Writers honor Michael Moorcock, SFWA's latest grand master
Our first message is from the author of AMERICAN GODS, the 2002 Nebula Award Winner for Best Novel -- Neil Gaiman.Link (Thanks, Freddie Freelance!)Neil -- "Mike Moorcock changed the inside of my head. I read STORMBRINGER when I was nine, and that was pretty much that. My pocket money went on Moorcock books -- which were gloriously being issued and reissued back then -- and I read them and took what I could from them. It's not long until you have a multiverse in your twelve-year-old mind, and you learn that every hero is the Eternal Champion, and suddenly you're puzzling over Jerry Cornelius stories, with your head going places it hasn't gone before.
When people ask me about my influences, I tend to forget Mike, much in the way that people listing the things that were important to them growing up, fail to list the earth, the air, and sunlight. He taught me that high culture and low culture were simply points of view, and that what mattered was the writing. His influence as an editor still reverberates today. We're lucky to have him."
the latest
latest episodes
Couldn't happen to a better guy. I found the Elric books at a rummage sale when I was about 12 or 13. As Mr. Gaiman said, his writing changed the way my mind worked on a fundamental level. A lot of people accuse him of writing fluff or pulp or whatever, but all I can say is that he opened me up to a world of possibility and his books are almost solely responsible for making me an avid reader. Hooray for Michael Moorcock!
Despite the well-documented dangers, about all my 13-year-old brain could think of (other than sex and naked women) was owning Stormbringer or Mournblade. Then those bullies at school would pay -- oh yes, they would pay.
I don't trust "celebrity" reviewers anymore. It's always something like "This book changed my life" and "That's the greatest book ever" and then I read it and "Meh" is my comment.
I've had better luck just looking at the book cover.
#3 I don't think this was a celebrity review so much as a congratulatory speech.
But as far as celebrity reviewers go ... I'd read anything Neil Gaiman told me to ... I'm a bit obsessed. When I'm listening or watching various clips of him on youtube etc. my husband has been known to come into the room and say "oh, I'll leave you with your porn then"
Sorry about that tangent.
Oh. My. Gods. American or otherwise.
I love Neil Gaiman's work. I do. He's an excellent writer of fiction. Yes.
As for the critical sense exhibited here...he's a great writer of fiction. Really great.
The most remarkable thing about Moorcock is that he managed to build an entire career with only one plot. This is the guy who literally put the same chapter—word for word—in four different books.
I know other people, people I also respect, who love Moorcock. I've never really understood why. De gustibus non disputendem est, I guess.
I'm another thrall of Moorcock's writing and have been since my early teens.
Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, Count Brass, Jerry Cornelius, Una Persson, Dancers at the End of Time, and let's not forget the one-ofs like Behold the Man, Breakfast in the Ruins and the Fireclown.
I imagine that without Moorcock's formative works, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore and many other favourites of today might not even exist in the mind of fandom.
There were three writers I never could get enough of:
Robert E Howard
H.P. Lovecraft
and
Michael Moorcock
Howard and Moorcock had a great deal of crossover and both seemed to embrace ambiguous morality, moving more towards a ying and yang of chaos and law. Like Lovecraft they always hinted at unknowns much more horrible going on under the surface of the scenes they were portraying. Some scenes being so fantastic you feel like they are being described through the drug crazed eyes of a sickly albino astride a fantastic horse. Of the two I always found Elric's world very difficult to grasp, it was as chaotic as the sword Elric wielded.
Xopher (#5): you make the 'same-chapter-in-four-books' thing sound like a failing, rather than the deliberate device it was.
That was an instance of four of his novels' protagonists experiencing the same event, so it's entirely justifiable that it appears in four narrative threads (not quite word for word). It's tricks like that which I find particularly attractive about Moorcock's writing.
And 'one plot'? Exactly - that's the whole point of the Eternal Champion!
I like Neil G's writing, but Moorcock's made me who I am.
@ #5: "The most remarkable thing about Moorcock is that he managed to build an entire career with only one plot."
