Michael Moorcock on the airwaves: New interview up on the Appendix N Book Club podcast

I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that one of the podcasts in my regular listening rotation, Appendix N Book Club, recently conducted an hour-plus long interview with Michael Moorcock.

Author of the Elric, Corum, and Hawkmoon stories, along with many other fantasy and science fiction titles including Gloriana and the non-fiction fantasy genre treatise Wizardry and Wild Romance, Moorcock is the only living author left on the famous Appendix N, a list of fantasy authors cited by Gary Gygax as principal influences upon the Dungeons and Dragons role playing game. Appendix N appears in the first edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide, published in 1979.

Moorcock turns 80 years old on Dec. 18, and it was great to hear him sounding very hale and hearty. He was buoyant, ebullient, and enjoying the discussion.

I knew most of what was contained in the interview, but it made for a wonderful listen. It covered a wide range of topics, including Moorcock informally and casually allowing both Gygax/D&D and Chaosium to simultaneously use his settings and characters for their role playing games, with disastrous consequences (Chaosium threatened a lawsuit against D&D, and Moorcock was never fairly compensated for his work); his (very) early days as a writer and editor of an Edgar Rice Burroughs fanzine; a little about his exchanges with Fritz Leiber in the pages of Amra, and Leiber’s subsequent coining of the term “sword-and-sorcery”; his admiration of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and general antipathy for Lovecraft’s works; the general lack of a viable fantasy market until the publication of the unauthorized J.R.R. Tolkien Ace paperbacks by Donald A. Wollheim; his dislike of The Lord of the Rings, which he places in the category of children’s fantasy literature, differentiating his own works as pulp-inspired; and his eclectic Elric influences including the opium cigarette smoking Zenith the Albino (“Pretty much Elric in a top hat and tails, really”). Moorcock reveals that of all his characters, Elric remains the closest to his heart. He has returned to the character again and again over his career, with death of the character no obstacle to penning subsequent stories.

For someone who has dismissed genre fiction studies in the past (of which my own, Flame and Crimson, will soon be published—insert gratuitous tooting of own horn here), Moorcock reveals himself to be highly aware of them, even sophisticated in their application (see around 26:42, where he says of L. Sprague de Camp’s Viagens Interplanetarias series, “I love those, because they were kind of sword-and-sorcery, almost … or nearer to sword-and-planet than anything else”). He’s also self-deprecating, stating that his cure for insomnia is reading his own works. He discussed his early days of marathon writing, cranking out Hawkmoon stories in three days, then using Roy Thomas comic adaptations to refresh his memory when writing subsequent entries. He still loves fantasy and science fiction, expressing his continued admiration for the likes of Leigh Brackett’s Eric John Starks stories and Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword.

It was nice to hear Moorcock firmly establish his fantasy works as belonging principally to the sword-and-sorcery genre. He confirmed what I knew from an email exchange with John Jakes, that Lin Carter’s wonderful Swordsmen and Sorcerer’s Guild of America (or SAGA) was far more myth than reality. “He (Carter) wrote to us telling us that we’d joined,” he said, calling it an excuse to have a drink together on occasion.

Newer to me was some of the biographical material covered, including the social and political atmosphere of Britain in the 1950s/early 1960s. The racism of the era fueled by migrations into Britain, post-Colonialism angst, and the rise of feminism all impacted Moorcock’s fiction. There is some great discussion on the general state of fantasy fiction today, which Moorcock describes as largely moribund, and good conversation on the negative impact of Dungeons and Dragons and the publishing industry on fantasy fiction. Wonder has gone away with over- explanation and codification of magic systems and fantasy races. Moorcock quotes Terry Pratchett, who described genre fiction as a big pot from which subsequent writers should add at least one original ingredient back into the stew, and not just take from others. Without that element the result is derivative material and pastiche, Moorcock shrewdly points out.

I’ve had my issues with Moorcock, in particular his oft-cited “Epic Pooh” essay (which I maintain is an inaccurate, surface level critique of Tolkien, more of a splenic reaction than actual criticism), but I have spent many, many enjoyable hours immersed in his fiction, and it goes without saying that he’s a towering figure in fantasy and science-fiction.

Kudos to Appendix N for scoring this interview. Nice job gentlemen. If you haven’t added that podcast to your regular listening rotation, I recommend you remedy that today. That and Rogues in the House and The Cromcast are highly recommended for fans of pulp fantasy and sword-and-sorcery in particular.