The Dancers at the End of Time

[Anonymous]

I don't know if there are many out there who count your "End of Time" books among their favorites, but I know I am one. I am curious to know if you have any plans for doing anymore "End of Time" novels or stories?

See a short simple question...bet you're surprised...I know I am..I usually tend to just babble on and on...it reminds me of the time....

[Post terminated...managerial presence detected]

[Michael Moorcock]

Nope. There's such a thing as extending a joke too far. I prefer to emulate Faulty Towers! The stories all depend on certain paradoxes and I think it would be a mistake to continue them any further. Sorry, pard!

[Anonymous]

Well you can't blame a guy for trying...Keep up the great work

[Anonymous]

Finished Dancers' SF Masterworks Edition on Sunday. What a ride! I continue to be dumbfounded and, to no small extent, poisonously jealous of your expertise with the written word.

By a great stroke of luck I happened across Blood: A Southern fantasy that same day and I'm ploughing through it; highly intriguing...

[Doc]

By a great stroke of luck I happened across Blood: A Southern fantasy that same day and I'm ploughing through it; highly intriguing...

Stick with it, Sparhawk. It's a truly amazing work. You might find it even better after you read the other two volumes in the second ether series.

[Michael Moorcock]

Much obliged for your kind comments! I'll be interested to see what you think of Blood and War Amongst the Angels. Some sf reviewers seemed to think I was writing parody of space stories in the Billy Bob Begg episodes. Nothing was further from my mind. Thinking about these episodes, however, I can see the influence of William Burroughs more than will otherwise be found in my stuff. People crazed by a thousand irreconcilable paradoxes!

[DeeCrowSeer]

Having just finished War Amongst the Angels, I'd just like to say how much I loved all three books in the series. I especially enjoyed the Second Ether sections, and didn't take them for parodies at all... I thought they were unique, and lapped them up.

I haven't read a great deal of Burroughs, despite frequently trying to name drop him, but I also found a certain resonance in the Cornelius books with Naked Lunch, if only for the fact that everyone is working as an "agent", but no one is entirely sure which side is which... or if there are really any sides at all!

One day I intend to write a "thank you" post that will make the very trees blush, but for now I'll just hijack this one and say that the more of your work I read, the more impressed I become by the breadth of scales you traverse, and the number of genres your writing claims with enviable ease.

Thank you.

D...

[Anonymous]

Have arrived at the second Oakenhurst POV part, "codes" I think. As for the Corsairs, the two parts I've read thus far hint at what would have been an interesting whole, which is a little sad to dwell on.

Am bidding for the Cornelius quartet, Nomad of the Time Streams Trilogy, and Adventures of Catherine and Una on e-bay. I've heard a lot about Cornelius, and flicking to random passages in Cornelius books I find I feel somewhat bemused.

Blurbs I find on the internet are... cryptic:

"In (The Final Programme) he fights out a grim vendetta in a French chateau, guns his way through the fleshy jungle of a devastated London to a laughable clue in the icy wastes of Sweden, tackles the sinister Miss Brunner and throws a vast party that lasts for months in Ladbroke Grove, and finally (in a high state of sexual ambivalence) leads a horde of happy pilgrims to their death, like lemmings, in the sea, until he (or she) is the only man (or woman) left on earth..."
:? :?:

I think I can hear Cornelius-philes laughing at my naivete already. Just have to wait and see what happens.

[Michael Moorcock]

The Cornelius books were my first full-blooded attempt to deal with the problem of the medium being the message -- or how conventional messages are drawn from conventional structures, no matter how hard you try to subvert them. For the same reason I wrote Mother London the way I did, because my friend Angus Wilson had found with his great novel No Laughing Matter that, no matter how many pointers he included in the book, people still chose to see it as a kind of nostalgic family saga similar to Galsworthy. What he was actually doing was what the title suggested -- showing how the British tend to makes jokes out of what they don't want to deal with, be it homosexuality or the rise of the Nazis.
This method of working doesn't make you into a bestseller, unless you have the business sense of Sylvia Beach behind you or some ayatollah
kindly makes you the target of the year, but it does seem to give what you write a certain amount of longevity. Cornelius himself might seem amoral, but the books themselves are moral enough, I think. They have a lot to do with finding identity in a world of dangerous lies and fast changing social and political environments. But they were also designed to be enjoyed. I have an old-fashioned sense that my job is to entertain and not instruct the reader, but that I also have to pass on my impressions of the world and its problems. The Cornelius books were also designed not to propose one moral interpretation on the material, but to encourage the reader to look at it and come up with ideas of their own. Ultimately, in terms of structure, they describe one character's journey (Jerry's) through what it's probably fair to call a post-modern multiverse.

