Gloriana - Communism and Facism

[Nizam]

Mr M

Was Gloriana a way of putting on paper in a fiction your own ideas of how you think politics should be practiced?

The reason I'm asking is that the two main characters seem to represent very distinct types of political atitude and an interpretation of their inherent weaknesses - Gloriana represents the Left, someone who is completely selfless yet is utterly misserable while Quire is on the right of the political spectrum, totally self-serving and as a consequence a source of misery for everyone else. Their intimate union in the end of the story seems to indicate that your idea of a perfect political system is a compromise between the left and right.

I guess my second question is are you political views still the same as when you wrote this book or have you changed? Would you have given it a different ending if you wrote it today?

[Michael Moorcock]

The book was really a discussion of pre-Enlightenment politics and didn't really reflect my own views, save one that's common in all my books -- the search for the balance between Law and Chaos, Vice and Virtue and so on. The book, as I explain in the upcoming new Warner edition, was more a dialogue with Spencer of The Fairy Queene than a description of my own ideal State. It's neo-Platonic, that culture, you'll notice, in keeping with certain late Renaissance thinking.