Fantastic Metropolis

Something which makes me sniff about more recent sf is how it harps on about computer simulation and virtual reality and stuff (they keep doing it in Star Trek). It’s old hat to us. It was all in ‘Duel’! The reader isn’t sure at the end if the computer was only there to run simulations, or if the whole saga had taken place within it. Dear old Ted Carnell. He took the trouble once to write me a long letter explaining why he thought my stuff was hopeless. The gravamen, put over with much kindness and sympathy, was: you can’t write, you never could write, and you never will be able to write. I am a testament to the advantage of stupidity. I never listened to discouragement, but treated its sources to my favourite emotion, disdain (FYI: I live in Donnington because I can disdain ceaselessly). They never understood that I had no ambition to be a writer, because I already was a writer, had become a writer at the age of fourteen. So there.

I dimly remember our being in Carnell’s office and discussing Ballard’s novel, which Ted was doubtful about—probably because it was so good!—but it must have been mainly you who persuaded him to use it. Ted wouldn’t have heeded me. The only time he ever asked my opinion was when he was terribly upset over a cranky letter he had received trashing New Worlds, saying it contained only rubbish, took only twenty minutes to read, and wasn’t worth the money. I told him he was bound to get letters like that, it was part of being an editor, and he shouldn’t worry about it. What I really wanted to say was, you should use my stuff, then! One of Ted’s criticisms of my stories was the way I treated the whole universe as mankind’s backyard.

I think our first New Worlds collaboration was ‘Peace on Earth’. It was about death, and its place in life. Did we do a Hilary Bailey story? I vaguely remember doing some work on one she had written, about people turning into ants. Was that it?

When my ‘dodgy friend’ wrote to confess why I wasn’t getting the New Worlds money (he had been spending it) I used his letter in a new story. So that was one he really did co-author!

I recall with fondness the daytime pub meetings with Jim Ballard, and a friend of his whose name I forget, who was very shy. He and Jim had worked out a private philosophical vocabulary between them. Jim referred to some idea, and his friend replied, ‘That’s very spinal.’

I can’t remember where and when I first met Ballard, but it was almost certainly through you. You made it your business to get to know writers who interested you. You would write to them and introduce yourself. I still remember T.H. White’s reply when you asked him for advice to a young writer wanting to improve. It’s the advice I now give: Read, read, read!

It was you who first enabled me to make a living as a writer (as apart from starving and owing the rent) by introducing me to the juvenile field, which was great fun. Do you remember our rubber stamp when we were in partnership? You also wrote a letter of introduction to Don Wollheim when I wanted to start writing novels. He was sf editor at Ace Books then. I had written a couple of these for him, I think, when I first met him in the flesh in the English town of Worcester. His eyes shone. “Barrington Bayley? You really exist? I thought you were Mike Moorcock masquerading under another name!” He explained that your output was so enormous he had believed you had adopted a second identity to help market it.

Not the only time I have been compared with your shadow!

Michael Moorcock: You are kind—but what’s this ‘we’ worked out—you fucking worked it all out. I’m too dumb for that.

Barrington J. Bayley: Listen to this. There’s a story in one of your Millennium omnibus editions (don’t know the title as I can’t lay my hands on it) in which the galaxy is slowly being eaten up by a huge object at its centre, which you didn’t actually call a black hole, probably because the term hadn’t been coined yet. At the time I would guess it was written, nobody knew that galaxies have black holes in the middle. Furthermore, astrophysicists then thought the expanded universe would eventually fall together again by gravitational attraction. Guess what? Recent measurements show that there isn’t enough matter to do it! The galaxies will just carry on receding until they are all swallowed by their black holes. And who thought of it first? You did!