'm writing about alienated individuals who are fundamentally solitary, who don't really want do an awful lot with other people. And again, it's my own experience. I pretty much brought myself up, and I pretty much looked after myself on my own feet from a very early age. I was earning my own living from the age of 15. I don't think in terms of five friends getting together to solve a problem.
How is producing an Elric novel now different than it was back in the '60s?
Moorcock: Well, it's no different in one sense, and that is, it's just as hard. And the reason is because I deliberately make it harder for myself. I don't make it harder for the audience--that's not the idea. The idea is to write a book that the audience is going to buy. I mean, these books are also written for money. I'm not trying to put off people, but at the same time, obviously I can't make compromises. I just have to write what I write. But at the same time, my idea is not to put obstacles in the way of somebody buying it. I'm not going to make it a difficult read. What I'm going to do is make it a difficult write. I'm going to give myself new tasks that I haven't solved before.
I've said this about rock 'n' roll before, the thing that gives great rock 'n' roll its quality is that it's always not quite sure where it's going. It's never quite sure it's going to get there, you know? And everything: voice, instrument, everything, the great rock 'n' roll is just on the edge of ... it's always just expanding itself.
Essentially, I was winging it with Stormbringer. I was sort of riding a very fast motorbike but didn't know quite where it was going. I just hoped to God I could hold on and keep steering over the bumpy bits. So you need to set another standard, a higher standard, that doesn't interfere with the reader's enjoyment of the narrative or stop them from getting any pleasure from the book they would normally get. They don't need to know what you're doing, but you have to do it for yourself.
And the other analogy is essentially how you get a good rock 'n' roll voice on stage. If you raise the mike up above the level of your head, you're straining to reach the mike and in that act of straining to reach it, you introduce tensions, which are, again, essentially the tensions that are in rock 'n' roll. That's why operatic voices can't sing rock 'n' roll--trained voices can't sing certain songs that untrained voices sing better, i.e., Pavarotti singing a Willie Nelson song is crazy, and yet Willie Nelson could probably just about sing any Pavarotti song and it wouldn't sound crazy, because he would modify his mouth rather than his diaphragm to change notes and things like that. He would just sing it. He would have found a way of singing it, and that's one of the things that's interesting.
That what attracts you to science fiction and rock 'n' roll initially, what attracted me, was the fact that they were raw, they were new, and that they hadn't been taken over by anybody. There weren't any magazines, Web sites, and so forth to make me feel self-conscious. That was the ambience in which you wrote and produced. You've got to reproduce that in some way. And what I've done is I've made the narrative harder for me to write, but I know it isn't harder for anybody to read, because everybody that's read it has said, "Great," you know--zipped through it. So I know that that works. But what I did, what I had to do in order to achieve that, was something more difficult than I've done previously. What a long answer.
It seems like in the last 10 years or so you've made a conscious effort to make the Multiverse a smaller place--to have the characters inter-relate more.
Moorcock: Well, yeah, to some extent that's true. But what I've also been doing is expanding. It goes both ways. And really, partly, it's chaos theory. The more I've understood chaos theory as such, and I don't mean this kind of fashionable stuff they call chaos theory, but the actual mathematics involved in Mandelbrot, the more I've understood that, the more rational the irrational world becomes. I've been able to produce a much more coherent, as it were, version of the multiverse. And it's almost like there are zones in it now, whereas there weren't before.
Again, it goes back to the comic and War Amongst the Angels, which has Elric in it as well. But the other thing I discovered I could do through writing those books, and this is very deliberate, [is] how to write a story about the same character, one story could be just straight realistic, set in Austin, say, and absolutely no element of fantasy in it at all, and the next story be about the same characters but completely fantastic. Because for me, both things are true, i.e., my imaginative life and my real life are as vivid as each other. I want to describe that experience in a story without having to rationalize it or explain it in any kind of generic way except by my own logic, my own rationale. What you're looking at in my fiction is not so much generic work as such, but individual work that is in a sense its own genre, attempting to solve its own generic problems. The genre developed after I had started.
When you say, "its own genre," just like fantasy and science fiction have their own set of rules within the genre, does it have its own set of rules?
