From: Jamal Hannah x342446 (jah@parsons.iww.org)
Date: Thu Jul 01 1999 - 00:48:04 MDT
Starship Stormtroopers
by
Micheal Moorcock
(From Michael Moorcock's "The Opium General" Harrap (1984), reprinted from
Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review 1978)
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. If I were sitting in a tube train and all the people
opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval it
probably wouldn't disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein,
Tolkein or Richard Adams. All this visionary fiction seems to me to have a
great deal in common. Utopian fiction has been predominantly reactionary in
one form or another (as well as being predominantly dull) since it began.
Most of it warns the world of 'decadence' in its contemporaries and the
alternatives are usually authoritarian and sweeping -- not to say
simple-minded. 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.
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. I'd been confused in the past by listening to hardline Communists
offering views that were somewhat at odds with their anti-authoritarian
claims, but I'd never expected to hear similar things from anarchists. My
experience of science fiction fans at the conventions which are held
annually in a number of countries (mainly the US and England) had taught me
that those who attended were reactionary (claiming to be 'apolitical' but
somehow always happy to vote Tory and believe Colin Jordan to 'have a
point'). I always assumed these were for one reason or another the
exceptions among sf enthusiasts. Then the underground papers began to emerge
and I found myself in sympathy with most of their attitudes -- but once
again I saw the old arguments aired: Tolkein, C. S. Lewis, Frank Herbert,
Isaac Asimov and the rest, bourgeois reactionaries to a man, Christian
apologists, crypto-Stalinists, were being praised in IT, Frendz and Oz and
everywhere else by people whose general political ideals I thought I shared.
I started writing about what I thought was the implicit authoritarianism of
these authors and as often as not found myself accused of being reactionary,
elitist or at very best a spoilsport who couldn't enjoy good sf for its own
sake. But here I am again at Stuart Christie's request, to present arguments
which I have presented more than once before.
During the sixties, in common with many other periodicals, our New Worlds
believed in revolution. Our emphasis was on fiction, the arts and sciences,
because it was what we knew best. We attacked and were in turn attacked in
the all-to-familiar rituals. Smiths refused to continue distributing the
magazine unless we 'toned down' our contents. We refused. We were, they
said, obscene, blasphemous, nihilistic etc., etc. The Daily Express attacked
us. A Tory asked a question about us in the House of Commons -- why was
public money (a small Arts Council grant) being spent on such filth. I
recount all this not merely to establish what we were prepared to do to
maintain our policies (we were eventually wiped out by Smiths and Menzies)
but to point out that we were the only sf magazine to pursue what you might
call a determinedly radical approach -- and sf buffs were the first to
attack us with genuine vehemence. Our main serial running at the height of
our troubles was called Bug Jack Barron written by Norman Spinrad, who had
taken an active part in radical politics in the US and used his story to
display the abuse of democracy and the media in America. He later went on to
write a satirical sword-and-sorcery epic, The Iron Dream, intended to
display the fascist elements inherent to the form. The author of this novel
existed, as it were, in an alternate history to our own. His name was Adolf
Hitler. The book was meant to point up the number of sf authors who were, in
a sense, 'unsuccessful Hitlers'.
Many Americans came to use NW as a vehicle because they couldn't get their
stories published in the US. Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek, Harvey Jacobs,
Harlan Ellison and others published a good deal of their best and at the
time most controversial work in NW -- and Heinlein fans actually attacked us
for 'destroying' science fiction. Escapism this form might be, but it posed
as a 'literature of ideas' and that, we contended, it wasn't -- unless The
Green Berets was a profoundly philosophical movie.
Another example: in 1967 Judith Merril, a founder member of The Science
Fiction Writers of America, an ex-Trotskyist turned libertarian, proposed
that ' this Organisation would buy advertising space in the sf magazines
condemning the war in Vietnam. I was around when this was proposed. A good
number of members agreed with alacrity -- including English members like
myself, John Brunner, Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverberg and Harry Harrison
were keen, as were Harlan Ellison, James Blish and, to be fair, Frank
Herbert and Larry Niven. But quite as many were outraged by the idea, saying
that the SFWA 'shouldn't interfere in politics.' Okay, said Merril, then
let's say 'The following members of the SFWA condemn American involvement in
the Vietnam War etc.' Finally the sf magazines contained two ads -- one
against the war and one in support of American involvement. Those in support
included Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, Ann MaCaffrey, Daniel F. Galouye,
Keith Laumer and as many other popular sf writers as were against the war.
