‘Most fiction bores me these days’: Michael Moorcock on life and the many worlds he’s created

Part of me expects to go on forever like some of my characters,” Michael Moorcock says. He is tall, and bearded, and speaks with an accent that is somehow of an England that is slightly lost.

And what characters have sprung from his mind! Elric of Melnibone, the pale and wan otherworldly albino with a black sword that eats souls, who Moorcock has revisited in his new book, a prequel adventure called The Citadel of Forgotten Myths (8 December).

Then we have Dorian Hawkmoon, the far-future German prince waging war against the fascistic, imperialistic island state of Granbretan. Jerry Cornelius, the hip and sexy secret agent swinging his way through a psychedelic London.

Wildly different protagonists, yet thanks to Moorcock’s overarching concept of a multiverse for much of his fictional output, all connected… and even the same, all aspects of his “Eternal Champion” existing to maintain the balance between order and chaos across the many facets of reality.

Well, Moorcock did hang out with the bands Hawkwind and Blue Öyster Cult and embrace all the swinging decades had to offer. “In the 1960s and 1970s, if I hadn’t thought I could go on forever, I don’t think I would have made it to my eighties,” he says. “I only feel my age in my body sometimes. I feel about 35 in spirit.”

Michael John Moorcock, science fiction and fantasy author, literary novelist, magazine editor, bon vivant, rock star, and anarchist, was born in South London, on 18 December 1939. He grew up not only in the shadow the Second World War but in the ruins of it.

“We were in the main zone for V1 and V2 bombs, so my world was highly malleable,” recalls Moorcock. “A building that was there the previous day would be gone next morning. I loved the paths people created through the ruins. That is probably my main source of nostalgia. I have no interest in military history but I’m very curious about what leads to war and how people behave during one.”

There was also conflict of a more personal and domestic nature, too. Most men were conscripted into the forces, apart from those with essential work on the home front. Moorcock’s father Arthur was one of those, employed as an engineer with an aerospace company. Most of his co-workers were women, and evidently the temptation was too much to bear. He, in Moorcock’s words, “ran off in 1945, when I was five.” It was on Christmas Day, a week after Moorcock’s birthday.

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Perhaps because of his curiosity about how people behave in war, Moorcock seems philosophical about this — perhaps even, in a way, thankful. “Best thing he could have done for me,” he asserts, adding that his father was “a dull bloke. He avoided promotion if he could.” Moorcock senior didn’t leave much behind when he abandoned his family, but he did leave four books, two of which were by Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs. “It’s fair to say he provided the circumstances and materials of my forthcoming career,” says Moorcock.

In the absence of a father for her only child, Moorcock’s mother June stepped up, getting a job at a timber yard and working her way up to become a director of the company. “She was a bit flaky, but she loved me to bits,” he says fondly. Arthur might have taken his MG car, the fruits of the Moorcocks being part of the rising middle classes born into the 1920s, but June’s drive and hard work saw her buy their home and provide a sound, secure base from which to provide for her son. Perhaps she also saw the potential in him to enjoy her own unfollowed dreams – Moorcock calls her a “great mythologiser”, given to fanciful tales and outright lies, talking intimately of far-flung places she’d never visited.

He says that after his father left, “I had a very happy childhood, all in all. I could read before going to school. All kinds of fiction. I produced my first magazine, “Outlaw’s Own”, by the time I was nine. I wanted to be a writer from a very early age and my mother was determined for me to fulfil my ambition.”

As a child, Moorcock had decided he wanted to be a journalist, and at the age of 11 or 12 went to Pitman’s College to learn typing and shorthand. He began to produce his own amateur magazines, or fanzines: “One was devoted to old boys’ story papers and books in general, and one was for fantasy and science fiction, especially Edgar Rice Burroughs.”

“My mother had given me self-confidence from the beginning,” he says. “She sent me to a posh school and supported all my literary endeavours.”

Posh school notwithstanding, Moorcock and formal eduction didn’t really get on very well. Post-war Britain didn’t hold the same excitement as the war years had for a small boy exploring ruined London. “I found peacetime dull and school bored the crap out of me,” he says. “As a result I was regularly in trouble with schools and was expelled not because I was ‘bad’ but because I was bored stiff. Happily for me my mother continued to support me in my ambitions to write and produce magazines. I left school at 15 and by 16 was assistant editor on a juvenile national magazine and by 17 was editor, promoting my own policies.”