Well, I prefer to think of it as an epic plot spanning hundreds of volumes. :-)
Moorcock makes no bones about this. In fact, it's common knowledge that he lifted his one plot from the Commedia dell'arte.
The real fun is seeing how Pierrot, Harlequin and Columbina play out their inevitable roles as sword-and-sorcery characters, secret agents, science fiction protagonists, Boer War soldiers, messiahs, steampunk adventurers, hermaphrodites, heroin addicts, and omnipotent minor gods indulging themselves as the universe dies of entropy.
In many of these books, Moorcock's hero is The Eternal Champion, a tool used by Fate to balance Order against Chaos; In many others, his hero is the Runestaff, an entity that could never exist if it did not change the Universe in such a way as to make its own existence possible; But in the end his hero is always revealed as no more than a sad clown with a love that is doomed.
I had the good fortune to read the Elric series when I was young as well. Simplistic in some ways, yet superb in so many others. I've read nearly everything he has ever written and as scifi/fantasy authors go, he is among the best.
I went to a reading by MM in SF at Borderlands (great book store btw - go Alan!) and a discussion afterwards. I bought a couple books just so he could sign em, and when it came time for me to shake his hand, I said "thank you for a lifetime of amazing reading!" he was honestly taken aback, held my hand an extra moment and said "thank you for reading my work and for your kind works" (and may Arioch consume your soul!!!!)
Jack Vance showed up just as I was leaving (another great! Dying Earth and Eyes of the Overworld being classics!). If you like Vance, try Terry Dowling's fantasy - unique!
Did you all know that the Multiverse that MM first wrote about is now being taken seriously as an explanation of quantum parallel universes? If the universe is infinite and massively forked, then somewhere an albino price is slowly sinking into his cups, bemoaning his lost Cymorril, a massive runeblade crooning softly at his side.
Thank you MM!
Enkidu (first time poster, very long time reader)
"This is the guy who literally put the same chapter—word for word—in four different books."
To be fair, it was a crossover.
You know, that whole multiverse thing.
I'm with Neil.
It's like Kirby or Lee, the influence is a given.
Ministry 8: It was a deliberate device all right...to get paid four times for the same writing! (OK, which of us has not turned in the same paper for two classes, right? I turned in my computational linguistics paper for both linguistics and computer science, for example.)
And I agree that it was the whole point of the Eternal Champion, but in the sense that the EC was an excuse to write the same book over and over with slightly different details. FOR ME (and I cannot stress enough that if you like Moorcock, I don't think less of you or anything, and many of my friends disagree with me) once you've read one EC book you've read them all, and I read many of them before coming to this conclusion. I gave up after one book of Jerry Cornelius, a character I found entirely repulsive (unlike, say, Elric, who was a Tortured Soul, Jerry appears to have no conscience whatsoever, at least in the book I read).
As for the writing itself (use of language, narrative voice, dialogue), I found it uniformly cheesy with the single exception of Gloriana, which though gloomy seemed more a labor of love than the others, and is actually lyrical in places. But my enjoyment even of Gloriana was dramatically lessened when I detected the EC pattern in it. By then I was sick to death of the (often literally) gods damned Eternal frakking Champion!
I managed to mostly enjoy Gloriana anyway, but it also convinced me that I should never read another Moorcock novel, and I never have. I know that even if he writes one that isn't about the E frakking C, I'll be distracted from whatever story he IS telling by looking for that pattern.
Again, YMMV. MY mileage is all "why am I driving this same road over and over? Where's the next exit to Babylon?"
Beyond his contributions as a writer, Moorcock also deserves credit for helping start the New Wave movement in science fiction, as editor of New Worlds magazine in the '60s.
How could you not love a man who's written of Wars fought by Armored Zeppelins over the Asian Steppes? Who's written lyrics for, and performed with, Hawkwind & Blue Öyster Cult? Who created a Swords & Sorcery so weak he often couldn't raise himself from bed?
"more cock, more cock, michael morecock you fervently moan". - half man, half biscuit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Man_Half_Biscuit
i have photos of the event-
http://www.flickr.com/photos/katiecowden/sets/72157604761416813/
one of the coolest awards ceremonies i've ever attended.