The interesting thing was that at the time many of the pro-US-involvement
writers were (and by and large still are) the most popular sf writers in the
English-speaking world, let alone Japan, the Soviet Union, France, Germany,
Italy and Spain, where a good many sf readers think of themselves as
radicals. One or two of these writers (British as well as American) are dear
friends of mine who are personally kindly and courageous people of
considerable integrity -- but their political statements (if not always, by
any means, their actions) are stomach-turning! Most people have to be judged
by their actions rather than their remarks, which are often surprisingly at
odds. Writers, when they are writing, can only be judged on the substance of
their work. The majority of the sf writers most popular with radicals are by
and large crypto-fascists to a man and woman! There is Lovecraft, the
misogynic racist; there is Heinlein, the authoritarian militarist; there is
Ayn Rand, the rabid opponent of trade unionism and the left, who, like many
a reactionary before her, sees the problems of the world as a failure by
capitalists to assume the responsibilities of 'good leadership'; there is
Tolkein and that group of middle-class Christian fantasists who constantly
sing the praises of bourgeois virtues and whose villains are thinly
disguised working class agitators -- fear of the Mob permeates their rural
romances. To all these and more the working class is a mindless beast which
must be controlled or it will savage the world (i.e. bourgeois security) --
the answer is always leadership, 'decency', paternalism (Heinlein in
particularly strong on this), Christian values...
What can this stuff have in common with radicals of any persuasion? The
simple answer is, perhaps, Romance. The dividing line between rightist
Romance (Nazi insignia and myth etc.) and leftist Romance (insurgent cavalry
etc.) is not always easy to determine. A stirring image is a stirring image
and can be ,employed to raise all sorts of atavistic or infantile emotions
in us. Escapist or 'genre' fiction appeals to these emotions. It does us no
harm to escape from time to time but it can be dangerous to confuse
simplified fiction with reality and that, of course, is what propaganda
does.
The bandit hero -- the underdog rebel -- so frequently becomes the political
tyrant; and we are perpetually astonished! Such figures appeal to our
infantile selves -- what is harmful about them in real life is that they are
usually immature, without self-discipline, frequently surviving on their
'charm'. Fiction lets them stay, like Zorro or Robin Hood, perpetually
charming. In reality they become petulant, childish, relying on a mixture of
threats and self-pitying pleading, like any baby. These are too often the
revolutionary figures on whom we pin our hopes, to whom we sometimes commit
our lives and whom we sometimes try to be; because we fail to distinguish
fact from fiction. In reality it is too often the small, fanatical men with
the faces and stance of neurotic clerks who come to power while the
charismatic heroes, if they are lucky, die gloriously, leaving us to
discover that while we have been following them, imitating them, a new Tsar
has manipulated himself into the position of power and Terror has returned
with a vengeance while we have been using all our energies living a romantic
lie. Heroes betray us. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves.
The heroes of Heinlein and Ayn Rand are forever competent, forever right:
they are oracles and protectors, magic parents (so long as we obey their
rules). They are prepared to accept the responsibilities we would rather not
bear. They are 'leaders'. Traditional sf is hero fiction on a huge scale,
but it is only when it poses as a fiction of ideas that it becomes
completely pernicious. At its most spectacular it gives us Charlie Manson
and Scientology (invented by the sf writer Ron Hubbard and an authoritarian
system to rival the Pope's). To enjoy it is one thing. To claim it as
'radical' is quite another. It is rather unimaginative; it is usually badly
written; its characters are ciphers; its propaganda is simple-minded and
conservative -- good old-fashioned opium which might be specifically
designed for dealing with the potential revolutionary.
In a writer like Lovecraft a terror of sex often combines (or is confused
for) a terror of the masses, the 'ugly' crowd. But this is so common to so
much 'horror' fiction that it's hardly worth discussing. Lovecraft is
morbid. His work equates to that negative romanticism found in much Nazi
art. He was a confused anti-Semite and misanthrope, a promoter of
anti-rationalist ideas about racial 'instinct' which have much in common
with Mein Kampf. A dedicated supporter of 'Aryanism', a hater of women, he
wound up marrying a Jewess (which might or might not have been a sign of
hope -- we haven't her view of the matter)Lovecraft appeals to us primarily
when we are ourselves feeling morbid. Apart from his offensively awful
writing and a resultant inability to describe his horrors (leaving us to do
the work -- the secret of his success -- we're all better writers than he
is!) he is rarely as frightening, by implication, as most of the other
highly popular writers whose concerns are not with 'meeping Things' but with
idealised versions of society. It's not such a big step, for instance from
Farnham's Freehold to Hitler's Lebensraum.