Moorcock: Yes, that's right. That you have to follow to fulfill readers' expectations. To give the customer what they want. My readers have certain expectations of me. Any new reader can come into my multiverse with any new book and not feel they've got to read all the other books. But that is exactly the same as you read your first novel about real life, you don't feel you've got to know everything about the real world. You only need to know about the real world of that book. In To Kill a Mockingbird, you need to know what's going on in that town with those people and so forth. You don't think, "Oh my God! I can't read To Kill a Mockingbird until I have read the entire history of the South" and etc., etc.--you just don't do that. So I don't want readers to be put off by seeing that kind of coherent body of work and thinking, "God, where do I start out, and where do I finish?"
What I offer is the same as what maybe a movie director offers: if you fancy this aspect of my work, this aspect of my life, then go for that. I don't expect you to like Elric and Pyat. I'm very glad when you do, but I don't expect you to. One of the things I said to Betsy Mitchell [editor of The Dreamthief's Daughter] before I even began these was, "I want you to know if you have never read an Elric book and your reps have never read an Elric book and your editorial people and your advertising people have never read an Elric book, it doesn't matter. This is going to be a book that you will never have to read another Moorcock title to enjoy." I'm offering a broad range of entertainment here. I'm like a TV channel.
Are you waiting for the Moorcock section at the bookstores?
Moorcock: I used to be the Moorcock section, and this is unfortunate. The bookstores used to have a Moorcock section. That was in my heyday, before all these other f-----s came along. But at one point, it was just Tolkien, and he didn't really have a section as such, and then there was me. And it's absolutely true, everybody said this at the time, I was a category. I was sold as a category. I was sold, essentially, to the distributors as a category: "How many Moorcocks do you want this month?"
Since then there have been some fine new books and an awful lot of bad xeroxes, but I've never been out of print anywhere in the world, really. I mean, 40 years and I've stayed in print--that's not bad. And most of them are readable. The other thing I'm proud of, and again, people say this and I feel it's true, but obviously I can't propose it myself--my books don't actually go off in quality. Again, it's a question of personal pride. I couldn't do anything but my best. Just because you produce a nice line of furniture that's very good and lasts and everybody says, "Oh, I'll buy Moorcock furniture," you don't immediately cut the quality down so that people fall down and their tables fall apart. I feel that special relationship that I have with the reader. My deal with the reader is that I deliver the best quality I possibly can. Furniture you can use. That does the job it's supposed to do. I mean, there's a chance I'll get senile and lose this ability, but while I'm not, that's what I do. It's an old-fashioned family business which takes pride in what it produces!
In the '60s you were well known for hanging out with other writers that wrote similar things. You know, Fritz Leiber and Mervyn Peake, and these were writers that you were associated with. Are there writers writing today that you do associate with?
Moorcock: To some extent, the kind of writers I hung out with then are the very same kind of writers I hang out with now. They're writers with a very broad range of reference. It doesn't matter whether they're writing genre work or whether they're writing literary work or whatever they're writing. It doesn't matter because they're as well educated in genre as they are in high art, if you like, and that's what I like. There's a magazine called Modern Word that Jeff VanderMeer writes for, and that's a very kind of highbrow magazine that includes people like Philip K. Dick, i.e., it includes genre writers as cheerfully as it includes people like Pynchon and Don DeLillo and that kind of writer. So really what I'm most at ease with is somebody who's a curious reader, who's well read in all kinds of areas.
In a piece for Amazon UK, you wrote that Tolkien "was patient with you as a boy." What was your relationship with him like?
