​Michael Moorcock has been one of the most popular and prolific names in what we call science fiction since the 1950s. Though his many readers and Moorcock himself would not dub his work SF, or limit it to any category in fact, there is no getting away from the fact that he’s one of the most important names in the history of the genre. Born in 1939, Moorcock began his writing career as editor of New Worlds Magazine and has written dozens of novels and countless short stories. One of his most popular characters is the mysterious and enigmatic Jerry Cornelius, a man (is he a man?) whose adventures can take him to nay time and any place. I was honoured to ask Michael about the origins of Jerry Cornelius, the places his character has been over the years, and where he plans to take him next.
 
You've been a writer and editor for so long now, and written in so many styles and genres, but I wondered if you remembered first coming up with the character of Jerry Cornelius.  
 
I remember it very clearly. I was sitting in a cafe on the corner where Portobello and Kensington Park Road divide when I saw a good-looking young man with long, fine hair walking towards me.   Behind him  at Notting Hill gate was a greengrocer called  Cornelius of  London. I  had been looking for a character with a European name and gender unspecific appearance and there he was! Probably October 1964.  In January 1965, with two very young babies to take care of, I wrote the book in ten days, sometimes feeding the babies so my wife would not have to get up. We were living at 8 Colville Terrace,  a rackman-controlled slum  at the time. In 65 we moved to 87 Ladbroke Grove,  thanks  to Mrs Pash who ran the musical instrument shop in Elgin Crescent and she was  moving.  For a while nobody would buy the book until eventually Allison and Busby, just starting, took on that and behold the man. Avon books in the USA were very enthusiastic and in 1967 when New Worlds went to large size, I began a sequel which I wrote in monthly parts as a serial, A Cure for Cancer, illustrated by Mal Dean, who established the graphic appearance of the character.
 
What I love about Cornelius is that he can be anywhere, in any place or time, and we accept that fact every time we read about him. Was it and is it liberating to be able to bend your stories into all kinds of shapes, time periods and tones, and have a character you are able to do that with?  
 
That’s why I created him! I wanted a myth figure for the 20th century then and now one for the 21st—a figure who could represent rapidly changing times. I wanted, as I put it, a character and a kind of story which could be cool in hot times! One who could respond to the present as rapidly as possible.
 
There are many novels and short stories featuring Cornelius. Which ones did you enjoy writing the most, and which ones challenged you as a writer? Do you have any you are happier with than others?
 
I enjoyed writing almost all of them. It’s easier to think of the ones I didn’t feel were particularly successful. I need to forget about ‘Pegging the President’ which I wrote about Trump. I was far too angry with Trump and the story isn’t that cool at all! It did not do what it was supposed to do. My most recent, which will appear in New Worlds later this year, is one of my best, if not the best short, and is called ‘Wigan!’. I think it’s one of the best I’ve written. Illustrated by Mark Reeve, who is a fine successor to Mal Dean.
 
Other writers have written Cornelius stories, and you've even encouraged them to do so. It's very rare that an author will pass a character on to a contemporary. Do you think more writers should allow their characters to be adaptable and not be as possessive of their creations?  
 
M. John Harrison, who wrote three of the best, said that Jerry was not so much a character as a technique and I’m inclined to agree with him. He stopped writing them because he felt Jerry was ‘a  character for the sixties’. I strongly disagreed with that. Some of the best stories are those written since the sixties – I think of The Entropy Tango, The Spencer Inheritance and Cheering for the Rockets which were written in  the 70s, 90s and 2000s and were all I think pretty successful stories, all dealing with ‘hot’ issues of the day and lasting pretty well now!
 
People use the word fantasy and sf when talking about your work,  but I've never seen your stories as escapism. In fact they often mirror real life more than a lot of supposedly "realistic" fiction. How important is it for you that your writing works as satire and commentary while also being a highly readable story in its own right?  
 
I have never seen the Cornelius stories, in particular, as sf, fantasy or, indeed, ‘spy’ stories.  They are sui  generis, intended to work as a form of literature for modern times. It’s very important to me for the stories to be understood as, I suppose, absurdest, yet serious, commentary on issues which are both of our day and speaking universally.   
 
On the subject of genres, do you feel that categorisation limits what a lot of readers might delve into, or do you see the tags as useful for the writer and the reader alike? (For example, I have heard people who claim they do not like sf then reading one of your books and loving it.)  
 
I have found the same. Early books of mine were generic sf, without a doubt, and like the early fantasy were written to support New Worlds and my family. All books since The Warhound and the World’s Pain, Gloriana, Mother London, the Pyat Quartet and various others were books not intended to be read as generic books. The Dancers at the End of Time was an odd book in that I forgot to put the sf in the final volume and had to go back and rewrite it to add an sf element. Behold the man – the novel – was not written as a generic book, either! Sadly some people read an early sf or fantasy book and judge my work according to that, while booksellers insist on shelving my books as sf or fantasy when I have always believed in books being shelved by author!
 
