From fantasy to... what?

[The-Hunter]

Mr. Moorcock--

It's been said allready that I'm a fan of the Elric saga, but it's not yet been understood that this is more or less an irregularity in my favored reading. I liked the Lord of the Rings, The Sword of Truth ( if you haven't read them, I gladly suggest them ), and your works, though anything beyond that I've experienced never seems quite palatable enough for me. My question concerns your reason for writing fantasy, and if there are any other types of literature you pursue?

[Michael Moorcock]

Fantasy is just one form I use (and use, I think, has meaning here). As you'll see from the bibliographies and other strands, I move regularly between 'realism' and 'fantasy'. I've written pretty much all kinds of fiction, even comedy thrillers, and my Pyat series concerns the Nazi
holocaust and its implications and how it came about. Mother London is a literary novel, which was on the short list for the Whitbread when it appeared, as is King of the City. There are links between all my books so that what is 'symbolic' in a fantasy novel becomes 'real' in a literary
novel.

[The-Hunter]

Great, thanks a lot. I'm going to have to check these other pieces out!

[Michael Moorcock]

Hope you enjoy 'em. The American edition of Byzantium Endures, by the way, was heavily censored and NOT RECOMMENDED! The narrator is anti-semitic and naturally has anti-semitic remarks to make, many of which Random House cut from their edition. The book has yet to give offence to any Jewish person, who knows exactly where it's coming from, but there you go... King of the City is the most easily available in the USA at the moment, but most of the literary fiction is available in England or via Amazon.UK

[Doc]

If I can be presumptuous enough to add-

Thanks to MM, I read both the American and British editions of Byzantium Endures (although at remarkably different times in my life), and Pyat is much more interesting in the UK edition.

[Michael Moorcock]

Weird, isn't it, what people make of political correctness. They just don't get WHY something is wrong and in what context it might be right.
Just like people who want to censor Mark Twain.
On the other hand, I do feel that ERB would be better if some of the racism was censored from current editions of those books, only because it serves no purpose for us to know that he reflected the general racism of his day. Even then, of course, he wasn't PROMOTING racism.
I also had a weird review from Ziauddin Sardar, a regular contributor toThe New Statesman, who read Jerusalem Commands as an attack on Islam! He clearly wasn't aware of the number of Arab books (for instance) I had reviewed and the attempts I had made in The Daily Telegraph (among other places) to get people to understand the complexity and depth of Islamic culture! I doubt if to this day he doesn't continue to believe I'm some sort of redneck anti-Islamic writer.
On the other hand, as I've said elsewhere, I have never been accused of anti-Semitism by Jewish people (although there is one exception, when I was doing a reading in Leeds of Jerusalem Commands -- an old Jewish lady had come along to hear me, thinking I was reading a travel book about Jerusalem and at the end of the reading when it's question time lifts her hand. 'Yes, madam ?' I say. 'Mr Moorcock,' she asks mildly,
'What have you got against the Jews...' Freddie Earlle was there, having been playing Pyat, and he cracked up). My argument against censorship is that if there are loonies and racists out there, we might as well know who they are -- though I must admit some of the stuff they publish is stomach-turning and capable, in my experience, of doing real harm. By and large, however, it's like Mel Gibson's dad's stuff -- so
out to lunch only someone already out to lunch could possibly believe a word of it.

[titmouser]

Nice one.

The whole debate on race and political correctness seems very rum to me. I'm constantly hearing from the papers and politicians that we (ie in the UK) live in a multicultural society; to me, it sounds like a mantra that people think they can make true if they only repeat it often enough. I live in one of the more ethnically diverse areas of London, itself a pretty diverse place, but I notice more and more just how much the different communities keep to themselves (or ourselves, I should say...). One of the pubs that I pass every evening is split straight down the middle - black people in the public bar, white in the saloon bar. And this is by mutual consent - it's not as if it's got 'blacks only' over one door and 'whites only' over the other.

And the people who fall over themselves to see racism in others (like yer man Mr Sardar) aren't helping matters, they're often closing off avenues of debate.

That's my tupenny worth, anyway.

[Doc]

I doubt if to this day he doesn't continue to believe I'm some sort of redneck anti-Islamic writer.

Hopefully you haven't been in Texas so long that people now resort to calling you a redneck. Is there such a thing as a British redneck? I thought you guys were only redCOATS :lol:

[Michael Moorcock]

The term's well-known in England and is a useful one for describing a certain kind of mentality, probably better than 'peasant' or some such, since we don't have much in the way of peasants, by and large. That's why we're having so much trouble recruiting for the redcoats, maybe...