Space Cowboys

It's funny, I was just thinking earlier this morning about how less likely I am now than I was say, fifteen years ago, to look up to people whose creative output I admire. I was thinking about how I used to actually expect pop music to save my life. I bought albums as if the perfect collection might complete me; I would be buried with them in a pyramid of preserved artefacts of the imagination. When I bought Little Earthquakes I was enlarged by the sum of Tori Amos, and so on. These days, I think I would be quite happy never to buy another album again as long as I live. (I suppose iPods and so forth are good from a storage-space point of view, but I haven't got round to that yet, and that's not what I'm talking about, anyway.)

Then Justin Isis sent me this link to an old article by Michael Moorcock.

It starts off, in my view, quite badly. For instance:

There are still a few things which bring a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I experience them — a church service in which the rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants — a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeois decadence — a radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein.

The last part of this quote in particular strikes me as rather silly. I was writing about stereotypes and labels only a few days ago, frustrated with the power that such things still exercise over the human mind, and lamenting that some people seem voluntarily to affix labels to their own foreheads, and here is a perfect example of such thinking. (Perhaps I should have included in my 'conclusion' that I think labels unlikely to disappear completely, and that they should therefore best be regarded as costumes that for some reason or other we are forced to wear, but which are not our real skin.) Moorcock actually seems to believe that there is such a thing as a radical, that a person can truly be indentified with such a vague and abstract label. Why else would he be surprised? I suppose Moorcock thinks that he's a radical, too (his article would seem to suggest so). Although he berates other writers hither and thither for being infantile, I have to say that the suggestion this article contains that Moorcock goes around with the mental label 'radical' on his forehead tends to raise an inward titter in me at his infantilism.

As I said, this is a bad start, and the skein of this particular infantilism of Moorcock's runs through the weave of the entire piece, but all thinking is, after all, flawed, and the article has, otherwise, a great deal to recommend it. I won't try to reproduce the content, since, after all, you can simply read it yourself. The main thrust of the piece, however, is that science fiction, despite claims by many that it represents a 'fiction of ideas' and is therefore 'radical', is, in fact, largely reactionary, right-wing and paternalistic. Well, to quote, or paraphrase, the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, ninety percent of everything is crap. And that's probably a conservative estimate. I appreciate, however, that Moorcock has taken the time to try and deconstruct the conservatism underlying the genre (I have a notion that this conservatism might be slightly eroded since this article was written, but I'm not the best person to ask). I appreciate it because I find myself hanging around vaguely in the loosely associated genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror like a wallflower at a party of nerds and geeks who realises that, even here, he still does not belong, and is therefore more pissed off than ever. And I wonder if it's not some underlying conservativism in these genres – in the very idea of genre, if it is taken as uniform rather than costume – that has alienated me.

I'm not going to put the case for the conservatism of these genres here, however. No, as I said, you can read Moorcock's article for that. Naturally, I don't think he's covered everything in making his case, and perhaps I'll try and fill in what I see as the gaps at some later date (which usually means I'll never get round to it). What I intend to do now, though, is the opposite; I intend to pick holes in the article. Let me proceed by giving more quotes from that article:

A look at the books on sale to Cienfuegos customers shows the same old list of Lovecraft and Rand, Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so many people who would be horrified to be accused of subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the Monday Club and yet are reading with every sign of satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune.

My first reaction is, why the hell should I need Moorcock's permission if I want to read Telegraph editorials? To me, this is the underlying attitude of this writing – that we need Moorcock's approval. The whole article is simplistically polarised into this same infantile anarchist vs. Telegraph-reader mentality, with there being no question at any point as to who is wearing the white hats and who is wearing the black hats. We already know that the anarchists, with Moorcock at their head, are the good guys.

Some years ago I remember reading an article by John Pilgrim in Anarchy in which he claimed Robert Heinlein as a revolutionary leftist writer. As a result of this article I could not for years bring myself to buy another issue.

Again, Moorcock shows strong evidence of being someone who takes labels excessively seriously. He is deeply offended when someone applies one of his most beloved labels to someone of whom he disapproves. "I'm the revolutionary leftist around here, not Heinlein!" It's really quite pathetic, and I can't help thinking that this attitude most resembles such 'revolutionary leftists' as Rick out of The Young Ones.

At this point, I'd like to add a few words about Heinlein. Actually, it's interesting to me that Moorcock picks especially on Heinlein and Tolkien. I'm afraid I'm going to employ a very seventies phrase now, but I was born in the seventies, and therefore have an excuse. Moorcock, Heinlein and Tolkien are three writers who were read to me while I was still of the age to have parents read me things – yes, I know that no one does that anymore, but such a custom did once exist, when parents actually read, instead of just lamenting that their offspring don't read – and who had an effect on me that I am afraid can probably never be duplicated in adult life, to wit, they blew my mind.

