What to Make of Michael Moorcock

“What I’d like to know is,” said Engelbrecht, cutting suddenly to the chase, “who gets into heaven and why?”

There was a bit of a pause in the air, as if everyone felt perhaps he’d pushed the boat out a little too far, but God was nodding.  “Fair question,” he said.  “Well, it’s cats, then dogs, but there’s quite a few human beings, really.  But mostly it’s pets.”

— Michael Moorcock, A Slow Saturday Night at the Surrealist Sporting Club

I recently finished reading The Best of Michael Moorcock, a collection of short stories edited by John Davey with Ann and Jeff Vandermeer.  I first picked it up for a couple of reasons: partially because Michael Moorcock is a towering figure in sf that I was largely unfamiliar with, but mostly because he influenced and worked with a lot of writers I like (China Miéville, Jeff Vandermeer, M. John Harrison.)  This post is a collection of thoughts on Michael Moorcock himself as well as the book rather than a straight review.

My first real exposure to Michael Moorcock’s name happened in 2005 or so, when I saw him being mentioned by China Miéville in interviews as a source of inspiration.  Miéville specifically mentioned Moorcock’s essay Epic Pooh as an articulation of his distaste for The Lord of the Rings.  I read the essay then and found much that I agreed with, even though it had been about five years since my last full read-through of the books at 13.  These days, although I dearly love Miéville, I would say that Moorcock’s criticisms mostly miss the point.  He fails to understand what the books are about — even though it has now been almost ten years since my last full reading of The Lord of the Rings.

But Michael Moorcock is more than a misguided Tolkien critic and he has written so much more than Epic Pooh.  I was, of course, always aware of this.  It was just that whenever I saw a book by Moorcock that I could purchase, it would be one of his Elric books that I don’t have much interest in or a book that I couldn’t remember hearing about.  So when I was in a book store this past December and saw a collection of Moorcock short stories partially edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (even though it seems John Davey, with whom I am unfamiliar, did most of the heavy lifting) I decided to pick it up.  I read it on and off since that point and I finally finished it a few days ago.  I’m still puzzling out what I think.

On the whole, I would say that I liked the majority — probably 60% — of the stories I read in this collection.  One of the stories, The Cairene Purse, might rank up with some of my favorite fantasy short stories.  On the other hand, I would consider Behold the Man (which won a Nebula in ’67), a facile novella about an amateur psychologist who goes back in time and finds out that he’s Jesus, to have been a total waste of time.  Moorcock was trying to play with the idea that historically Jesus doesn’t need to have existed for Christianity to be meaningful, but I thought the whole thing came off as clumsy.  Other than that, I had no real visceral reactions.  I enjoyed Lunching with the Antichrist, London Bone, My Experiences in the Third World War, Doves in the Circle, The Deep Fix, and A Slow Saturday Night at the Surrealist Sporting Club.  Other than that, I was mostly indifferent.

Ann and Jeff Vandemeer note a pretty telling joke in their afterword:  “Michael Moorcock has written for so long in so many different genres that there’s something for every reader to hate.”  Moorcock started writing in the early sixties and still writes today.  He’s written everything from secondary world fantasy series to “litarary mainstream” short stories.  One of the impressive things about this collection of only 17 stories is that I can think of no single genre, however all-encompassing, that you could accurately label it:  he’s just written so much in so many different ways.  I think, really, therein lies his ultimate value.

I still don’t have much desire to read the Elric books, but while they are secondary world fantasies, I know they also play around with what the boundaries of fantasy can be.  The fact, however, that Michael Moorcock could have written such a large volume of material without creating secondary worlds or populating his stories with elves or vampires while still being known as a great sf/fantasy author is something that he really deserves credit for.  I feel like his experimentation helped pave the way for the opening up of the genre, whether it was the New Wave in the 60s and 70s or the New Weird in the 90s and 00s.

The problem with criticizing Moorcock would be that you probably couldn’t find any universal link between his works to criticize.  He’s just written too much and written so much of it differently.  As I am sure I have pointed out, there is plenty of room for criticism of Moorcock on a piece-by-piece basis.  But I don’t know that it’s easy to criticize him generally.  To be honest, despite the fact that I was so indifferent to many of the stories in this collection, I believe he deserves better than that.

Evidently Moorcock met both J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis when he was young.  He claims to have liked them personally, but disliked the work that they produced.  While I feel that these criticisms, articulated in Epic Pooh, aren’t really that well thought out (well, okay, I actually mostly agree with him on Lewis), I’d say that I was pretty okay with Michael Moorcock as a person.  I imagine you’re probably getting that sense anyway.  I really did enjoy most of what I read by him.  And if I ever try write out a long-form criticism of one of his works, I’ll at least try to do it justice.  Sometimes you just have to forgive people for failing in a few areas when they’re done so well (and so much) in the rest of their work.

So thanks, Michael Moorcock.  Keep doing what you’ve always been doing.