The Eternal Champion

July 26, 2015 9:25 PM

“I was very much into Freud and Jung when I was writing those books,” he says. “The whole point of Elric’s soul-eating sword, Stormbringer, was addiction: to sex, to violence, to big, black, phallic swords, to drugs, to escape. That’s why it went down so well in the rock’n’roll world.” - Michael Moorcock at 75 on his work, autobiographical fantasy, and why he thinks Tolkien was a crypto-fascist.
posted by Artw (69 comments total)

Blimey, I must really like this title for Moorcock interviews.
posted by Artw at 9:30 PM on July 26, 2015 [9 favorites]

... crypto?
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:37 PM on July 26, 2015 [20 favorites]

That anecdote about Moorcock's weird perceptual errors (for instance, mistaking a stand of mops and buckets for a samurai armor set) was fascinating.
posted by infinitewindow at 10:03 PM on July 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Legends from the End of Time and One More Deep Fix would have been acceptable as titles for this post. I'd also give a pass to Chaotic Good? YES!
posted by misterbee at 10:09 PM on July 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

“Back then, I was unaware of gender politics,” he confesses. “We simply didn’t have the vocabulary to deal with those inequalities. ... You have to address that and you think, ‘Christ, I was a bastard.’”

Possibly the most self-aware thing I've ever seen Moorcock say, and I applaud him for continuing to learn.
posted by hanov3r at 10:41 PM on July 26, 2015 [26 favorites]

This is an apocalypse that even Moorcock never expected. A money bomb went off and took away all the ordinary people.

The Moorcocks now divide their time between Paris and Austin, Texas. We meet in their apartment in the multicultural warren of the tenth arrondissement [...]

I suspect that in his own mind, Moorcock is one of "the ordinary people".
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:46 PM on July 26, 2015 [11 favorites]

The Weitz brothers were briefly engaged to direct an Elric movie, possibly with Michael Sheen in the title role, but it came to nothing.

I think this is the purest expression of Elric possible. [ nsfw ]
posted by benzenedream at 11:38 PM on July 26, 2015

“I think he’s a crypto-fascist,” says Moorcock, laughing. “In Tolkien, everyone’s in their place and happy to be there. We go there and back, to where we started. There’s no escape, nothing will ever change and nobody will ever break out of this well-­ordered world.”

This is really a profoundly bizarre thing for someone who has, I assume, read LOTR to say. The whole point of the, I dunno, like two hundred pages after the ring is destroyed is that the world can progress and improve, but it can never go back to the way it was. Frodo is never really normal again and basically anyone who came within spitting distance of the ring has to be shipped off to an Elvish sanitorium in the west sooner or later. The series and all the peripheral stuff like the Silmarillion is full of displacement, melancholy, corruption, etc.

But it’s not hard to see Tolkien as a complacent, hierarchical force of Law in opposition to Moorcock’s free-ranging, morally complex Chaos.

Well--it's is hard if, like me, you don't know what this is supposed to mean. Hierarchical force of Law?

In 1978, Moorcock made the conflict explicit in a jeremiad against the old inkling entitled “Epic Pooh” (as in Winnie-the-Pooh), which accused Tolkien of propagating a ­sentimental Luddism while blithely promoting war

So I tracked this piece down--it's here, if you're curious--and his sentiments there are no less bewildering.

It is the predominant tone of The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down and it is the main reason why these books, like many similar ones in the past, are successful. It is the tone of many forgotten British and American bestsellers, well-remembered children's books, like The Wind in the Willows, you often hear it in regional fiction addressed to a local audience, or, in a more sophisticated form, James Barrie (Dear Brutus, Mary Rose and, of course, Peter Pan). Unlike the tone of E.Nesbit (Five Children and It etc.), Richmal Crompton (the 'William' books) Terry Pratchett or the redoubtable J.K.Rowling, it is sentimental, slightly distanced, often wistful, a trifle retrospective;

There's nothing sentimental or wistful in Rowling? Like, is that claim supposed to make sense if you leave aside all the British boarding school stuff?

I'll stop since I can go on indefinitely. I don't reflexively reject criticism of Tolkien and I don't think he's the Platonic Form of the fantasy writer--but criticisms of him should at least make sense. The one I kind of least understand is the charge of luddism. I mean...there are some evil characters in the books who like to use their powers to make war machines, and this is represented as a bad thing. If you combine this with a strongly environmentalist streak the overall impression is that Tolkien does not think technology is an unmitigated good and is often a direct means to accomplishing a lot of bad. For someone writing in the aftermath of WWII and as the Cold War was heating up, that seems like a totally sane perspective.

