Fantastic Metropolis

Michael Moorcock: After that it was Look and Learn for a while and “Round the Universe on a Ray of Light” (one of yours) or “Anudhaphura; Lost City in the Jungle” (one of mine). We had a living to write. Remember going to see that guy who was then editing Eagle and saying we wanted to get Dan Dare back to his former glory. He told us Dan Dare was fine as he was and it was just nostalgia on our part. Poor Frank Hampson, the creator of Dare, was thoroughly screwed by them. They essentially used him and threw him out. His self-confidence was so poor he never really got close to his glory days again. Remember when we suggested Boys World give away a B-52 bomber as a prize in competition? You could buy them for next to nothing, apparently. We pointed out that you’d never have to deliver since the kids’ parents would never allow them to have the plane in the back garden. Did you have any favourite stories you were writing then or were they pretty much all journeyman work?

Barrington Bayley: It would have to have been a B-29. The Yanks are still using their B-52s to kill people! I do remember our bravely complaining to Eagle’s editor of the sadly deteriorated Dan Dare strip. Maybe that’s why we never got much work there! As for all those stories, I recall being pleased with some I did, but there were so many it’s hard to know what, although the Astounding Jason Hyde serial, which ran for three years, had its moments. Juha Lindroos recently sent me a story from an old annual supposed to be mine. As it’s derived from another of my serials it probably is, but I couldn’t recognise it, not at all. If it was mine (or yours) it had been seriously mauled by the copy editor. I don’t believe either of us would have left the reader without the information necessary for the story to make sense.

A story I do remember was Tunnel To The Moon, about a tunnel from Earth to the moon through which trains ran and airliners flew. But I remember it because my wife Joan turned out to have read it!

One thing that did happen through doing that stuff was that I learned to write more and more quickly (a trick I have now forgotten). The weekly paper Valiant, in which the Jason Hyde serial ran, planned a “boom” issue and asked me to turn in two episodes that week. Late one morning I got a phone call.

“Do you have those two episodes yet?”

You like to seem reliable, so I said, “Yes.”

“We’ve got a flap on. Can you bring them into the office by two o’clock?”

“All right,” I heard myself saying, feeling no doubt of it. So I sat at the typewriter and wrote two episodes (five thousand words) in two hours, without even feeling the strain. Nuthin’ to it! To you, of course, that’s a regular pace.

Michael Moorcock: In the sixties a lot of hippies were convinced I’d written those books on acid. I used to have to tell them that I’d done it on adrenaline, sugar and caffeine. It’s a wonderful banisher of self-consciousness that kind of work but, of course, it helps to know it’s all being published anonymously. I remember how horrified we were when we discovered that we were getting by-lines to some of our work! Especially since you’d written under my name or I’d written under yours. And now, as you say, people show us the stuff and we actually don’t know whether it was us or somebody adapting something of ours. And was a regular pace is the operative word there. Having neither the deadlines, the anxiety nor the sugar and caffeine, I tend to go at a relatively slow pace, these days. My last Elric novels actually took months. I think that’s the first time a fantasy novel has gone over a month. Not worth doing any more. Maybe that’s why I’m not planning to write another after the next. Maybe we should start trying to collaborate again, now that we’re getting closer in speed. What do you think?

I wonder why we collaborated so successfully. We got on from the first time we met. I know that interest in barmy sciencet is one of the things which helped us get on so well when we first met. Where was that? I suspect we met at the Globe. I know we hit it off immediately. I’m trying to think of the first story I read of yours and I think it was one of those you published in Vargo Statten’s Magazine when you were still a teenager. We both shared that precocity but your career was sadly interrupted by doing National Service (which I barely escaped, having wasted time in the Air Training Corps in anticipation of a call-up which never came). I know I found your ideas fascinating and highly stimulating. I think they definitely raised the level of my ambition. You seemed the most erudite person I’d ever met. You introduced me to a lot of very different writers from Hesse to Balzac. Extraordinary, really.