I must admit I'm not following a properly argued critical line. I'm arguing
on the assumption that my readers are at least familiar with some of the
books and authors I mention. I attack these books because they are the
favourite reading of so many radicals. I attack the books not for their
superficial fascination with quasi-medieval social systems (a la Frank
Herbert). Fiction about kings and queens is not necessarily royalist fiction
any more than fiction about anarchists is likely to be libertarian fiction.
As a writer I have produced a good many fantastic romances in which kings
and queens, lords and ladies, figure largely -- yet I am an avowed
anti-monarchist. Catch 22 never seemed to me to be in favour of militarism.
And just because many of Heinlein's characters are soldiers or ex-soldiers I
don't automatically assume he must therefore be in favour of war. It depends
what use you make of such characters in a story and what, in the final
analysis, you are saying.
Jules Verne in The Masterless Man put some pretty decent sentiments in the
mouth of Kaw-djer the anarchist and his best characters, like Captain Nemo,
are embittered 'rebels' who have retreated from society. Even the aerial
anarchists of The Angel of the Revolution by George Griffiths have something
to be said for them, for all their inherent authoritarianism, but they are
essentially romantic 'outlaws' and the views they express are not
sophisticated even by the standards of the 1890s.
H.G. Wells was no more the 'father' of science fiction than Jules Verne. He
inherited a tradition going back some thirty or forty years in the form he
himself used and several centuries in the form of the Utopian romance. What
was unusual about Wells, however, is that he was one of the first radicals
of his time to take the trappings of the scientific romance and combine them
with powerful and telling images to make Bunyanesque allegories like The
Time Machine or The Invisible Man. Wells didn't have his characters talking
socialism. He showed the results of capitalism, authoritarianism,
superstition and other evils and because he was a far better writer than
most of those who have ever written sf before or since he made his points
with considerable clarity. Morris had been long-winded and backward-looking.
Wells took the techniques of Kipling and preached his own brand of
socialism. Until Wells -- the most talented, original and intelligent writer
of his kind -- almost all sf had devoted itself to attacks on 'decadence'
and military unpreparedness, urging our leaders to take a stronger moral
line and our armies to re-equip and get better officers. By and large this
was the tone of much of the sf which followed Wells, from Kipling's
effective but reactionary With the Night Mail and As Easy as ABC
(paternalistic aerial controllers whose rays pacify 'the mob') to stories by
John Buchan, Michael Arlen, William Le Quex, E. Phillips Oppenheim and
hundreds of others who predominantly were following Kipling in warning us of
the dangers of socialism, mixed marriages, free love, anarchist plots,
Zionist conspiracies, the yellow peril and so on and so on. Even Jack London
wasn't what one might call an all-round libertarian any more than Wells was
when he toyed with his ideas of an elite corps of 'samurai' who were
actually not a great deal different to how Soviet Communist Party members
saw themselves, or were described in official fiction and propaganda. The
quasi-religious nature of sf (which I describe in a collection of pre-WWI sf
Before Armageddon) was producing on the whole quasi-religious substitutes (a
variety of authoritarian socialist and fascist theories). A few attacked the
theories of the emerging dictators (Murray Constantine's Swastika Night,
1937, seemed to think Christianity could conquer Hitler but is otherwise a
pretty incisive projection of Nazism several hundred years in the future).
By and large the world we got in the thirties was the world the sf writers
of the day hoped we would have -- 'strong leaders' reshaping nations. The
reality of these hero-leaders was not, of course, entirely what had been
visualised -- Nuremberg rallies and Strength Through Joy, perhaps -- but
Kristellnacht and gas ovens seemed to go a bit too far.
