Tolkien Rotates in Grave, Again. Junk mail from Hawthorne Village offers the Official Lord of the Rings Express Diesel Locomotive. This heirloom quality train—richly adorned with scenes and characters from the movie trilogy including Elven text and a working headlight on the diesel locomotive—will have you reliving this epic saga every time the train journeys around the tracks. One of Gandalf's fireworks notoriously whizzed past ‘like an express train', but...
Magazine Scene. Two new UK rivals to SFX are SciFiNow and Death Ray. In America, Thrilling Wonder Stories (dead since 1955) is being relaunched.
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As Others See Us III
From a droll list of alleged book-trade words: ‘"Gatsby” (n.) the twice-weekly enquiry about the possibility of a new book by Anne McCaffrey/Raymond Feist/Robert Rankin from a sad bastard.’ (The Bookseller, March)
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Thog's Masterclass
The Nose of Heisenberg Dept. ‘Big boogers of uncertainty were beginning to form.’ (Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End, 2006)
Dept of Chemical Arcana. ‘He wasn't a chemist, but he had spent a couple of years studying organic chemistry. Changing just one number or a couple of letters, he knew, could mean two very different compounds.’ (Ian Smith, The Blackbird Papers, 2004)
Whack-a-Simile Dept. ‘Pieces of a jigsaw puzzle began to pop into place like rabbits into holes at the sound of dog.’ (Peter Hawkins, ‘The Edge of Oblivion', New Worlds 102, Jan 1961)
Dept of Possibly Unfair Advantage. ‘Claudie Andre-Deshays ... had beaten hundreds of men to become her country's first spacewoman.’ (Brian Harvey, Russia in Space: The Failed Frontier?, 2001)
Equine Anatomy Dept. ‘Terrence knew he would have to stop several times and pick out his mare's hooves, but at least it wouldn't be the thick, forelock-deep goop that could suck the shoes off a horse...’ (Raymond Feist in Legends II, 2003)
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R.I.P.
Lloyd Alexander (1924-2007), US author best known for his 1964-68 Prydain sequence of YA Celtic fantasies beginning with The Book of Three and The Black Cauldron (title of the Disney adaptation), died on 17 May; he was 83.
Massimo Belardinelli (1938-2007), Italian cartoonist who was in the original 2000AD team (Ace Trucking, Dan Dare revival, Slaine), died in March aged 68.
Christopher ‘Jamie’ Bishop (1971-2007), US academic who created digital cover art for four books by his sf author father Michael Bishop, was killed in the 16 April shootings at Virginia Tech (where he taught German). He was 35.
Paul E. Erdman (1932-2007), Canadian writer whose bestselling thrillers included near-future borderline sf like The Last Days of America (1981), died on 23 April at age 74.
Bernard Gordon (1918-2007), US screenwriter who scripted the 1962 The Day of the Triffids, died on 11 May aged 88.
Dave Martin (?1934-2007), co-author with Bob Baker of eight 1970s Dr Who scripts—one introducing the dread K9—died earlier this year; he was 72.
Pat O'Shea (1931-2007, born Pat Shiels), author of The Hounds of the Mórrígan (1985—a fine, funny children's fantasy saturated with Irish myth—and a few lesser works, died on 3 May. She was 76.
Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), who should need no introduction, died on 11 April at age 84. Though often deceptively lightweight and laconic, his best sf was hard to forget: Player Piano (1951), The Sirens of Titan (1959), Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) ... Somehow, despite verbally distancing himself from ‘the file drawer labeled “Science Fiction” [ ... ] since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal', Vonnegut kept returning to the genre and his invented sf author Kilgore Trout, right up to his final satirical novel Timequake (1997).
Dick Vosburgh (1929-2007), comedy writer/broadcaster who voiced Captain Larry Dart in the Space Patrol puppet series (ABC/Rediffusion 1963-4), died on 18 April; he was 77.
Leslie Waller (1923-2007), US author who novelized Close Encounters of the Third Kind, died on 29 March aged 83.
Dave Wood (1936-2007), popular UK fan active in the 1950s/60s and again since 1983, died on 5 June; he was 70. His fanzine Xyster won a 1984 Nova Award. He was a friend.
