CM: More on the ideas and concepts found in your work: Since Plato, Western thought has cleaved to the idea that there is one true reality, and the world we live in is illusion-in other words, that there is knowable, transcendental, discernible Truth-with-a-capital-"T." (Of course, today, the shadows on the wall of the cave have been replaced with television and movie images designed by some of the most creative human minds, all directed to selling us worldly goods.) However, the concept of the "multiverse," of parallel, equally valid worlds-which I believe you first conceived of in the early '60s-goes distinctly against Platonic grain. How did you come upon this idea? And how does that idea, as well as other concepts found in your work, such as the balance of Law and Chaos, relate to the political and social climate you were involved with at the time?

MM: I think it has to do with experience. Growing up during the Blitz, you became used to seeing whole buildings and streets suddenly disappear. After the Blitz, new buildings and streets appeared. The world I knew was malleable, populated, violent and urgent. After the war, everything seemed dull and certainly the obsessions of most politicians and writers didn't bear much relevance to my experience. I had no particular worries about the Atomic Bomb (Brian Aldiss thinks it probably saved his life, since he was just getting ready to invade Japan when it happened. . . Of course, it would have been great if the young Aldiss had liberated the young Ballard from his prison compound.)

Our experience simply wasn't dealt with in modernist fiction. You got stories of how the war affected sensitive middle class people (Heat of the Day) but nothing which really described what it was like growing up with nothing else but war. My generation came out of those ruins. To be honest, the likes of Martin Amis and Ian McEwen, let alone the previous generation, didn't seem to be addressing my experience any better. I noticed in Amis, for instance, that when he wrote about Ladbroke Grove (the main spiritualcentre of the Cornelius stories) I was probably one of the 'denizens' he was afraid of, who lurked in the dark doorways he found so sinister.

I was lucky in having very little education and a lot of freedom. So my response was, like my feminism and my 'post-modernism', spontaneous and visceral rather than intellectual. Since then, of course, I have given an intellectual gloss of what we've done, but it was gut response that led to it, not sitting about discussing the crisis of the novel (though we did that a bit, too, in the early days). The same with New Worlds—run it up the flagpole and see what comes down was our chief "policy statement." We were doing post-modernism before the name was invented.

As someone who can't stand the idea of unused space, I think I was psychologically prepared for the multiverse before I described it. That book also described black holes and a "shrinking" universe. It was very predictive re: theoretical physics, but the images were poetic rather than scientific, just as the physicists tended to use poetic imagery to frame their ideas. I grew up with a mother who was both highly supportive and loving and was a congenital liar on certain levels, very perceptive on others. I learned early on that the "truth" is malleable. It's what we make of it.

Increasingly, of course, we have developed the tools of making new "truths." Modern society is inclined to see all "truths" as mere statements of opinion. It makes argument difficult, if you are armed with facts, because the tendency is for people to say that truth is in the eye of the beholder and can't be persuaded by argument. They are more likely to be persuaded by style or method of approach. I think that some of this has to do with our horrible consumerist economic system, which promotes a false idea of "individualism," and some is what people have always done. You have the idea before you have the reality.

I have always felt mildly that the brain is a very powerful engine in a slightly inadequate chassis. Early stories of mine tended to be about people creating reality more or less whole. Forty years ago we were saying that none of the existing accepted systems were that useful for dealing with the amount of information we were able to get. During that forty years we have improved the systems, but the under-educated Englit world has scarcely understood it. Most of them have been educated into a deep, specific ignorance. No wonder so many of them feel inadequate or threatened by the modern world.

I don't think we ever felt threatened by the modern world—just the politicians who were messing it up. New Worlds and Jerry Cornelius embraced computers when in fact they were far too big to embrace and needed specially cooled buildings. Polite society meanwhile continued to worry about "computers taking us over". . . We were curious to see what you could do with them. That was probably what the cyberpunks saw in the English "new wave" (not a term we used ourselves). What we saw was variety, proliferation, possibility. It was far more exciting to us than moon-shots. I never had much interest in space. Jimmy was slightly more interested in astronauts than I was.