That magazine was Tarzan Adventures, his editorship was the fruit of an obsession gifted him by his absent father who was otherwise interested only in cars and motorbikes.

For his Edgar Rice Burroughs fanzine he interviewed the then editor of Tarzan Adventures, published by the magazine giant IPC, and was disappointed to find him “an old hack” who had no real interest in the subject matter.

But the editor moved on and on the back of his Burroughs fanzine work Moorcock was contacted by the publishers to ask if he would like the post of assistant editor at Tarzan Adventures. That first appointment would mean he would go on to edit a magazine called New Worlds, and usher in a revolution in science fiction writing.

New Worlds magazine had been around in various guises since the 1930s, and while it was the home of the British version of what might be called classic, Golden Age science fiction, concerned with space exploration, aliens and the far future of mankind, it also published early work by such luminaries of the scene as Brian Aldiss, John Wyndham, John Brunner and Arthur C Clarke. And in 1956 New Worlds published the first story that JG Ballard ever sold, “Escapement”. This was significant because it sowed the seeds for the tone of Moorcock’s take-over of the magazine in 1964, and the beginning of what became known as the New Wave of science fiction. The New Wave would be more experimental, would take a more literary approach, and be far more inclusive than the largely white, male-dominated era that had gone before.

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”It was boring,” says Moorcock of the science fiction status quo. “It showed little interest in style or character or, indeed, adults.”

Moorcock, Ballard and a Birmingham-born writer called Barrington J Bayley had for a long time by the mid-sixties been lamenting the genre. New Worlds was going to be their cure for an ailing industry.

“Barry Bayley, Jimmy Ballard and myself met in pubs for years, planning a magazine which would prepare the way for literary fiction for the future,” he tells me. “We’d write stories as if our readers were familiar with all we wrote about. No explanations or rationales.”

Moorcock wrote a sizeable amount of fiction for New Worlds, mostly under the pen name James Colvin. He also made a conscious effort to break the stranglehold on the genre of the white male author. Writers of colour such as Samuel R Delany were published in New Worlds, and the New Wave introduced or gave better platforms to many women writers such as Pamela Zoline, Judith Merrill, Joanna Russ and Ursula K Le Guin.

Moorcock says reading Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics” articles in the Evergreen Review counter-cuture magazine gave him the political language to try to change the landscape of science fiction. He became close friends with Millett, and with radical feminist Andrea Dworkin. Perhaps being brought up by a strong-willed single mother in some way informed his 1960s feminism ally-ship.

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Undergoing a variety of owners and bail-out grants, New Worlds burned brightly for the second half of the decade but limped to a close as a periodical in early 1970. But it had done its job, creating a new landscape that allowed writers who had previously been “gatekeepered” out of the genre, to flourish. New Worlds appeared sporadically as a quarterly and then even more semi-regularly, and eventually the name disappeared in 1979.

The 1979 edition of Who’s Who In Science Fiction, by Brian Ash, and published by Sphere in the year that Moorcock turned 40, calls him a “germinal influence” on the New Wave, and says “he encouraged experimental styles and approaches which sometimes read more like hard-core pornography than software science”. Ash notes that New Worlds had to be “rescued with an Arts Council grant in 1967”, and that WH Smiths banned the magazine because of the “salty language” in Norman Spinrad’s story “Bug Jack Barron”. The entry also observes that with regards to the science fiction with which Moorcock made his name: “He now views the genre with distaste”.

Could that have been true? “I viewed most genres, including literary fiction, as moribund,” he says. “I remain interested in well-done fiction, preferably outside genre. Most fiction bores me these days and I tend to read 18th- and 19th-century literary and popular fiction. I like reading fiction which has not yet learned to become self-conscious.”

Moorcock has been married three times. His first was to Hilary Bailey, the editor and critic. They married in 1962 and had two daughters together quite quickly — Sophie and Katherine. A son Max came along a little later. They separated in 1978 and Moorcock was briefly married to the artist Jill Riches, who illustrated some of his book covers. He married Linda Steele, an American, in 1983, with who he now splits his time between Texas and Paris.