At least the American pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and Thrilling
Wonder Stories were not, by and large, offering us high-profile
'leadership': just the good old-fashioned mixture of implicit
racialism/militarism/nationalism/paternalism carried a few hundred years
into the future or a few million light years into space (E. E. Smith remains
to this day one of the most popular writers of that era). John W. Campbell,
who in the late thirties took over Astounding Science Fiction Stories and
created what many believe to be a major revolution in the development of sf,
was the chief creator of the school known to buffs as 'Golden Age' sf and
written by the likes of Heinlein, Asimov and A.E. Van Vogt wild-eyed
paternalists to a man, fierce anti-socialists, whose work reflected the
deep-seated conservatism of the majority of their readers, who saw a
Bolshevik menace in every union meeting. They believed, in common with
authoritarians everywhere, that radicals wanted to take over old-fashioned
political power, turn the world into a uniform mass of 'workers' with
themselves (the radicals) as commissars. They offered us such visions, when
they attempted any overt discussion of politics at all. They were about as
left-wing as The National Enquirer or The Saturday Evening Post (where their
stories occasionally were to appear). They were xenophobic, smug and
confident that the capitalist system would flourish throughout the universe,
though they were, of course, against dictators and the worst sort of
exploiters (no longer Jews but often still 'aliens'). Rugged individualism
was the most sophisticated political concept they could manage -- in the
pulp tradition, the Code of the West became the Code of the Space Frontier,
and a spaceship captain had to do what a spaceship captain had to do...
The war helped. It provided character types and a good deal of
authoritative-sounding technological terms which could be applied to
scientific hardware and social problems alike and sounded reassuringly
'expert'. Those chaps had the tone of Vietnam twenty years earlier. Indeed,
it's often been shown that sf supplied a lot of the vocabulary and
atmosphere for American military and space technology (a 'Waldo' handling
machine is a name taken straight from a Heinlein story). Astounding became
full of crew-cut wisecracking, cigar-chewing, competent guys (like
Campbell's image of himself). But Campbell and his writers (and they
considered themselves something of a unified team) were not producing
Westerns. They claimed to be producing a fiction of ideas. These competent
guys were suggesting how the world should be run. By the early fifties
Astounding had turned by almost anyone's standard into a crypto-fascist
deeply philistine magazine pretending to intellectualism and offering
idealistic kids an 'alternative' that was, of course, no alternative at all.
Through the fifties Campbell used his whole magazine as propaganda for the
ideas he promoted in his editorials. His writers, by and large, were
enthusiastic. Those who were not fell away from him, disturbed by his
increasingly messianic disposition (Alfred Bester gives a good account of
this). Over the years Campbell promoted the mystical, quasi-scientific
Scientology (first proposed by one of his regular writers L. Ron Hubbard and
aired for the first time in Astounding as 'Dianetics: The New Science of the
Mind'), a perpetual motion machine known as the 'Dean Drive', a series of
plans to ensure that the highways weren't 'abused', and dozens of other
half-baked notions, all in the context of cold-war thinking. He also, when
faced with the Watts riots of the mid-sixties, seriously proposed and went
on to proposing that there were 'natural' slaves who were unhappy if freed.
I sat on a panel with him in 1965, as he pointed out that the worker bee
when unable to work dies of misery, that the moujiks when freed went to
their masters and begged to be enslaved again, that the ideals of the
anti-slavers who fought in the Civil War were merely expressions of
self-interest and that the blacks were 'against' emancipation, which was
fundamentally why they were indulging in 'leaderless' riots in the suburbs
of Los Angeles! I was speechless (actually I said four words in all --
'science-fiction' -- 'psychology' -- Jesus Christ!'- before I collapsed),
leaving John Brunner to perform a cool demolition of Campbell's arguments,
which left the editor calling on God in support of his views -- an
experience rather more intense for me than watching Doctor Strangelove at
the cinema.
Starship Troopers (serialised in Astounding as was most of Heinlein's
fiction until the early sixties) was probably Heinlein's last 'straight' sf
serial for Campbell before he began his 'serious' books such as Farnham's
Freehold and Stranger in a Strange Land -- taking the simplified characters
of genre fiction and producing some of the most ludicrously unlikely people
ever to appear in print. In Starship Troopers we find a slightly rebellious
cadet gradually learning that wars are inevitable, that the army is always
right, that his duty is to obey the rules and protect the human race against
the alien menace. It is pure debased Ford out of Kipling and it set the
pattern for Heinlein's more ambitious paternalistic, xenophobic (but equally
sentimental) stories which became for me steadily more hilarious until I
realised with some surprise that people were taking them as seriously as
they had taken, say, Atlas Shrugged a generation before -- in hundreds of
thousands! That middle-America could regard such stuff as 'radical' was easy
enough to understand. I kept finding that supporters of the Angry Brigade
were enthusiastic about Heinlein, that people with whom I thought I shared
libertarian principles were getting off on every paternalistic, bourgeois
writer who had ever given me the creeps! I still can't fully understand it.