CM: I'm confused about the ideas of free will and determinism expressed in your works. The Elric series, for instance, has an undeniable sense of doom about it; by the final book, Elric is convinced that his path has been chosen for him. Yet, the Corum series ends with one god destroying the rest, so that humankind can determine its own destiny. A third idea surfaces in Breakfast in the Ruins, where we get the idea that people are the products of their environments. Have your views on this issue changed over time? How much free will do we have?

MM: No reason not to be confused, since these are ideas which have developed from early romantic notions in my late teens to my present state. I was very much writing under the influence of Norse mythology and French existentialism when I did the first Elric stories. Both tend to adopt a somewhat fatalistic approach.

CM: Elric's roots in Norse mythology brings to mind another writer who was influenced by Norse and Germanic mythology, J.R.R. Tolkien. As a result of Peter Jackson's upcoming movies, a whole lot of attention has been paid to Tolkien's work recently. Some are seeing The Lord of the Rings less as escapist fiction, and more as a "serious," quintessentially postmodern work that draws on a mythic past for a categorical rejection of modernity. In fact, some are even calling the Ring saga the "book of the century." I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the reasons for Tolkien's popularity, and your interpretation of what ways in which your views are in harmony or opposed to his.

MM: What I found lacking in Tolkien which I had found in, for instance, the Elder Edda, was a sense of tragedy, of reality, of mankind's impermanence. Tolkien really did set out to write a fairy tale and in my view that's exactly what he did—provide a perfect escape plan, which had the added attractions of having been written by an Oxford don. I knew and liked Tolkien who in a bufferish sort of way was very kind to me and encouraging. I looked forward to those books coming out. I was deeply disappointed by their lack of weight and their lack of ambitious language. They are about as likely to last as “the book of the century” as Ouida, Hall Caine or Marie Corelli, all of whom were judged the greatest writers of their day by a contemporary audience. Thomas Hardy hardly got a mention and well into the twenties people were still wondering if George Eliot was going to last. . . You can just hope nobody puts a curse like that on your own work!

Those polls remind me of what happened after Melody Maker stopped being a professional musicians' paper and became a pop music paper. They still ran the votes for best musicians. In the old days the winner would have been someone like Louis Armstrong. By the time the pop fans were voting, the best guitarist would tend to be whoever was guitarist with the teeny fave band—I remember the guitarist of the Bay City Rollers won one year. I am against popularity contests on principle (they always result in some people feeling less popular) as I am against literary prizes. They are only good to stimulate interest in the trade or professional organization that puts them out. Otherwise they are divisive. I grew up in an England that actually thought high-profile literary prizes were bad for literature. That all stopped after the Triumph of the Market (or the Marketer, actually).

Tolkien has the right elements of snobbery and escapism to make it a huge success. John Buchan for teenagers. A compendium of disguised bigotry and English high church snobbery. I hate it for exactly those qualities which made it so popular. It's a lullaby. Not sure we need lullabies at the moment. Unless we're all just going to give up, go to sleep and wake up dead. I really do feel contempt for Tolkien and a certain disgust for those adults who voted him writer of the century. This has nothing to do with why I decided to be a writer.

CM: What you said about Tolkien—"A compendium of disguised bigotry and English high church snobbery" put me in mind of Benjy at the end of Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury," bawling his head off because the horse-cart was taking him on other than the accustomed route. Could one see "The Lord of the Rings" as the last gasp of the former order, crying out for the way things used to be? Similarly, can you see American conservatism as some sort of grasping at the myth of Norman Rockwell's America?

MM: I think the appeal of Lord of the Rings, like certain quasi-dystopian science fiction stories which clean the world of all complication, is the escape it offers from the industrialized world. Such work (including mine) sells very well in highly industrialized societies but does not sell well at all in non-industrial countries. The Gothic was a clear response to the Industrial Revolution and Tolkien is a clear response, in my view, to the post-Industrial Revolution. It has the same discomfort with cities, the same 'volkishness' you get in proto-Nazi stuff. It scares me a bit, but not that much because times have changed. It would have scared me more if it had been published the year it was conceived.

Next: "America has always been in the hands of violent and ruthless entrepreneurs."