Moorcock: Very good, because in those days, Tolkien didn't have any fans. I think I might have gotten in touch with him ... I knew T.H. White because I'd written an article on him in my fanzine. I ran a fanzine that was originally started as an Edgar Rice Burroughs fanzine, but it became a kind of general fantasy fanzine. So I did interviews with various people, and anybody, in fact, who was still alive and had written a fantasy novel, there were only about three or four, as a boy I got in touch with. I was also interested in folk music, so I was corresponding with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
This may seem strange to people these days, but in those days those poor bastards didn't have any fans. They were only too grateful for the odd person like myself to come along. I had a wonderful correspondence with T.H. White. I mean, these days, these people would be inundated, I'm sure. So this is all it was, you know? Just like you or anybody might write to me now. It's just that in those days there were only about six readers and writers all together in the world: three in America and three in Britain. There were the odd writers like Leiber and myself who were interested in that, but generally speaking, science fiction was the dominant genre form. All of the science fiction writers, the likes of Damon Knight and Co., the intelligent science fiction writers, absolutely loathed fantasy, and still do. Their hatred of Tolkien isn't really the same as mine, because they hated it all. Whereas I grew up reading science fantasy: Leigh Brackett and stuff like that, which, to me, is the perfect combination. You have magic and science, throw it all in. Why have just one when you can have it all? So I had a very different view of it. But these science guys, generally speaking, are a lot more austere. They're still pretty good, but they believed you had to have some kind of serious social subject. Pohl and Kornbluth, Damon Knight, Philip K. Dick, all these people had a focus; an actual point.
The weird thing is, of course, that my fantasy does have that. It has what most fantasy doesn't have. It has an element of social commentary to it, and that's, I think, what people sort of noticed in the beginning. And that's what this new book has. It's not just set in Nazi-land because Nazis are nasty people. It's set in Nazi-land because I had a letter from a young woman who was raped by someone calling himself Elric, which upset me considerably. I can't control people, but I can control my own books, and so I began to consider the fascistic underlying elements of sword-and-sorcery fiction: the elements of feudalism and simplified, sentimentalized ideas of heroism, and so on, which a lot of people regard as being rather bad for you. I don't think they are bad for you, depending on the context, but others do.
George Orwell predicted that people who read a certain boy's fiction were automatically going to become fascists. I was absolutely soaked in that stuff and I don't think anybody's yet called me a fascist. I found elements in it which encouraged a totally different kind of impulse. There's always a moral element running in an Elric story. Just like there is in Behold the Man. Again, there's a moral argument. There has to be a moral argument. I can't write anything else. And the reason for it, I swear this is the truth, and it's stupid, but the real reason is that first book I bought as a kid with my own money, and really because I thought it looked like a good fantasy adventure, was The Pilgrim's Progress. I read it and I liked it, and it's a really good moral lesson for us all, regardless of one's religion. You know, keep striving, so forth. It draws mostly on the common testaments, and there it is and it's got two meanings: it's an allegory. There's the story, and it's pretty good. There's the Kingdom of Heaven and all these various fantastic elements going on, but also, it's about somebody resolving their spiritual journey. Narratives give birth, as it were, to other narratives.
So I thought that any story for adults had to have two meanings. That was part of the deal. Part of the job you learned was to have an allegorical or symbolic meaning running through it. A moral argument. These fantasies of mine, they actually do have a symbolic meaning. I'm not saying others don't, but generally speaking, most don't seem to. They don't focus in on a social problem, they don't resonate between the modern world and that invented world. And the other thing that somebody asked me, they just asked me on the net today, "If I were doing a game, could you give me some extra details of the Young Kingdoms?" And I thought about this, and I said, "I'm not a world-maker, I'm a storyteller." When I travel, I don't know every detail of history and economics and culture of the places I travel to. The stories come out of both people and landscape. I get as much of the world as the story needs. The rest of that world, I know no more about it than about economics in Madagascar.
If I set a story on the island, I'd learn a little bit about the island. But just enough to tell the story. As it is I tend to take my stories from the places I've been, but "world-making" as a pastime is meaningless to me. I know that there are people out there who do this all the time, but it sort of stops you in your tracks, because all you're doing is building a world, you're not navigating that world. I find that very peculiar. All of these are assumptions made by people who've come out of the genre itself: Dungeons and Dragons, everything that's come since me. Most of that stuff is fairly strange to me. Younger readers will complain that my books are all right, but I don't go into enough detail, the way all these other writers do. Now as far as I'm concerned, those writers are boring farts. They're wasting my time and killing a tree to boot. That stuff I just skip automatically.
What does the future hold for Elric?
Moorcock: The next Elric, which I'm working on at the moment, is called The Skrayling Tree. Skrayling is the word that the Vikings used for the Indians they met up in Nova Scotia. It's in the Edda; they called them Skraylings. This is set in America, northeastern America. It deals with, well, the way Dreamthief's Daughter played against Nazis and Nazi politics, this one plays against American politics.
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