My first remembered experience of this effect came with The Lord of the Rings. In a way, this experience was imprinted on me at such an early age and so impressively, that The Lord of the Rings could more or less be called my primary model for literature. As something so fundamental to my imaginative life, and my attitudes to literature, do I think I have taken away from it, as Moorcock suggests, the lesson that life is a battle of maverick, right-wing cowboys to win the favour of some paternalistic overlord? Er…. no. I think that Tolkien is drawing on something deeper than the battles of Labour and Tories (and I wonder how sacred the Left is to Moorcock now, after Blair and all the forces of Mordor have cast their shadow over this land). I think the wellspring of Tolkien's imagery goes back at least as far as the tale of Beowulf, and if it goes back that far, then necessarily further. I'm even reluctanct to say what Tolkien's trilogy is about, though many people of an excessively political point of view (such as Moorcock and Germaine Greer) seem to wish to decode it immediately and glibly at the shallowest level possible, presumably because that's as deep as they go, as an attack on the working classes. Well, I don't know much about Moorcock's background, but Greer is as middle-class as they come. (Always the way.)

I remember very powerfully how many of the specific scenes in The Lord of the Rings felt to me when it was first read to me, with images of the scenes themselves. When we come to Heinlein, however, all I remember – and I think I must have been read almost everything that he wrote – are a few fragments along with the actual sensation of my mind in the process of being blown. Titles I know were read to me include Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land. I have not returned to Heinlein in adult life.

What stays with me – and what, I suppose, has influenced me – from these two writers, is, first of all, a sense of ancient mystery, like a race memory that is also another world, and something of the future possibilities of consciousness and space exploration. In both cases, the overwhelming feeling is one of wonder. Perhaps I'm mistaken here, but I do not feel that I have been brainwashed by either into thinking that John Wayne was politically on the money or anything like that. In fact, my impression is that such attitudes comes more from the household in which one grew up. I grew up in a household where politics was never an issue. Therefore, unlike Moorcock, and possibly – I do not know – unlike Heinlein, I do not identify myself as either left or right, noticing only that my social group tends to consist of those identifying with the left. To give an example: I am neither 'pro-life', nor am I amongst those who think that the rights of a mother necessarily come before those of the unborn. Since I'm unlikely to become pregnant myself, this is an unresolved issue for me, but I see idiocy, or, at the very least, lack of thought, on both sides, since both sides seem immediately to think something like, "I'm left-wing, therefore abortion is good", or the equal and opposite sentiment.

Now, as to the way in which Moorcock blew my mind, this was on a Greek isle, when I was… perhaps nine. I can't quite remember now. I don't even remember the title of the story for sure. Anyway, some guy is called back in a dream to an alien world where he's hailed as some kind of messiah. At first he is a figurehead for the humans in a war against the aliens, then he gets captured by the aliens. Initially he hates his captors, but with time realises that the aliens are the good guys and the humans are the bad guys. As well as this switching-around of world view (blowing one's mind basically consists in showing there's a whole new way of looking at the world, or there's a whole other world to look at), there was something for me poignantly haunting in the atmosphere of the story, and in the beauty of the alien civilisation, to which I wished to belong, in preference to the ugly, barbaric human civilisation.

In adult life I have tried to read Moorcock. I read one of the Elric books, about which I remember little. I also read some other sword and sorcery type thing – whose title I forget – that was so tedious and unoriginal that I abandoned it, and Moorcock with it. Moorcock accuses Tolkien and his other chosen literary villains of being "dull", but Tolkien, at least, was never so dull that I had to stop reading him when I returned to him in adult years.

This is from Moorcock's closing paragraph:

Yet what Heinlein or Tolkein lack is any trace of real self-mockery. They are nature's urbane Tories. They'll put an arm round your shoulder and tell you their ideas are quite radical too, really; that they used to be fire-eaters in their youth; that there are different ways of achieving social change; that you must be realistic and pragmatic. Next time you pick up a Heinlein book think of the author as looking a bit like General Eisenhower or, if that image isn't immediate enough, some chap in early middleage, good-looking in a slightly soft way, with silver at the temples, a blue tie, a sober three-pieced suit, telling you with a quiet smile that Margaret Thatcher cares for individualism and opportunity above all things, as passionately in her way as you do in yours. And then you might have some idea of what you're actually about to read.

Do I really have to point out here that Moorcock lacks the self-mockery necessary to make him see how ridiculous it is to go round thinking you're an anarchist? Now, I'm really not sure that Tolkien would put his arm round your shoulder and do any such thing as Moorcock proposes above, although perhaps he would have, if I or you had ever met him. As for the request at the end – once more Moorcock is asking us to replace our own thoughts with his. Why the hell should I imagine such a thing when I pick up a book? Why shouldn't I let my imagination run where it will? But perhaps this would be a threat to Moorcock's determined Left/Right dichotomy. Moorcock seems to care nothing for the story, seeing only the projected face of his enemy, and seeing it everywhere, so that the story itself is the very last thing he sees.

I remember someone telling me that he used to admire Sylvia Plath until he learned that she was known, at university, as "Sylvia bury-me-in-Y-shaped-coffin Plath". Apart from the fact that I'd be more inclined to think the people who said that were idiots and hypocrites than suddenly be disappointed in Sylvia (I've never been able to be particularly outraged by sexual promiscuity, either male or female), I didn't see how that had any bearing on her output as an artist. I made an inarticulate answer about art being "transcendent" or some such thing. I know what I meant, but even now I find it hard to put into words. Perhaps what I meant, though, is that art is, or should be, somewhere people meet without casting stones, without all the scurrilous rumours and petty divisions of daily 'rational' life, a place where people can be, in a way, who they truly are.