peered into the bays underneath, searching for the remains of the population.
The rise of psychogeography was in some ways an impulse to rediscover those old natural paths I and others like me had trodden through the ruins, to find ways of rediscovering serious memory, something which Peter Ackroyd, Alan Moore, and Will Self understood.
As well as friends and relatives, who are also memory, weare equally dependent on the geography of our cities for the myths and rituals by which we live. Without conscious ritual we have only buried tram tracks, some vague ideas of what still lies under the steel and concrete cladding, and a few bits of film.
I have nothing against virtuality. We create virtual identities for London. We create them for ourselves. We seek options allowing us to survive and, with luck, be happy. Jerry Cornelius knows, as he strolls in clothes just recently back in fashion, through virtual ruins, virtual futures, that it’s the only way we’ll survive,
as long as we’re fully conscious
, so that when fashions like Dickens World cease to suit the tourists, we’ll have another city standing by. I’m hoping for a London that neither swings nor sags, is neither grim nor gay, but rises defiantly, a fresh guarantee against the dying of our memories.
NOTES
1 . South African comic actor known mainly for playing a London cockney.
2 . But can’t the same be said of Elizabeth Bennet?
“GET THE MUSIC RIGHT”
MICHAEL MOORCOCK INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON
Why Texas?
I was on the run. Looking for some fresh mythology.
You have played a central role in science fiction since the editorship
of New Worlds
magazine in the 1960s. How has that role changed from then to now?
I suppose I was more of a gadfly in those days where SF was concerned. I’d read almost none of the so-called “Golden Age” (1950s) SF. I bought a long run of
Astounding
when I became editor of
New Worlds
because I thought I ought to look at it, and found most of it dull and unreadable. This was also the experience of J. G. Ballard and others who had expected far more of American SF than it actually delivered (apart from a relatively small amount found mostly in
Galaxy)
.
American 1960s “New Wave” was about improving the quality of SF, but we Brits were less interested in that than we were in using SF methodology to look at the contemporary world. SF magazines were the only ones that liked our ideas, but we had to provide rationalizations to those stories, more or less. Explication dulled down the vision.
Fritz Leiber, whom I greatly admired, told me that he and several of his contemporaries like Bloch and Kuttner had thesame problem in their day. So you’d write, say, an absurdist story but you could only sell it if you added: “On Mars …” or “In the future …” and then stuck in a boring rationalization.
Anyway, we could only really publish in the SF magazines.
But we also felt contemporary fiction was anaemic and had lost the momentum modernism had given it. Most fiction we saw had no way it could usefully confront modern concerns— the H-bomb, computers, engineering and communications advances, space travel—not to mention changing social conventions and consequently language, politics, warfare, the altered psyche in the face of so much novelty of experience.
Almost all the literary fiction we read was actually retrospective (Durrell, Heller, Roth, or Bellow) or only pretending to tackle contemporary issues in a novel way (Selby, B. S. Johnson, the Beats, and others who saw themselves as the most interesting subject matter).
The reason we liked William Burroughs
(Naked Lunch)
was because his language focused on modern times and drew much of its vitality from modern idiom. We were inspired by him and Borges rather than influenced by them.
Many of our heroes (French existentialists,
nouvelle vague
movies) read SF and the
Galaxy
writers in particular (Bester, Dick, Sheckley, Pohl and Kornbluth, and, of course,
The rise of psychogeography was in some ways an impulse to rediscover those old natural paths I and others like me had trodden through the ruins, to find ways of rediscovering serious memory, something which Peter Ackroyd, Alan Moore, and Will Self understood.
As well as friends and relatives, who are also memory, weare equally dependent on the geography of our cities for the myths and rituals by which we live. Without conscious ritual we have only buried tram tracks, some vague ideas of what still lies under the steel and concrete cladding, and a few bits of film.
I have nothing against virtuality. We create virtual identities for London. We create them for ourselves. We seek options allowing us to survive and, with luck, be happy. Jerry Cornelius knows, as he strolls in clothes just recently back in fashion, through virtual ruins, virtual futures, that it’s the only way we’ll survive,
as long as we’re fully conscious
, so that when fashions like Dickens World cease to suit the tourists, we’ll have another city standing by. I’m hoping for a London that neither swings nor sags, is neither grim nor gay, but rises defiantly, a fresh guarantee against the dying of our memories.
NOTES
1 . South African comic actor known mainly for playing a London cockney.
2 . But can’t the same be said of Elizabeth Bennet?
“GET THE MUSIC RIGHT”
MICHAEL MOORCOCK INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON
Why Texas?
I was on the run. Looking for some fresh mythology.
You have played a central role in science fiction since the editorship
of New Worlds
magazine in the 1960s. How has that role changed from then to now?
I suppose I was more of a gadfly in those days where SF was concerned. I’d read almost none of the so-called “Golden Age” (1950s) SF. I bought a long run of
Astounding
when I became editor of
New Worlds
because I thought I ought to look at it, and found most of it dull and unreadable. This was also the experience of J. G. Ballard and others who had expected far more of American SF than it actually delivered (apart from a relatively small amount found mostly in
Galaxy)
.
American 1960s “New Wave” was about improving the quality of SF, but we Brits were less interested in that than we were in using SF methodology to look at the contemporary world. SF magazines were the only ones that liked our ideas, but we had to provide rationalizations to those stories, more or less. Explication dulled down the vision.
Fritz Leiber, whom I greatly admired, told me that he and several of his contemporaries like Bloch and Kuttner had thesame problem in their day. So you’d write, say, an absurdist story but you could only sell it if you added: “On Mars …” or “In the future …” and then stuck in a boring rationalization.
Anyway, we could only really publish in the SF magazines.
But we also felt contemporary fiction was anaemic and had lost the momentum modernism had given it. Most fiction we saw had no way it could usefully confront modern concerns— the H-bomb, computers, engineering and communications advances, space travel—not to mention changing social conventions and consequently language, politics, warfare, the altered psyche in the face of so much novelty of experience.
Almost all the literary fiction we read was actually retrospective (Durrell, Heller, Roth, or Bellow) or only pretending to tackle contemporary issues in a novel way (Selby, B. S. Johnson, the Beats, and others who saw themselves as the most interesting subject matter).
The reason we liked William Burroughs
(Naked Lunch)
was because his language focused on modern times and drew much of its vitality from modern idiom. We were inspired by him and Borges rather than influenced by them.
Many of our heroes (French existentialists,
nouvelle vague
movies) read SF and the
Galaxy
writers in particular (Bester, Dick, Sheckley, Pohl and Kornbluth, and, of course,
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