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At the time of his first marriage, Moorcock moved to Notting Hill in London. It’s fair to say Moorcock embraced the sixties outside of driving forward the New Wave of science fiction. The houses either side of where he lived were brothels, and he remembers the arrest of his dope dealer causing widespread dismay in the community.

Notting Hill had a large West Indian population then, and was often the focus of right-wing attention. Moorcock and a friend infiltrated a fascist organisation that turned out to be run by a white-haired old lady who poured tea from a pot and held forth with her racist and anti-Semitic opinions. It further turned out that absolutely everyone else in the gathering, aside from the elderly host, were also left-wingers who had infiltrated the group. Moorcock joined the Race Relations Council and lobbied for legislation to make racism against the law.

He was being a father and a husband and editing magazines and writing novels. He was writing novels at a terrific pace. He wrote his Corum books in just three days apiece. He didn’t have time to read them before sending them off to his editor, who didn’t have time to read them before sending them to the printer.

And then there were the bands. Moorcock was friends with and collaborated with Blue Öyster Cult and the group he is most often associated with, Hawkwind. He and Hawkwind appeared in the background of the movie of the first Jerry Cornelius novel, The Final Programme, in 1973.

“Essentially both bands asked me for material, and that’s how we began working together,” says Moorcock. “Some of them were readers of mine. Hawkwind were friends through Frendz, the underground paper.”

Hawkwind’s 1985 album The Chronicle of the Black Sword directly referenced Elric, and their track “The Black Corridor” used lines from Moorcock’s novel of the same name. Similarly, he wrote the lyrics to Blue Öyster Cult’s track “The Black Blade”, among others.

Since 1975 Moorcock has recorded with his own band, The Deep Fix. Moorcock’s written mythology winds through his music; The Deep Fix was the title of a short story collection he wrote in the 1960s as James Colvin. It’s also the name of the band that Jerry Cornelius fronted. The latest album Live From the Terminal Cafe was released in 2019. He still plays live but these days, he says, largely limits himself to the harmonica.

In 1988, Moorcock produced the book Mother London. This was not one of his slim fantasy books rattled off in a few days, it was a huge beast of a literary novel, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. It is a love letter to Moorcock’s native city, and follows the lives of three outpatients from a mental health hospital as they navigate a London where time roils like an ocean rather than flows like a river, detailing their – and the city’s – lives from the Blitz, into which Moorcock was born, to the late 1980s.

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Moorcock feels he has been fortunate enough to not be pigeonholed as a writer only working in science fiction and fantasy. In 1976 he wrote Gloriana, a re-imagining of the reign of Elizabeth I through the lens of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, and Byzantium Endures in 1981, the picaresque adventures of a young man in Tsarist Russia. Both earned Moorcock his “literary fiction” stripes and paved the way for Mother London, a book he had been wanting to write for almost 30 years before it eventually appeared.

The writer doesn’t have a huge amount of truck with genre distinctions anyway, and the literary fiction tag is no different. “I suppose I think of it as a genre with modernist and even post-modernist tropes,” he says. “I wasn’t really pigeonholed even before Gloriana and Byzantium Endures. In fact, that didn’t happen until they discovered they could sell a lot of my ‘lurid paperbacks’ and the critics got confused! Up until then, I was reviewed frequently as general fiction.

“With Mother London, I had wanted to write about London from about 1960, and I wrote the book as soon as I had made sure it couldn’t be read as a generational novel.”

Never doing what’s expected has been Moorcock’s watchword throughout his career.

His most recent novel – before The Citadel of Forgotten Myths – appeared in 2015. The Whispering Swarm again has London as its focus; indeed, looked at from one angle it’s the nearest readers have to his memoirs, detailing his life from the Second World War to editing New Worlds. But twist it slightly in the light and it becomes a whole different beast, a truly Moorcockian tale that departs reality when the young author discovers a hidden city called Alsacia, which exerts an almost irresistible pull on him and draws him away from the mundane world again and again.

And now he’s been pulled back into his own fantasy worlds, with Elric and his companion Moonglum. His Elric books were optioned for TV three years ago. Elric is one of Moorcock’s enduring characters and, with the publication of a new book, it does feel like the pair of them really will go on forever.

‘The Citadel of Forgotten Myths’ by Michael Moorcock is out 8 December, Gollancz