Happy Birthday Michael Moorcock
michael moorcock Originally uploaded by Cat Sparx I can't let the day pass without wishing a very happy 70th Birthday to Michael Moorcock. Best known for his sword-and-sorcery Elric novels and his tales of the Eternal Champion (of which Elric is one aspect), Moorcock also wrote some of the darkest, funniest and most bizarre science fiction of all time. But wait! There's more! Moorcock was also one of the most influential editors of the science fiction New Wave, which completely reinvented science fiction in the 1960s. He edited New Worlds, which for years was the showcase for radical and disruptive sci-fi. Cool enough for you? He's also a political activist and a powerful political writer. Oh, and he also wrote a bunch of songs and created music, most famously in collaboration with the sort of sci-fi-geek-death-hippie band Hawkwind but also in many other projects over the years (my favorite is Hawkwind's "Sonic Attack," a truly creepy and uproariously hilarious sort of acid nightmare). Did I mention he all but invented steampunk with the brilliant The Warlord of the Air and its two even brillianter sequels, The Land Leviathan and The Steel Tsar? Or that I may have come to the conclusion that his Elric series actually may be a bigger influence on the esthetics of fantasy fiction than even Robert E. Howard? (In terms of influence they're both outstripped by Tolkien, of course -- but more about that momentarily). I could write reams of weird stream-of-consciousness Freud shit on this guy...but I've spent most of the day at a funeral and the rest of it driving there and back, so I am not much for deep thoughts at the moment. Perhaps most importantly, I ask your indulgence by insisting (at gunpoint if necessary) that, as soon as possible, at the very least you read Moorcock's The War Hound and the World's Pain, Breakfast In the Ruins, Behold The Man and the abovementioned Warlord and its sequels. Seriously. Trust me on this one. A relentless experimenter, Moorcock practically remade the way my mind worked with his wholesale reinvention of narrative time and space. If I had not read Michael Moorcock when I was in my early teens, I would not be the guy I am today; this fact might conceivably piss Moorcock off a bit, since one of his favored areas of political writing was (is?) as an antiporn activist and a great admirer of Andrew Dworkin (he interviews her here. But then, as a critic Moorcock can still cause outrage and consternation twenty years on with his 1989 essay Epic Pooh, in which he savages Tolkien, and his 1977 Starship Stormtroopers first published in Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review, in which he refers to: "Lovecraft, the misogynic racist...Heinlein, the authoritarian militarist...[and] Tolkein and that group of middle-class Christian fantasists who constantly sing the praises of bourgeois virtues and whose villains are thinly disguised working class agitators -- fear of the Mob permeates their rural romances."
When I read the latter essay, reprinted in 1984's The Opium General, I was mindfucked something fierce. Was this a science fiction and fantasy writer politically shit-talking science fiction and fantasy? Was this someone holding SFF writers responsible for their subtexts? To me, at the time, science fiction was utterly divorced from politics; in fact, I felt utterly divorced from politics, except for the fact that I rabidly hated Reagan and was quite sure he was going to drop the bomb on Russia any second and wipe us all off the face of the planet and why weren't all the adults freaking out about that shit? I can honestly say that Starship Stormtroopers was one of the first times I looked at fiction in the context of politics and thought something along the lines of, "Oh, that's why all the adults aren't freaking out about that shit." My brain was a mirror, and what I saw of Moorcock's political writing revised my thinking with a hammer. A quarter century later I'm still reading Michael Moorcock, and he still makes me think. I highly advise learning more about him at Wikipedia, or at his site Multiverse.org. Happy Birthday, guy. Now hit the bookstore, people -- The War Hound and the World's Pain isn't getting any younger.