Copyright © 2007 David Langford
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GUEST EDITORIAL—March of the Whiteshirts by Michael Moorcock
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In 1964, when Cyril Connolly published his influential book The Modern Movement, he was already quoting the likes of Spender as suggesting that modernism was already dead. That same year, when I took over New Worlds, Ballard and I were promoting William Burroughs (from whom the term ‘interzone’ was taken) as an example of ‘a new literature for the space age'. We argued that modernism had become a spent force and that it was as much a convention-bound genre as any other, including the SF genre. What we were hoping to see was a new kind of fiction which engaged with the present in its own terms, that effectively modernism (as exemplified today, for instance, in the work of Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis and others) was not a form capable of describing and exploring a new sensibility which had come with the dropping of the Atom Bomb on Hiroshima and the sending of men into space.
From everything that I have seen in the past forty years or so, I've no reason to believe that much has changed. Admittedly, modernist fiction limps along on automatic, as predictable and as nostalgic as the detective fiction of, say, Ian Rankin, and there remains an audience for it. That audience has always existed, since the days when Bentley ruled the library shelves (before the advent of the ‘six shilling novel’ and the first great flourishes of English modernism with the likes of James, Hardy, Conrad, Wells and Gissing and thin shades of Austen, Dickens or Ainsworth still dominated the best-seller lists of the time. The majority of science fiction and fantasy writers continue to turn out versions of the same stories which appeared in Astounding or Unknown Worlds, in the days when Campbell edited them and large numbers of people continue to reward them for offering no more than minor variations on the mixture as before, whether they are concerned with the vastness of intergalactic space or the odd doings of the denizens of fairyland. The majority of authors who confront the present, rather than exemplify it, are not hugely rewarded for their pains and those who reflect the fundamental conservatism of the reading public are usually far better rewarded. Yet the likes of Ballard, whose career somewhat resembles that of his predecessor Conrad, continue to work and continue to find an audience. Many such authors have fewer places to publish and usually those places, as they were in Conrad's day, are magazines, traditionally where readers impatient with the status quo go to look for their fiction.
We are living in times of Whiteshirt fascism, when our liberties and altruism are under sustained attack from forces which take forms the likes of Pohl and Kornbluth, Bester, Sheckley and, yes, Phil Dick predicted they would take in stories like The Space Merchants, Tiger! Tiger!, Mindswap and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Forces impressively described by William Burroughs, who took his inspiration chiefly from that generation of SF writers and added his own particular genius for prose and structure making him so influential on my generation, finding precise metaphors in the language and practises of the drug culture. As a consequence, we require a fiction which is even more able to confront those forces, see them for what they are and find a language powerful enough to resist them. I have never been in any doubt, especially since Margaret Thatcher and her people changed the meaning of the language of liberal-humanism, that rhetoric is perhaps the most powerful tool of all in defeating totalitarianism in whatever guise it presents itself (either as Marxism or Monetarism). Without a precise dialectic, a language which exactly sums up the world we live in, we have no means of defeating what threatens us. Without it, we can have no effective politics and will continue (as most of us do today) to use the imprecise terms of an earlier generation, which somehow fail to describe our dilemma.
Of course, language is not important only where it relates to our politics, but there is a p
erhaps more general debate which goes on all the time and which is exemplified by the fiction we read and write and how we receive that fiction. Burroughs, who invented so many terms besides ‘interzone', understood this perhaps better than anyone else of his generation. It was why the likes of Ballard and myself celebrated him as soon as we began reading those little green and black Olympia Press books which began to appear from Girodious in the 1950s and for which I was arrested by the Special Branch when I began smuggling them into the UK; why I, and others, defended him so passionately during the famous ‘Ugh’ debate of the early 1960s when the likes of Victor Gollancz and Edith Sitwell, who had so much invested in the modernism of their time, attacked him in the Times Literary Supplement. It is why we have to continue supporting Burroughs and those he inspired in these reactionary times, where almost every book on ‘front tables’ in Waterstone's and Barnes and Noble absolutely stinks of the worst kind of nostalgia, with writers perpetually recycling the ideas of their fathers and grandfathers, even to the extent of turning out sequel upon sequel of Jane Austen novels or reviving Edgar Allen Poe characters and offering this offal, so long past its sell-by date, as ‘post-modernism'.
