Michael Moorcock is, of course, well-known as a popular science fiction writer, the author of the Elric series, as well as several other cycles of books. Few, however, know of Moorcock as a musician whose career in London's fertile underground of the '60s and '70s saw the birth of such bands as Hawkwind and Mötorhead, and fewer still are familiar with Moorcock the political thinker. Some of his views, we think, will not be unfamiliar to CORPORATE MOFO readers. Mr. Moorcock was gracious to answer some of our questions about his career, his philosophies, and his life.

CM: First off, I hope that your health is good, and that your family (cats included!) is well.

MM: My health is crap, by my standards. I've been hugely healthy all my life, but since I moved to Texas I seem to have picked up all kinds of weird diseases. I had a bad auto-immune disease which went into remission and I have fairly serious progressive neuropathy which is painful and makes it hard to get around sometimes and, unfortunately, is going to get worse (though I live in hope!) but which doesn't seem to slow down my flying fingers very much. I actually exercise my fingers by playing guitar and banjo! Old blues player told me that years ago—keep playin', it stops the arthritis taking hold. Cats are well and too hot at the moment. We hope to be traveling with them in a month or so.

CM: You don’t mind us printing that about your illness?

MM: I'd only not want an illness kept secret if it was going to upset someone or stop an editor buying my next book and I don't have that kind of illness. I always do interviews on the basis that if I say something to the interviewer that isn't actually an admission of crime I could be prosecuted for, then I stand by it.

CM: I wanted to thank you for getting back to me so quickly. I noticed that you're very open to questions from your fans, journalists, and the community-at-large. Do you find this onerous at all? Do the same banal questions come up time and time again? And, if so, do you wish people would ask you more high-minded questions?

MM: I think of myself unconsciously as part of a community. It is, if you like, a community of intellect and temperament whose links are strengthened and developed via the Internet, but I have always had the sense that I am one voice in a community of voices. I therefore tend to think of my work in part as an ongoing dialogue with the reader and I am inclined to note readers' questions or demands and often try to satisfy them in my fiction. Although fairly solitary in general, I still see my interest as the same as my readers.

For me, being available to readers has always been part of it. It led to some spectacular problems in the '60s and '70s when I was at the height of my cult success, but Hawkwind used to have the same attitude—we'd go into the pub and drink with the audience. You only get treated like a superstar if you want to be. Most people are ordinarily polite and the more like them you are, the more like themselves they'll treat you.

I am a natural anarchist. I really don't believe in leaders, though I tend to see the point of parking meters. . . I was brought up to expect and enjoy a very large degree of liberty. I was brought up to respect people and to listen to their experience and ideas. I was brought up virtually without preconceptions. My grandmother and mother were fierce lovers of liberty and my whole family is rather "bolshy" in its attitudes. So I'm used to argument and like it. I enjoy the exchanges with readers, just as I enjoy readings and discussions when I tour. By and large I am blessed, as you can tell from the Q&A site, with very smart readers, many of whom are writers or have ambitions to be writers themselves.

I know I'm more "generous" with my time than many writers, but I think I have a bunch of very generous readers. It sounds like the rawest sentimentality, but I do just like people. I feel no need to escape from this world, have no social problems living in it, so I tend to use my fantasy writing as a method of confronting certain ideas, rather than avoiding them.

I said to Mike Harrison the other day that some readers have a look at Elric, for instance, and become positively enraged by the fact that I haven't made him cuddly and likeable. These are readers who see Elric as a failed escape plan. I have always used the methods of escapist fiction to look at the modern world. That's what science fiction gave me. When I read my first real sf [science fiction] book (Tiger, Tiger/Stars My Destination by Bester) I saw that it was possible to write imaginative contemporary fiction which also incorporates ideas and ideals. For me that book was the great American novel. I read it in Paris, where I found it, and it has the best kind of American idealism—with that marvelous populist ending. Trust the people. It was the book which made me decide not to give up on contemporary science fiction.

But most of the best U.S. science fiction in those days very much addressed social issues and often brilliantly. Pohl and Kornbluth are the two most prominent. This was when American socialism was still alive, if not well, under Joe McCarthy. What rock-and-roll and science fiction offered the English reader was a voice from the real America, from the working class and politically engaged America we could see was already being buried. We responded to black blues and white social protest songs because we were desperate to hear the voices of the real Americans, not the horror of populist fascism, which seemed to have been brought home on the boots of returning soldiers. . . Sf and rock and roll meant a lot to us—not just as entertainment, either. It brought Americans in contact with Europeans—jazz was doing that, too--and producing the cultural template which would result in an explosion of talent on both sides of the Atlantic through the sixties. I've said this before—but Joe McCarthy, by sending the likes of Kubrick and Ramblin' Jack Elliott to England, did the world of the arts a power of good. That American influence came back a few years later as the British Invasion.

Next: "Snobbery is the last resort of the intellectually inadequate."