I always look at Cornelius in a similar way to Pilgrim's Progress, or even Lindsay Anderson's Mick Travis in his trilogy starting with if.... Do you have any more plans for the character in the future?  
 
The Pilgrim’s Progress was the very first book I bought with my own  money – a shilling (5p) given to me for my birthday by a neighbour. I read it and came to understand  that a book  should contain a plot, characters who represented some sort of moral quality, some sort of moral intention, social observation and a dynamic (not necessarily linear) structure which maintains the reader’s attention. I have tried to offer the reader those same qualities ever since, only to be judged by some as formless, presumably because, as in my current ‘Whitefriars’ novels, I have  not provided them with a linear story-line! Frequently the books have both!

INTERVIEW WITH GRAHAM MASTERTON
AUG 2024
 
Graham Masterton is a legendary British writer, known primarily for his horror fiction, though he has written prolifically in many areas. He’s authored dozens of books over the past few decades and has a huge readership the world over. I got in touch with Graham recently to see if he might indulge me and answer some questions about a book of his called The House That Jack Built, a chilling horror tale which was published over thirty years ago. I was pleasantly surprised that Graham not only answered me, but also said he would happily take time out of his schedule to answer my questions. It’s a book that genuinely frightened me, wrapped itself around my psyche, and one which I read compulsively. If you are a fellow fan of Masterton and The House That Jack Built in particular, you might find these responses interesting. So here they are…
 
You were already well established by the mid 90s when The House That Jack Built came out. I wondered if you remembered how you came up with the initial idea for the book. Did anything specific inspire it? How do such books come about?
 
I started spending a lot of time in New York in the 1970s because I was the editor of Penthouse magazine in the UK and I was helping to bring out the new US edition of Penthouse to challenge Playboy on its own turf. After I quit Penthouse I still visited New York regularly because I was mainly publishing my sex instruction books and novels in the US, and my agent lived there. My late wife Wiescka and I took a trip up the Hudson River one weekend and we saw some remarkable houses up there, like Lyndhurst Mansion at Tarrytown. I combined those houses with the characters of some of the tycoons I had met during my time on Penthouse, including the owner and publisher Bob Guccione, who at one time owned the largest private house in Manhattan. I liked Bob a lot, but he could be bombastic, and although he was wealthy, he was given to starting up doomed enterprises like casinos and magazines, rather like Donald Trump. I was trained as a newspaper reporter, so I have always had the facility to combine one arresting feature or incident with another, to create a story, and that is how the idea of The House That Jack Built was germinated.
 
It begins with such a disturbing scene, but it's also a perfect beginning because it stuns and pulls you straight in. How important do you feel it is to come up with such an arresting opening chapter, especially in horror?
 
For horror stories, I think it’s essential. It’s the same as a news story – you should catch your readers’ attention and start their adrenaline pumping from the very beginning. After all, that’s why people read horror novels – to be excited and frightened but know at the same time that they are not in any real danger.
 
The character of Jack Belias haunts me to this day. Did anyone else inspire him?
 
Bob Guccione, as I have mentioned. There was no doubt that he had a charisma that was almost tangible. And one or two other American business people that I met, such as Albert Freedman, who was caught in the 1950s fixing a TV quiz show called Twenty-One by giving the winning contestants the answers in advance and paying the losing contestants to fail.
 
The characters are so vivid and at times relatable in The House That Jack Built, but Craig is such a flawed man from the start. Was it unsettling for you to explore the psyche of that character as Jack burrowed himself more and more into his very being?
 
I found it interesting, not unsettling. My training as a newspaper reporter gave me the skill to question people’s motives and their personality traits without holding back – a technique which eventually led to my writing sex instruction books such as How To Drive Your Man Wild In Bed based on a real conversations with real people.
 
At the end, Effie moves on in her life. Did you ever think what might have become of her? Do you ever think about what characters might do after the story is told?
 
Sometimes I think of writing sequels. Very few of my books were originally written with a series in mind, like Rook the college teacher with psychic insight, or Night Warriors about ordinary people who become battling heroes in dreams. A classic example is my series about the Irish detective Katie Maguire, which started off as a stand-alone thriller. The twelfth Katie Maguire novel Pay Back The Devil will be published this October.
 
Did The House That Jack Built do well upon release? You have mentioned that the early 90s were a weird time for horror fiction because for some reason sales dipped. 
 