What Burroughs offered us, when he was finally published in the UK and US around 1964, wasn't post-modernism but a kind of anti-modernism, a way of condensing narrative. And he offered us one form of language we could use to attack the kind of conservatism already taking shape at a time when most of us were basking in the last summers of the Golden Age, the final decade before our economic circumstances, which offered us so much hope and optimism, such a willingness to take risks (and risk is at the very core of real art), were to change and become formalised in what we now term ‘Thatcherism’ or ‘Reaganism'. We now have a deeper understanding of where those terrible notions were to lead us, with the peace, prosperity and very existence of the planet threatened more than at any other time in our history. It is only in Interzone, where our visions are given flesh, that we can ever hope to find the means of resisting and perhaps even defeating Doctor Benway and his team-mates. We should make the most of our chance not only by keeping magazines like this alive but by filling them with fiction which will help us exemplify, confront and overcome the Whiteshirts wherever they set up their standards.
Copyright © 2007 Michael Moorcock
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STARING DOWN THE WITCHES—Interview by Andrew Hedgecock
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Andrew Hedgecock talks to the writer who introduced him to entropy, Alfred Bester and armchair anarchism...
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When I was 13 a patronising librarian took great pleasure in telling me I was too young to borrow Michael Moorcock's The Final Programme, so I got my dad to get it out on his ticket. Buoyed by the pleasure of putting one across the staff of Doncaster Public Library, I plunged into the first novel about the lives and times of Moorcock's protean, time-tripping antihero Jerry Cornelius. To be honest, I think I'd been drawn to it because I thought Cornelius might be a cross between James Bond and Tarot, hero of early 70s children's TV fantasy series, Ace of Wands. He wasn't, and I struggled to make sense of the language, themes and bizarre arc of the story.
But I was hooked. And for me The Final Programme fulfilled the same function as the severed ear in David Lynch's Blue Velvet—it was a ticket into another world. Before long, I was delving into the dictionary for the meaning of ‘entropy', ‘obsidian’ and ‘hermaphrodite'; scouring the encyclopaedia for references to Le Corbusier, Hindu cosmology and unified field theory; and pestering my older sister with questions about LSD, Zoot Money and Courrèges.
Before long I was voraciously consuming any other Moorcock books I could lay my hands on, and catching up with the artists, writers and ideas that inspired him. Over the years—through his roles as reviewer, critic and editor of the iconoclastic New Worlds—Moorcock led me to a huge range of writers, including: Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd, M. John Harrison, Fritz Leiber, Pamela Zoline, Thomas M. Disch, James Sallis, Joanna Russ, Alfred Bester, Philip Wylie, Maurice Richardson (author of the fiercely imaginative and witty Exploits of Engelbrecht), feminist polemicist Andrea Dworkin and anarchist activist Stuart Christie.
It wasn't The Sex Pistols who sparked the inchoate interest in anarchism that led me to read Malatesta and Kropotkin, it was Michael Moorcock. It would be ludicrous to claim Moorcock led me towards a design for living, but he's indirectly responsible for my capacity to resist the designs for living others try to impose on me.
And he's provided me with some of the most engaging, amusing and enjoyable reading experiences I've had over the past thirty-odd years: among the contenders for my desert island booklist from his output of around 100 books would be the Between the Wars (Colonel Pyat) series, his secret history of the twentieth century; Mother London, his mythic and elegiac re-imagining of city of his birth; Behold the Man, the story of a time traveller who takes the role of Christ; The Brothel in Rosenstrasse, a complex examination of morality and eroticism; Gloriana, an alternate history story riffing on Gormenghast and The Faery Queen; and The War Hound and the World's Pain, an underrated reworking of the Grail myth.
But my entry into Moorcock's world came through Jerry Cornelius. So when I got the chance to talk to the author—now based in Texas—about his work, Jerry was the obvious place to begin.
