MM: That's my standard advice to people who want to write fantasy: Stop reading fantasy. I read very little in the genre and never read as widely as most. I have no special liking for it, but I do have a talent for it, so I suppose you can say I took the line of least resistance. I have never really thought of myself as a fantasy writer or a genre writer, although I've written plenty of genre, including Westerns. But I began as a professional journalist and I tend to think of myself as a professional writer. I started in Fleet Street (actually just off Fleet Street) when I was l6. For many years I wrote very little fantasy or genre, but mostly features or comic strips about Vikings or Romans!

The question's not irrelevant. Snobbery is a huge factor in a creative artist's life—as is fashion. Categorizing has the effect of helping the snob determine what they won't read. Snobs are much happier with the arts than science because you can have an opinion without any information on the arts, but you need to know what you're talking about in the sciences. As a result, a certain section of "educated" society makes science less respectable a subject—i.e. the snobbery has to exclude the entire subject because snobbery wing any of it. Badly educated Englit [English Lit] majors are, therefore, one of the worst aspects of the phenomenon. They tend to get the jobs as lit editors and off you go. It's far worse in America where the snobbery is even more endemic. Snobbery is the last resort of the intellectually inadequate. Most of my first books, like Behold the Man and The Final Programme were not published as genre fiction. None of the Cornelius books, nor Gloriana, were published as genre in the U.K. They were published as genre in the U.S. (where much of my non-fantastic fiction isn't available—you can buy Mother London in Italian or French, but you can't buy it in America).

CM: You've already mentioned Brackett, Steerpike, Richard III, Byron, the Norse trickster god Loki, and Gothic literature as influences on the Chaos lord Arioch from the Elric series (in response to my earlier query about Milton's Satan being a possible inspiration for the character). More in general, what written works or personal experiences do you feel have been most influential on your own writing and personal philosophy? What are you reading right now?

MM: My influences are a mixture, like everyone's, and include movies and radio, of course. But Peake was probably the one writer who made me realize it was possible to do my own thing and use fantastic imagery at the same time. Two writers I admired and knew were very considerable influences on me—Peake as an imaginative novelist and Angus Wilson as a social novelist. Wilson was once regarded as the leading literary figure in England. What people didn't know was that as an sf advisor to Sidgwick and Jackson he also bought Alfred Bester's Demolished Man and Tiger, Tiger, which were also massive influences on my sf. Bester remains the single greatest influence, I think. Bradbury and Dick were others I admired.

But my romantic relish was for the pulps in which Brackett, Bradbury and Dick, amongst others, appeared. I have no particular nostalgia for pulps as such, but in those days you could find really good writers there—what you might call anti-modernists rather than post-modernists. The pulps, by and large, never paid much attention to modernism. G.B. Shaw was a big influence on me as a boy, as were Wells and Huxley. I read Wells's History of the World and Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, which gave me a broader view of the world's experience, and went on from there. I'm largely self-educated, having been to a number of schools briefly.

I'm not reading much fiction at all at he moment because I'm writing two books at the same time and that's more than enough fiction. Mostly it's when I have to review something. I liked Dworkin's Scapegoat, about the failure of Israeli men to incorporate their women allies into the system. I recently read Landor's Tower by Iain Sinclair, which is, of course, highly inventive and outside genre. I enjoyed Perdido Street Station by Mieville, but liked his King Rat better. Perdido Street had too many genre elements for me to be wholly enthusiastic. I dip in to Tim Etchells' wonderful Endland Stories and I love M. John Harrison's short stories—Travel Arrangements recently out. I admire writers like VanderMeer, Rhys Hughes, Steve Aylett and feel I should be finding more women I like. Annie Proulx, Ellen Gilchrist, Sheena Mackay are all writers I like. Glad to see Maureen Duffy's Capital back in print (experimental novel about London done before Mother London) and that Gerald Kersh is coming back, too.

I subscribe to a wonderful company called Persephone who specialize in reprinting modernist fiction by "forgotten" women writers. They have turned up some great stuff. I am a huge fan of Elizabeth Bowen, for instance, and her Death of the Heart remains one of my all-time favorites, along with Victory by Conrad, with which I bizarrely associate it.

CM: You're certainly one of the most prolific writers in the fantastic or any other genre. In fact, I can find no exact count of how many books, novellas, short stories, and articles you've written. How do you manage to be so busy? Also, though we're conducting this interview via computer, when you write, do you still use a typewriter, or have you switched over to a [bad joke alert] world processor?

MM: Good health, natural energy and a training which taught you that anxiety cost time and money and was best channeled into doing the work. I work on anxiety-power—or used to. It was easier to write a book in three days than sit about getting more and more anxious about it for weeks. . . I'm a story teller. I have stories to tell. I'd be telling them somehow, no matter what. One story leads to another. I have, an old lover once said, an unsleeping mind. I wake up thinking. My wife hates me in the mornings. I'm curious about stuff.

A computer proved a huge boon to me–for the 'net as much as the word processing. I came fairly late to composing onto the WP and still tend to do most of my work in long hand—I draw scenes pretty much the way a movie director would—sketching out a story board as I go. I'm very visual. My notebooks have as much visual material in them as written notes.

Next: "Tolkien has the right elements of snobbery and escapism to make it a huge success."