Article: From the Day I was...

From the Day I was born someone was trying to kill me. Most Americans are sympathetic when they hear how I grew up in a city with thousands of tons of bombs and rockets falling on it. But actually I had a perfectly happy childhood in the London Blitz. Cheerfully unconscious of danger, I could explore the mysteries of huge, half-ruined buildings and suddenly altered landscapes. And no child ever felt more emotionally secure. Mothers were delighted just to see you come home alive. You grew casually familiar with extremely fantastic events and scenery. Surrounded by exploded houses and burned-out offices, I continued to enjoy games which ironically perpetuated the causes of the real life and death conflict around me. Peace was quite a shock to me.

I#m inclined to celebrate change. The world I knew was malleable. Like Elric#s it was the centre of an empire in decline and under attack. It was a world of Chaos but not merely a world of Evil. Certainly the human spirit was at its best during the Blitz, just as it was more recently in Oklahoma City. I explain my optimism in these terms. Daily, I experienced ordinary people in the worst conditions behaving with casual bravery and concern for others. In crisis most people emerge at their very best. That#s probably why we enjoy stories of high adventure which remind us of the best we can sometimes be. I have known a lot of heroes. Most of them were only heroic for as long as necessary. That#s what real heroes are like. On some days, those identical people might be less heroic, possibly even downright craven. We all have our good days and bad, our areas of strength and weakness, our version of Orwell#s Room 101 in 1984..

If Mervyn Peake, T.H.White and Fritz Leiber turned me on to fantasy, it was the likes of George Orwell who turned me on to science fiction. H.G.Wells and Philip Wylie were another two. Aldous Huxley, Alfred Bester, Pohl&Kornbluth and Robert Sheckley also helped. Space opera tends to have the same effect on me as Italian opera. Exposed to it, I fall at once into a deep and comfortable sleep.

When Joe McCarthy, using identical tactics to Goebbels#s and Hitler#s, tried to kill real democracy in the US, there were only a few voices publicly challenging his lies. Amongst those few were certain sf writers. It was their ideas which helped bring about perhaps our last great brave mainstream political evemt, the signing of the Civil Rights Act and the Immigration Bill by Lyndon Johnson, which continue to have enormous social consequences for America.

The first book I ever bought with my own money was John Bunyan#s The Pilgrim#s Progress. Before that I had read omnivorously from the age of four # absorbing George Bernard Shaw, Edward Lester Arnold and Edgar Rice Burroughs with equal relish. I was fifteen before it occurred to me that I didn#t have to have three names if I wanted to be a writer. I soon stopped being Michael John Moorcock. I#d noticed that newer writers I admired, like Joseph Conrad, tended only to have two names#

My early success was also probably thanks to World War Two. Hitler had thoughtfully eliminated much of my competition. But unfortunately John Bunyan had given me the wrong ideas. I thought a book which contained fantastic monsters, weird landscapes and odd supernatural beings should always tell at least two stories, the way John Bunyan had. Christian#s journey has three purposes -- # physical, intellectual and spiritual. It contained a moral argument. Certainly much of the sf I had read also provided that -- gave you a straightforward fantastic story and made a point or two in passing, while at the end of the book the characters had been changed by their experience (The Stars My Destination by Bester is in my view one of the great American novels). I presumed that#s what all good fiction, fantastic or otherwise, was supposed to do. It#s what I started doing from the beginning. Not always successfully, of course. Although at the time I drew more on Freud than Tom Paine, the arguments in my first Elric stories were partly in opposition to the allegorical messages of C.S.Lewis and Co. I found their simplistic High Church proseltysing as irritating as any Marxist proseltysing. I like to see individual analysis in my reading, not the promotion of orthodoxy and Tolkien, say, was far too entrenched in English cultural presumption for me. Bunyan preached and was imprisoned for it. Tolkien was preaching to the choir. I had grown up reading authors who attacked cultural imperialism, not tacitly supported it.