You’re right, and horror sales did dip dramatically in the 90s. My publisher Simon & Schuster did not want to publish The House That Jack Built but I sold it to Carroll & Graf as a hardback and Leisure Books as a paperback and it sold very respectably.
 
You grew up reading horror masters like Poe and Lovecraft. Other than how to weave a masterful horror tale, what did you learn from them on a technical level? I see a direct link with the genre's original masters and your own prose, which is smooth and so carefully written at the same time as being hugely engaging.
 
What I mainly learned from Poe and Lovecraft was not to be afraid of writing about any kind of horrific scenario, no matter how absurd it may seem, because if you write it with conviction, your readers will suspend their disbelief, at least for as long as they are reading it. Dwarves being suspended from the ceiling and set on fire, for example, which is not something you see every day. I liked some of Lovecraft’s characters, such as Brown Jenkin, who I pinched for my novel Prey, but I am not a great fan of his style, particularly the way he gets all hysterical at the end of story. 
 
A little off topic, but as a huge admirer of the Beat writers, what did you learn from the like of Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs, both as men and as writers?
 
From Allen Ginsberg I learned not to allow a jet-lagged Beat poet with greasy hair to lie on the floor and fall asleep so that he stained my new pale Italian suede shoes (I was a Mod). From William Burroughs I learned never to be afraid to write about anything, no matter how explicit. He and I also worked many hours together on language, taking it apart like a car engine and putting it back together again so that it purred. In other words, we worked on writing rhythmic sentences with simple words so that the readers would not be aware they were actually reading, but would feel they were actually inside the story. We also wrote a ‘cut-up’ novel together Rules of Duel to explore the concept of writing a sentence and then cutting it up so that it had a new meaning. From William I also learned not to go to Lebanese restaurants and get so drunk that he shouted ‘Bomb the Ay-rabs!’ and was politely asked by the management to leave. The artist and writer Brion Gysin and I managed to drag him home across Trafalgar Square.
 
With so much published now, how do you keep your mind so fresh and adaptable to different genres and subjects?
 
I am always on the lookout for new ideas. Again, I think it’s another result of my newspaper training. I have just finished a new horror novel House of Flies which combines recent outbreaks of flies with Old Testament stories. I am also co-authoring stories with two younger writers, Dawn G Harris and Karolina Mogielska. Dawn has published her first supernatural novel Diviner and co-authored horror stories with me in an anthology called Days Of Utter Dread, while Karolina and I have published several major horror stories together in four different languages as chapbooks, such as The Dark Days of Christmas, published by Phantasmagoria Books. Dawn and Karolina and I are very much in tune with each other in our thinking and our writing, and it is really refreshing to work with them.

​
Will Self is undoubtedly one of the most important writers and thinkers of our time. His novels and short story collections have received wide acclaim, he currently teaches Modern Thought at Brunel University London, and continues to write articles and columns on the issues that concern and interest him. I was honoured when Mr Self  agreed to answer some questions about his novels, short stories, and thoughts on the creative process, especially given some of the stories were about work he wrote decades ago. Thank you for indulging me, Mr Self… This Q and A if from early 2023.
 
What I love about your short stories is the fact they are spare and detailed at the same time. You get to the core of a moment or a character in a single detail that often says so much more than if you went on to over-describe every single thing, as some writers do. Was it a purposeful decision when you started writing fiction to reach a sort of balance, of not being over descriptive? I know you have always written for yourself, but was it a conscious stylistic decision?
 
No, not really – and while I’m gratified that you say that (it’s certainly a very satisfying phenomenon for a reader), I can’t claim that it’s the way I’ve intentionally gone about things – rather, with the early stories, I was animated by the riff: most of them actually began as sort of bullshitting to friends; What would it be like if there were a Native American tribe characterised by being... boring? What would it be like if there were only eight people in London who actually had free will – and they controlled all the rest? And so on. When it gets to the novels – and especially the later ones, more influenced by Modernism I think I really have problem with not being to exhaustive when it comes to the world the characters inhabit... Modernism has to be, in part, precisely a revolt against the schematic quality of fictions that leave this description out because they assume their readers occupy a commonsensical world... 
 
My favourite story of yours (at the moment anyway) is Ward 9. It's such an exciting, engaging story, but there are some fascinating points raised in it. At the end, Busner says, 'You had the choice to be a patient or a therapist, you decided to become a patient.' Were you making bigger points about mental health and how hospitals can heighten and even create states of madness? Also, did you ever imagine the main character escaping the ward instead of being swallowed up by it?
 
