Fantastic Metropolis

Barrington Bayley: Let me make a little disclosure. I recall when you and I met up with Jim Cawthorn and you described to him a fantasy story you were working on, involving the hero’s sister who was in a permanent sleep (wasn’t this the inception of the whole Elric saga?). Seeing Jim’s fascination (and feeling my own), I thought, I’d like to do that! I’d like to meet with friends and tell them about a story I’m working on and get this kind of reaction. Some years later I was writing “The Ship of Disaster”, a story I never would have written without being influenced by you, as it has elves and trolls in it. I used to hear you talking of elves, “eyes gazing into infinity”. We were at the Globe and I started telling you and someone else about it (could have been Jim!). I was knowingly playing the role I had promised myself a few years before, getting your attention, getting the approving murmur “sounds good”. Of such small triumphs is life made!

Michael Moorcock: Well, it’s better than worrying I was going to take it into the toilet and dispose of it (as with “All The King’s Men”). I published “Ship of Disaster” in New Worlds 151. Not long after I’d taken over the magazine. I remember the response was tremendous. Mike Harrison said, as I recall, that “Ship of Disaster” and “All The King’s Men” were two of the most stimulating sf stories he’d ever read. When he was doing his own early work he said that a lot of what he was trying to do was reproduce the frisson he’d felt. So clearly you had your wish granted more than you’d hoped. Dave Britton says the same about that story, how it made him shiver. Nobody expected you to do an elves and trolls story which was not only science fiction but also had your familiar philosophical content. A great story. Was it reprinted in one of your collections? We ought to reprint it somewhere, if not. Certainly I had the same response when you were telling me about The Soul of the Robot. Your ideas just knocked me out. Not because you had the idea of robot discovering his soul, as it were, but because of the quality of your thinking. This is something not mentioned enough, I think. You could also discover the essence of something in another writer’s story and sometimes make the story sound a lot more interesting than it was. There was a James Blish story you liked in one of the pulps, Planet or Super Science or Thrilling Wonder—the magazines which published what people these days call “cross-over” fiction—a bit of everything in those stories, which is why I always preferred them to Analog and the rest. That’s certainly where I read the Leigh Brackett stories which combined fantasy, horror, science and, being Leigh, a bit of western thrown in as well (all written in a noir-ish prose which she did her detective stories in—the stories which made Hawks want to use her on the script for The Big Sleep). Maybe that was another enthusiasm which brought us together. Speaking of which, I wonder, too, whether you’d read Mervyn Peake before we met. And had you read Peake by the time I first took you round to Drayton Gardens to meet Maeve?

To be continued…