Fantastic Metropolis

Barrington Bayley: Well, in a novel of yours you serialised in New Worlds (the protagonist was able to tunnel between realities) someone was using a portable computer while a passenger in a car. So it’s not true none of us anticipated the PC. You anticipated the laptop!

(You also anticipated the current view that every galaxy has a black hole at its centre which eventually will devour it, leaving the universe devoid of anything but black holes.)

But it does seem true that sf writers generally failed to foresee the current state of computing. This is because they imagined electronic machines would get bigger and bigger, whereas they got smaller and smaller. A pulp mag novel which impressed me when young was Raymond F. Jones’s The Cybernetic Brains in Startling Stories. It depicted a future in which the brains of dead people were used as control systems for industrial processes, it not being known that thereby the brains became conscious again and went insane through being unable to communicate. About then, I read an article discussing how small a thermionic valve might be made. Could it be made as small as a grain of rice? It got replaced by the transistor, of which there are thousands on a chip.

Michael Moorcock: We came up with “Duel” around 1961 didn’t we, while I was staying with you at the House of Usher. The whole place would shake when even a motorbike went by outside and the landlord’s name actually was Usher. I was in a sleeping bag on your floor. I used to open my eyes slowly in the morning so as not to disturb the mice who had gathered around to stare at me. I felt a bit like Gulliver. I think it was you who discovered we could get maximum protein for the least money by buying bacon scraps from the local butcher. I remember being stimulated by your ideas a lot during that period. I also remember how much we put in to “Duel Among the Wine Green Suns” and how shattered we were when Carnell rejected it.

Barrington Bayley: I seem to remember the genesis of “Wine Green Suns” was material you wrote immediately after returning from Sweden where you lived for a while, or brought back from there. Its computer or “facsimile cabinet” for rehearsing societies, personalities and wars was an early if unpublished prefiguring of the misnamed “virtual reality” that has become commonplace ever since Gibson’s Neuromancer (the current film version is The Matrix) though I say that with trepidation, as somebody likely knows of other cases. Mind you, this “virtual reality” is only the computer-age version of the older sf theme where the characters contend in a shared dream. In Wine Green Suns the reader is left not knowing if the fabulous story really did take place or is a rehearsal in the facsimile cabinet. As we said before, as silicon chips hadn’t been invented, miniaturisation was achieved by means of “electron resonance plates”. My idea was that electron quantum states could be used to hold information stored and retrieved by “resonance”. It’s more or less the same idea as the quantum computer people are now trying to develop, which if feasible will make present-day computers look like a two-string abacus. I think they’ve probably got it to add one and zero so far.

Those mice, of which the house had droves, were very canny. One hint of human movement and they were off through their holes with unbelievable speed. They could also leap from the floor on to the table top (either that or they could walk up vertical surfaces and along the undersides of horizontal ones). Yes, I recall that getting something to eat was occasionally a problem in those days. Later I became adept at living on 10 shillings (50p) a week, and that included paraffin for the heater (as well as a big heap of bacon scraps). One day, in the same house, we had invited Pete Taylor to “dinner”. I was quite perturbed when you impressed on me, in some anxiety, that Pete would actually expect to be fed. Somehow we found enough money to buy some potatoes and something to go with them. On another occasion we gathered together all edible resources for something to eat that day. I can’t remember what I ate, but you ate a bowl of cocoa powder mixed with sugar. This was a familiar repast for me; I’d once lived on it for three days. I remember this occasion, though, because of you’re asking, in a sing-song Chinese voice, “How eat cocoa powder with chopsticks?”

You used to enjoy your ability to reduce me to a collapsed heap of uncontrollable laughter. One day you launched into a skit of what these days is known as a “wigger”—a white man trying to enter black American culture. Your spiel ended with: “Just ‘cos ah’m white don’t mean to say ah ain’t black!”