Certainly I can't doubt the sincerity of their idealism. But how does it
equate with their celebration of writers like Tolkein and Heinlein? The clue
could be in the very vagueness of the prose, which allows for liberal
interpretation; it could be that the ciphers they use instead of characters
are capable of suggesting a wholly different meaning to certain readers. To
me, their naive and emblematic reading of society is fundamentally
misanthropic and therefore anti-libertarian. We are faced, once again, with
quasi-religion, presented to us as radicalism. At best it is the philosophy
of the Western applied to the complex social problems of the twentieth
century -- it is Reaganism, it is John Wayne in Big John Maclean and The
Green Berets, it is George Wallace and Joe McCarthy -- at its most refined
it is William F. Buckley Jr., who, already a long way more sophisticated
than Heinlein, is still pretty simple-minded.
Rugged individualism also goes hand in hand with a strong faith in
paternalism -- albeit a tolerant and somewhat distant paternalism -- and
many otherwise sharp-witted libertarians seem to see nothing in the morality
of a John Wayne Western to conflict with their views. Heinlein's paternalism
is at heart the same as Wayne's. In the final analysis it is a kind of
easy-going militarism favoured by the veteran professional soldier -- the
chain of command is complex -- many adult responsibilities can be left to
that chain as long as broad, but firmly enforced, rules from 'high up' are
adhered to. Heinlein is Eisenhower Man and his views seem to me to be more
pernicious than ordinary infantile back-to-the-land Christian communism,
with its mysticism and its hatred of technology. To be an anarchist, surely,
is to reject authority but to accept self-discipline and community
responsibility. To be a rugged individualist a la Heinlein and others is to
be forever a child who must obey, charm and cajole to be tolerated by some
benign, omniscient father: Rooster Coburn shuffling his feet in front of a
judge he respects for his office (but not necessarily himself) in True Grit.
An anarchist is not a wild child, but a mature, realistic adult imposing
laws upon the self and modifying them according to an experience of life, an
interpretation of the world. A 'rebel', certainly, he or she does not assume
'rebellious charm' in order to placate authority (which is what the rebel
heroes of all these genre stories do). There always comes the depressing
point where Robin Hood doffs a respectful cap to King Richard, having
clobbered the rival king. This sort of implicit paternalism is seen in high
relief in the currently popular Star Wars series which also presents a
somewhat disturbing anti-rationalism in its quasi-religious 'Force' which
unites the Jedi Knights (are we back to Wellsian 'samurai' again?) and upon
whose power they can draw, like some holy brotherhood, some band of Knights
Templar. Star Wars is a pure example of the genre (in that it is a
compendium of other people's ideas) in its implicit structure --
quasi-children, fighting for a paternalistic authority, win through in the
end and stand bashfully before the princess while medals are placed around
their necks.
Star Wars carries the paternalistic messages of almost all generic adventure
fiction (may the Force never arrive on your doorstep at three o'clock in the
morning) and has all the right characters. it raises 'instinct' above reason
(a fundamental to Nazi doctrine) and promotes a kind of sentimental
romanticism attractive to the young and idealistic while protective of
existing institutions. It is the essence of a genre that it continues to
promote certain implicit ideas even if the author is unconscious of them. In
this case the audience also seems frequently unconscious of them.
It was Alfred Bester who first attracted me to science fiction. I'd read
some fantasy and Edgar Rice Burroughs before that, but I thought that if The
Stars My Destination (also called Tiger! Tiger!) was sf, then this was the
fiction for me. It took me some years to realise that Bester was one of the
few exceptions. At the ending of The Stars My Destination the self-educated,
working class, 'scum of the spaceways', Gully Foyle, comes into possession
of the substance known as PyrE, capable of detonating at a thought and
probably destroying the solar system at very least. The plot has revolved
around the attempts of various powerful people to get hold of the stuff.