Well, thank you – but I wrote the story almost 35 years ago, so can no longer speak definitively about intentions or motivations – suffice to say, it was inspired by the fact that I knew several psychiatrists and psychoanalysts at that time whose children had succumbed to mental illness – I was also very influenced by the anti-psychiatrists: Foucault, RD Laing, and especially Thomas Szasz, whose concept of ‘the therapeutic state’ informs all of ‘The Quantity Theory of Insanity’. Basically, I was proposing that a lot of the mental pathologies – as then (and still, now) defined – were iatrogenic, and I believe that the most recent research bears me out on this, whether you approach the issue from the position of psychology, or genetics... Here’s a link to a review article of mine which sets the issues out clearly: 
Then there’s Chekov – my Ward 9 is actually a response to his Ward 6, so in order to understand my motivations in respect of the ending, you have to know the other story...
        
I saw you do a talk fairly recently when you read parts of Scale, and you were pleased it had aged well. That is still such a wonderfully surreal story. May I ask where you got the idea for it? Did it just pop in there one day, or were there ideas in it which had been bubbling away in the kettle of your mind for a while?
 
My first marriage was breaking up, I had two young children and an opiate addiction, we lived outside Oxford near to the M40, I often took the kids to the model village at Bekonscott... so it was fairly autobiographical... I was also obsessed by alterations in scale, which Levi-Strauss observes: ‘Always sacrifice the sensible in favour of the intelligible...’ The actual proximate inspiration for the writing was John Major’s speech to the Tory Party conference in 1991, the centrepiece of which was him inveighing against the lack of services on British motorways – he cited the newly-opened M40 as a major culprit when it came to kids pissing themselves in the car... I just thought it showed up the extraordinarily ephemeral character of contemporary politics, and immediately thought: but what will the people in the distant future make of these monumental earthworks...? But of all my work it probably came the easiest: I remember sitting down and writing it in in more or less a complete draft at one sitting... but then I also remember giving the then Prince Charles a blow job – and I’m pretty sure that never happened...   
 
Shark is one of those books that is addictive and constantly unsettling at the same time, both a dream and a nightmare. How challenging and invigorating is it to work on such a long and intense piece like that?
 
It’s pretty intense... ‘Shark’ is tightly structured for a long novel with now paratextual apparatus – chapters, section breaks – and no supervening narrative voice... I also wanted to summon up at least two worlds with painful exactitude: that of the USS Minneapolis, and Genie’s childhood... But the novel was (is) part of a trilogy, and when I’d finished ‘Umbrella’ I knew where I was going with it, which was to express a dialectical relation between technological ‘advance’, psychopathology and warfare... I also had my methodology: an intense focus of the minutiae of human experience that’s usually eliminated by schematisation in fiction (see above)... I like ‘Shark’ a great deal... but I’ve yet to meet anyone who understood what was going on in the last twenty to thirty pages...
 
Chest is one of my favourite stories. There is a specific moment when you describe something being as bright and rich as a peacock's tail under a taxidermist's glass dome. Such details are mouth watering. You have said you take much pleasure in using rich and varied language in your work, but I wondered if you derived as much satisfaction from these types of descriptive detail. These little moments seem so minutely specific I am sure they please you as you tighten and hone them...
 
Yes, maybe – but you can’t really build fictions entirely out of well-constructed metaphors, and indeed, I came to believe that metaphor is a bit of a blind-alley for fiction (and by this I mean constructed metaphor, not merely allusive or colourful language)... The Umbrella trilogy is, in part, precise a reaction against so much English literary fiction, which goes along like this: tum-te-tum-te-tum ‘metaphor’! Tum-te-tum-te-tum ‘simile’! I really wanted to get past this – and if you read the trilogy with any attention you’ll see there isn’t a single constructed metaphor in all of its 1.500 very odd pages...
 
 I feel creativity is a restless pursuit of sensory satisfaction. How much do you think fiction is an exercise in trying to create the ideal aesthetic? Do you often feel it's an unfeedable hunger, that there is truly never enough to satisfy the creative urge?
 
No, I like making love, drugs, bringing up children and physical exercise when it comes to sensory satisfaction – and I have this much in common with Herman Goering: when I hear the word ‘culture’ (which is really socialised aesthetics – but then all aesthetics are... socialised)  I, too, reach for my gun... I write out of an urge to express and communicate, and also so as to have worlds that I alone control: I am the demiurge of my fictions…
 
The Indian Mutiny ends with a horrific nightmare (again a detail so graphically described), but the rest of the story is so believable. (It reminds me of Unman, Wittering and Zigo.)  Was this story inspired by a true event at all or was it from your imagination completely? (I had a teacher go mad, but he didn't kill himself.)
 
Again: it’s a long time ago, and I can’t remember the end of The Indian Mutiny... I thought the teacher just went mad in it... It absolutely was based on a real incident – indeed, there’s scarcely any invention at all... Pretty harrowing, really – and having worked as a teacher myself now for the past decade or so, my sympathies are squarely with the pedagogue...