Since the 1960s Jerry and his troupe of adversaries and associates have provided Moorcock with a way of dealing with the social, political and technological upheavals of our era, beginning with the threats and possibilities of the 1960s and the diminished dreams of the 1970s.
But, for me, Jerry's finest hour came in 1984, a couple of years after the first edition of Interzone, with The Alchemist's Question, a story that seemed to capture better than any other the creeping authoritarianism of Britain in the mid-1980s. At that point, Moorcock seemed to be ‘retiring’ Jerry for the foreseeable future, but went on to resurrect him in the late 1990s, to highlight the insanity and hypocrisy of the era of NuLabour and Neo-conservatism. So what makes
Jerry Cornelius such a versatile and durable vehicle for making sense of the times in which we live?
"He is a technique—as M. John Harrison first observed—before he is a character. It's what makes him so malleable, so able to observe and act as both an exemplar and a critic of his times. He is a character, of course, which is why he works, in a way the characters of Molière or the Commedia dell'Arte do not work for us, these days. He is not the representation of a virtue or a vice, but of qualities which might be virtuous or vicious, depending upon the context. And so I place him in the context (the Middle East, for instance, or Bush's America) and see how he will act and think.
"I use quotations for narrative purpose and to form an ironic counterpoint. These are probably what are misunderstood most about the JC stories. People failed to realise that use of real people and places, too, are there for narrative. As they are used, for instance, in Ballard's ‘condensed novels'. People say there is no ‘story’ because the story is contained within all the elements but not constructed in a way which, I believed, made the medium the message. This was the problem originally and it breaks from modernism's constructions, which became conventions by the time I was writing in the early ‘60s. Jerry is the narrative and we take the conventional diagnoses for granted in the stories. These are sometimes referred to obliquely by characters or through quotation."
Moorcock is currently working on a new JC story, provisionally titled Modem Times, which continues themes found in the original Cornelius books, but deals even more with ‘virtuality'.
"It will deal with the tendency to construct fantasies which we then attempt to make reality—the kind of abstraction which allows people to refer to dead people as ‘collateral damage'. I think monetarism, consumerism are fantasy constructs. Like fascism in the ‘20s and ‘30s they seem to work and to be real, but are an attempt to impose simplicity on a complex world. That is why such systems alw
ays fail, because ultimately the reality refuses to obey the created rules. In fact the more the rules are imposed, the less well reality responds. Social dysfunction is the result. I believe, at present, that the US and UK lead the world in this dysfunction. However, I'm curious about what degree of reality can be created, if at all. Jerry has always lived in a world where he has to find his own narrative, his own reality, to counter the simplistic narratives of those in power."
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An element of anger
Moorcock's oblique approach to his themes has led to many of his stories accreting new layers of meaning in the years since they were written. I've recently returned to his Dancers at the End of Time trilogy, first published between 1972 and 1976, and my response to the stories has changed entirely.
In the ‘70s, the childlike amorality of characters that party, and carelessly consume natural resources, as their universe dies had a sort of insane charm. It's still funny but, as the planet rushes towards ecological calamity, the humour is now tinged with a much darker resonance.
"Clearly, those stories have taken on a life of their own because people say they have. People see them in different lights. When this happens, I feel I've succeeded. It's not as if we didn't know we were already abusing resources and creating some kind of disaster when I wrote them. I understand two ways to offer an exaggerated or condensed narrative: one is through fantasy (if you like) and the other is through comedy. Both condense events to achieve their effects. A fantastical comedy seems to do the job especially well. I was interested to hear Martin Amis telling a radio interviewer that fantasy only worked if it was short—a few pages. That particular interviewer said nothing, but I happened to know Dancers were his favourite books.
"Comedy, I think, whether Cornelius or Dancers, allows one to exaggerate whilst best calling on the reader's willing suspension of disbelief. I also think good comedy must contain an element of anger, or at least strong concern about the world's follies. For me anger often translates itself into comedy, as with the scene I've mentioned in the past, where I burst into tears at Felix Green's pictures of burning children in Vietnam and within minutes was writing a comic scene transferring Vietnam to Ladbroke Grove. Presumably the comedy remains effective if one's anger is well-directed..."
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #211 Page 2