Foyle has it. Moral arguments or forceful persuasions are brought against
him to make him give PyrE up to a 'responsible' agency. In the end he
scatters the stuff to 'the mob' of the solar system. Here you are, he says,
it's yours. Its your destiny. Do with it how you see fit.
This is one of the very, very few 'libertarian' sf novels I have ever read.
If I hadn't read it, I very much doubt I should have read any more sf. It's
a wonderful adventure story. It has a hero developing from a completely
stupefied, illiterate hand on a spaceship to a brilliant and mature
individual taking his revenge first on those who have harmed him and then
gradually developing what you might call a 'political conscience.' I know of
no other sf book which so thoroughly combines romance with an idealism
almost wholly acceptable to me. It is probably significant that it enjoys a
relatively small success compared to, say, Stranger in a Strange Land.
Leaving aside the very worthy but to my mind journalistic The Dispossessed
by U.K. Le Guin, it is quite hard for me to find many other examples of sf
books which, as it were, 'promote' libertarian ideas. M. John Harrison is an
anarchist. His books are full of anarchists -- some of them very bizarre
like the anarchist aesthetes of The Centauri Device. Typical of the New
Worlds school he could be described as an existential anarchist. There is
Brian Aldiss with his Barefoot in the Head vision of an LSD 'bombed' Europe
almost totally liberated and developing bizarre new customs. There are J. G.
Ballard's 'terminal ironies' such as The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash and
so on, which have brought criticisms of 'nihilism' against him. There is
Joanna Russ's marvellous The Female Man. So little sf has fundamental
humanitarian values, let alone libertarian ideals, one is hard put to find
other examples. My own taste, I suppose, is sometimes at odds with my
political views. I admire Barrington J. Bayley, whose stories are often
extremely abstract. One of his most enjoyable books recently published is
The Soul of the Robot which discusses the nature of individual identity.
Charles L. Harness is another favourite of mine. The Rose, in particular,
lacks the simplifications of most sf, and The Paradox Men with its sense of
the nature of Time, its thief hero, its ironic references to America
Imperial, is highly entertaining. I also have a soft spot for C. M.
Kornbluth who to my mind had a rather stronger political conscience than he
allowed himself, so that his stories are sometimes confused as he tried to
mesh middle-American ideas with his own radicalism. One of my favourites
(though structurally it is a bit weak) is The Syndic (about a society where
a rather benign Mafia is paramount). Fritz Leiber is probably the best of
the older American sf writers for his prose-style, his wit and his humanity,
as well as his abiding contempt for authoritarianism. His Gather, Darkness
is one of the best sf books to relate political power to religious power
(this was also serialised in Astounding during the forties . John Brunner,
author of the CND marching song 'H-Bomb's Thunder', often writes from a
distinctly socialist point of view. Harlan Ellison, who for some time had
associations with a New York street gang and who has identified himself for
many years with radicalism in the US, writes many short stories whose heroes
have no truck with authority of any sort, though the conventions of the
genre sometimes get in the way of the essential messages of his stories.
This has to be true of most genre fiction. Ellison's best work is written
outside the sf genre. Philip K. Dick, John Sladek, Thomas M.Disch, Joanna
Russ...
To my mind one of the best examples of imaginative fiction to ear in England
since the war is Maurice Richardson's The Exploits of Engelbrecht, written
in the forties and recently republished by John Conquest (available from him
at Compendium Books). These 'Chronicles of the Surrealist Sportman's Club'
are superbly laconic pieces, concentrating more original invention into
fewer words than almost any writer I can think of. They outshine, for me,
almost anything else remotely like them, including the stories of Borges and
other much admired imaginative writers. Richardson goes swiftly from one
idea to the next, using a beautifully disciplined prose. He has the
advantage of being a great ironist and I find that more palatable. Such a
style can become one of the most convincing weapons in the literary arsenal
and it often astonishes me how cleverly Kipling influenced generations of
writers by disguising his authoritarian notions in that superb
matter-of-fact, faintly ironic prose. Many writers, not necessarily of
Kipling's views, have used it since. We find a debased version of it in the
right-wing thrillers and sf novels of our own day. It is probably this
'tone' (employed to suggest the writer's basic decency and commonsense)
which enables many people to accept ideas which, couched differently, would
revolt them. 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.
Michael Moorcock, May 1977, Ladbroke Grove
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