[edit: I'm confused by the mention of JK Rowling in the Epic Pooh piece I linked to given that it was supposed to have been written well before HP. Not sure what's going on there.]
posted by pdq at 12:03 AM on July 27, 2015 [36 favorites]

Moorcock has periodically updated "Epic Pooh" over the past 37 years to include more recent writers he prefers to Tolkien. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to give LOTR a reread in all that time.
posted by thetortoise at 12:20 AM on July 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Are people actually not aware that there is more than one school of regressive thought besides fascism
posted by Apocryphon at 12:24 AM on July 27, 2015 [21 favorites]

and as the Cold War was heating up

In case you were wondering: I realized only after the editing window closed that this is a sort of ludicrous choice of words.
posted by pdq at 12:26 AM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

that's the best kind of fascist!
posted by thelonius at 1:04 AM on July 27, 2015

I like the interview more than any actual Moorcock I've read.

On Tolkien, China Miéville has expressed similar thoughts in a much more solid way. Moorcock's essay is spoiled by the fact that he obviously despises the politics of the authors he discusses, but instead criticizes their tone.
posted by zompist at 1:16 AM on July 27, 2015 [7 favorites]

In Epic Pooh, I think Moorcock is, at the most charitable reading, being mischievous. If you look at, say, The History of the Runestaff, it has racial essentialism (used to justify genocide), rabid nationalism, glorification of war and the rallying round a lone hero who is going to bring down a corrupt and decadent empire. The switching up of the races so it's a Germanic character taking down a British foe has been used to hand-wave these elements away as satire, but aside from that, there's absolutely nothing else in the books to critique this position, except I suppose that they're dreadful.

I'd be much more convinced by his position if he interrogated these tropes in his own work. As it is - in the essay at least - he seems more interested in proving his Leftist credentials by slaughtering various genre sacred cows (Tolkien, Star Wars). It's not that I don't think a decent, interesting argument can't be made for his broad position - Fascism and sentimentality absolutely go hand-in-hand - it's just that he doesn't make it, and worse, he's a hypocrite.
posted by RokkitNite at 1:16 AM on July 27, 2015

I, too, prefer the Mieville criticisms of Tolkien even though I think Moorcock is at least kinda correct.
posted by Justinian at 1:17 AM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

What is Gondor, with a millenia old bookmark kept in place for the Dúnedain, if not a society deeply invested in the cult of personality for the one true leader, destined by birth into the unsullied line of a race of übermensch? One whole nation-state directed to the singular purpose of a race-war (well, species) for survival, in which war deeds are the only path to fame?

Sure, Moorcock goes off the deep end pretty easily - c.f. the whole Notting Hill paragraphs. It's not like there was nothing there, however, radiating a fire-like heat, particularly in the eye of the hothead beholder inclined to kick out the jams.

On preview, what RokkitNite said.
posted by deadgar at 1:27 AM on July 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

The purest expression of fantasy as fascism is Spinrad's The Iron Dream, which for all that it's literal Nazi propaganda, deliberately appalling in its prose and style and as shallow as a puddle (of Dominator blood just before the righteous and spotlessly clean boot of the genetically pure etc) is weirdly riveting.
posted by Sebmojo at 1:36 AM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

It seems like the charge being brought (rightly or wrongly) is actually one of conservatism. Fascism is surely different - actually quite strongly in favour of certain kinds of modernisation, just not democratic ones, I'd have said.
posted by Segundus at 2:29 AM on July 27, 2015 [6 favorites]

From Moorcock's essay, this bit made me smile:

One does become a little tired, too, of Hern the Hunter turning up here. Another legacy from Frazer. Sometimes he appears in books of this kind almost as an embarrassment, as if convention demands his presence: an aging and rather vague bishop doing his bit at official services.

I'M LOOKING AT YOU, DIANA WYNNE JONES.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:34 AM on July 27, 2015

I think anyone who wrote 'The Scouring of the Shire' is no kind of facist, cryto- or otherwise.

Oh, why oh why did you miss out one of the most important parts of the book, Peter Jackson? You know a bit that actually lifts it into proper literature? I guess the answer is in the Hobbit films.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:00 AM on July 27, 2015 [5 favorites]

The inclusion of a ton of padding bullshit to make The Hobbit feel epic on the scale of LotR was bad enough, but making Bilbo brave and heroic in the first third of the narrative? Unforgivable!
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:15 AM on July 27, 2015 [5 favorites]

Oh, why oh why did you miss out one of the most important parts of the book, Peter Jackson? You know a bit that actually lifts it into proper literature? I guess the answer is in the Hobbit films.