Discovering, early on, a facility for writing fantastic adventure stories, didn#t change my ideas. My rules were fairly simple. You had to have a major fantastic event happening about every four pages. You had to have narrative pace, which meant a good carrot and stick plot, You had to have characters who begin with a personal as well as a plot problem, and you had to have some sort of moral argument which also resolved all these elements.

I have always been engaged with politics. Tom Paine#s my hero. I#d like to help try to make the world a better place. That#s why people who know my politics are a little surprised my books have so much to do with kings and princes. I do point out that my heroes, by and large, although doomed to perpetual struggle, tend to triumph over the supernatural and even, sometimes, their aristocratic backgrounds#

What bothers me about a lot of fantasy fiction, and it is a tradition which comes from Tolkien as much as Howard in its own way, is the strong sense of anti-intellectualism it shares with, say, the likes of Star Wars. It promotes #faith# in a system rather than oneself, a notion that edges towards the fundamentals of fascism. This impulse seems to stem more from conservative unease than from the moral questioning faith of Bunyan or Wesley. It supports blind authority rather than challenging it. Rarely, in the scenarios I have seen, is there any questioning of the broadest cultural assumptions and the object of the story is to set things back to normal, to reassure. This is by no means the atmosphere of Gene Wolfe, say, or M.John Harrison, Octavia Butler, China Mieville or Ursula LeGuin, while Robert Holdstock, Jonathan Carroll and Steve Aylett spring to mind as writers who all use the fantasy story to question, among other things, our need to read fantasy stories! There are many fine, thoughtful, humane writers of literary fantasy, these days, whose ideas and prose stimulate as much as Camus, say, or Borges and who are enjoyed by discerning readers. This fantasy embraces intellectualism, loves ideas, is absolutely chock full of moral examination and questions of spiritual doubt and commitment. It enjoys an argument and it respects the intelligence of the reader.

That#s the background for the new Elric book. Elric has always questioned his situation and in The Dreamthief#s Daughter he also has a chance to argue with some real Nazis! It gives me a chance to examine some of those quasi-fascistic elements I mentioned. I hope it fulfills the first thing it#s supposed to do, which, as one reader described it, is to put you on a roller coaster that doesn#t stop till it hits the bumpers. It also hopes, in passing, to think a bit about the rise of Nazism, how we got there, how we might get there again, the attractions and delusions of totalitarian arguments, the nature of Law and Chaos.

I have always preferred to see the world in those subtler terms, borrowed mainly from Milton (who produced another fine fantasy with a great moral argument!) rather than employ the far less useful terms of Good and Evil.

We live in a world which depends upon contradiction and paradox for its very existence. Sometimes the best of us can take actions which result in terrible evil. Sometimes the worst of us do something which contributes some great good to humanity. Intention is one thing. Circumstances are another. We live in a modern world ruled by both luck and judgement and we have to embrace a whole set of ideas, if we are to survive well.

Sometimes complexity can be represented by simplicity, but never by simplification. The era of simple ideas we have just left behind was the bloodiest we have known. Chaos theory shows us simplicity in complexity. Nazism and other forms of bigotry elevated to political policy pretend to simplify. Theirs is the loud voice in the barroom, telling the military just to go in and bomb the buggers, or lock them all up or send them all to a desert island. We know from experience what complicated and sometimes devastating consequences these simple policies have.

Simple ideas attract those of us baffled by the world#s complexities and paradoxes, but real simplification results in a dumbed down and dysfunctional model of the world. It simply falls apart on us.

#We# didn#t bring down totatalitarian communism. It brought itself down. Totalitarian consumerism, of which we must always be wary, would also bring itself down. We can#t afford any kind of totalitarianism, can#t afford to take anything for granted, can#t afford to ignore reality. Reality isn#t simple. Fiction can be simpler, can offer a relief from that complex world. But no matter how it entertains and distracts us, the best fiction, in my view, whether fantastic or naturalistic, acknowledges those realities. There#s an urgent need for such realism. More than at any point in human history our planet#s future is now very much in our own hands. I can#t help feeling we#d be wise to embrace its complexity rather than pretend it doesn#t exist#

Michael Moorcock

Lost Pines, Texas.