[zakt]

Michael Moorcock wrote:

Cornelius himself might seem amoral, but the books themselves are moral enough, I think.

But given the timespan they were written over, and your age at the time(s), Mike - did they become more "moral" as you matured and the times went sour? Final programme strikes me as being energetically optimistic, Cure, Assassin (especially) and Muzak as being much more bedded in reality, and in society.

[Doc]

The Cornelius books were my first full-blooded attempt to deal with the problem of the medium being the message -- or how conventional messages are drawn from conventional structures, no matter how hard you try to subvert them.

This sounds almost exactly like what your friend David Harvey would write about them, as well.

Cornelius himself might seem amoral, but the books themselves are moral enough, I think. They have a lot to do with finding identity in a world of dangerous lies and fast changing social and political environments. .

I think this makes them really prescient, as well. I'm not sure if anyone could have predicted how relevant Jerry's stories would remain. To me, they resonate with today as much (if not more) as they do with the 60s and 70s.

I wonder if the people who were writing stories about 2004's great space frontiers and living computers while you were writing Jerry's original stories feel a little sad now, given how wrong so many of them were so far off, and seeing how well Jerry has aged.

[Michael Moorcock]

Well, it was about twelve years between the first and the last, wasn't it ?
I thought the ending of Muzak, though rooting the character himself thoroughly in reality, was pretty optimistic. I think I was pretty high on the sixties, though, in those ten days in January 1965 when I wrote The Final Programme and that particular age was over by 1977 when Muzak came out. In fact, I hadn't thought of it before, the books did span pretty much the exact period of what you might call the Beatles era,
up until the coming of punk. In spite of Vietnam and all that, I was still conscious that I was living in a Golden Age that was never likely to be reproduced in my lifetime. As proved the case. I welcomed the punk era, too, and had many good friends in that particular movement, but 1963 to 1976, say, was a time of enormous optimism, it's true.

[Doc]

To clarify a point in my last post. I mean no disrespect to the people who were writing about a future that didn't turn out like they imagined. It takes guts to put your ideas out there to see if they stand the test of time.

Besides they can't help it if they weren't bright enought to create Jerry and his stories.

[Michael Moorcock]

I've noticed this in many cases -- that those who were writing predictive sf when those of us on NW were rejecting it and concentrating on the present were actually pretty wrong about the future, whereas those of us who were attempting to grapple with the present, seem to have been pretty accurate about the future. But we were also writing parables and one intention, I'd suggest, of the parable is to try to avert the problem you're dealing with. Certainly nobody wanted the future to turn out the way it did (at its worst) yet by observing the seeds being sewn, say, in 1975, it's ironic that these writers were able to make pretty good guesses at the nature of the crop, as it were. I've argued for some time that we're living in a Philip K. Dick world, but I guess we'd better hope it doesn't turn TOO much into a J.G.Ballard world. Jerry, at least, still knows how to have fun as the apocalypse, or something like it, goes on all around him. And that's the main thing, eh...? :?

[zakt]

MM wrote:

I thought the ending of Muzak, though rooting the character himself thoroughly in reality, was pretty optimistic.

Yeah, I wasn't trying to imply pessimism in the later books, more sensing that Final Programme was, as you suggest about yourself, "high" on the potentialities of the 60s, whereas the later books were more grounded. Muzak always struck me as being truly a comedy, in that it's about the resolution of Jerry with his world, a coming to terms rather than an escape into fantasy.