Bruce Sterling on 8/20/10
*I dunno why the layout on these webpages is so lousy, but that article’s
awesome.
http://newstaging.spectator.widearea.co.uk/books/6215098/hero-of-the-counterculture.thtml
(…)
…he was sent first to a Steiner school, where he acquired ‘a morbid terror of
vegetarianism’ and was the first pupil to be expelled, then to a prep school in
Norbury, and finally and somewhat inexplicably to a Pitman’s College, which he
left at 15, to earn his living by his leaky Osmiroid.
The Final Programme made him a star of the counterculture, and he performed
with Hawkwind, and with his own band the Deep Fix: ‘I was a hippy prince. I had
an entourage … We did drugs and sex and blew our minds.’
He can remember when LSD was available over the counter at John Bell and
Croydon in Wigmore Street, but his ‘true liking’, he confesses, is ‘for
killer-narcotics, mainlined’.
He acknowledges, though, that they ‘can become a bit of a risk’, and in 1975
he
returned to a rather reactive and overdone sobriety … From being a glamorous
bore I turned into a totally dull bore … I gave myself monkish rather than
roguish airs.
He is very funny about his stint as a script writer in Hollywood, and
interestingly prefers LA to San Francisco. (‘Only Geneva and Amsterdam are
neater.’)
These days he lives with his American wife in Lost Pines, a liberal enclave
of Texas, and deplores the way in which England
seems to be shedding her virtues as fast as she can, celebrating her vices
… as class-bound as ever, and in some ways far more repressive than similar
Oriental cultures.
Moorcock is elegant and aggressive (‘badly educated people are suspicious of
ambiguity’), consistently entertaining, and frequently wise and generous. He is
generally sound on religion and politics, despising Blair more than Thatcher,
for example.
And however heartily one may join him in deploring science fiction, one can
only applaud this, written in 1991, on ‘Cyberspace’ (an SF coinage): ‘It is,
perhaps, the year 2011 … You float at ease in the centre of a vast library …
Brilliantly coloured books radiate towards infinity.’ One applauds the louder
when he adds:
Our scientific advances will be merely obscene unless they help the large
part of our world’s population emerge from miserable uncertainty and
debilitating terror.
John Davey, his editor, is surely right to hail Moorcock as the epitome of
‘the post-War culture ruffian’….
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