I think it was a good cut, for all that he stuffed up the ending in pacing terms. But Moorcock is basically right, isn't he? LOTR is as steeped in the Divine Right myth as Spinrad's book.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:29 AM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Moorcock's conclusion about A Game of Thrones is telling, not just about Martin's book but also a lot of the modern fantasy brick series: "But ultimately it’s a soap opera." The same realization made me kick out of The Wheel of Time after six books. There's a lot soap-operatic about the big series: too much melodrama, too many plotlines and characters. Martin's version is absolutely vicious, of course, but it boils down to the same thing.

The other telling remark, especially in the context of the recent Hugo Awards controversy, is: "The science-fiction people thought we were trying to destroy science fiction." Given the histrionics of the people promoting the Sad and Rabid Puppies slates in that controversy, it's very gratifying to have him say that he faced the same bullshit.

And of course he evaluates Tolkien, who was an older style of reactionary than fascism, incorrectly. That's the nature of the political generation he was raised in. Moorcock's peculiar genius is that, while he disagreed fundamentally (especially on a political level) with many of his predecessors, he was able to see what was good in their work and create his own offerings that took things in a far different direction.
posted by graymouser at 3:38 AM on July 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Both fascism and generic fantasy co-opt pre-modern mythos and graft it onto modern thought, so yes, there will be parallels - often very unsubtle ones. Both are deeply conservative and deeply sentimental. It doesn't make them the same thing, and it certainly doesn't make authors who write fantasy fascists, crypto- or otherwise. The creator is not the work. You could equally well cast Tolkein as a Victorian imperialist, concerned with justifying the nature and acts of his culture through synthetic history that demonstrates its traits as inherently tending to create a better world, but I don't think that's much more interesting.

Of those schoolfriends who trended Moorcock and those who favoured Tolkein, the latter have indeed proved more compatible with the generic modern world. The Moorcockians were more alarming at the time and, to the extent that I know their fates, have carried the seeds of chaos with them...
posted by Devonian at 4:05 AM on July 27, 2015 [4 favorites]

Are people actually not aware that there is more than one school of regressive thought besides fascism

This.

I remember reading the Epic Pooh and then the Mieville piece and being rather unimpressed by the inability to see the distinctions, and generally I've gotten tired of authors who are Here To Save Us All From Tolkien. Especially when they come carrying their own nasty baggage (misogyny, racial essentialism, cultural appropriation, etc.).

Although I would like to see Elric preserved in the genre culture - I've noticed a lot of the people my generation and younger who I run into seem to be more or less unaware of Moorcock's work. Like he's fallen down a memory hole in the genre or something.
posted by AdamCSnider at 4:14 AM on July 27, 2015 [4 favorites]

deadgar: "What is Gondor, with a millenia old bookmark kept in place for the Dúnedain, if not a society deeply invested in the cult of personality for the one true leader, destined by birth into the unsullied line of a race of übermensch? One whole nation-state directed to the singular purpose of a race-war (well, species) for survival, in which war deeds are the only path to fame?"

The tendency of latter day Gondorians to exclusively glorify martial deeds is explicitly criticized by Tolkien. Boromir is the failed brother.
posted by Chrysostom at 5:19 AM on July 27, 2015 [15 favorites]

I like Moorcock pointing out that we live in a Philip K. Dick world, and that it was Dick, Bester, Pohl et al. who really knew where things were going.

I am disappoint that nobody has mentioned Behold the Man.

Also I hope anyone for whom English is their first language will understand that Spinrad's Iron Dream is about science fiction itself, and is one of the most vicious parodies ever written, in the vein of A Modest Proposal and Yet Another Effort.
posted by Bringer Tom at 5:28 AM on July 27, 2015 [9 favorites]

Is it Moorcock or Mieville who said that English fantasy split after the war into two separate camps, the Tolkienian and the Peakeian? I'd tend to agree - at least for a conveniently simplistic rule of thumb - and am, like them, fairly solidly Peakeian.

During 1978 and 1979 I read an awful lot of Michael Moorcock books. I remember very few of them now, but they included the Jerry Cornelius books and off-shoots (for example The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the 20th Century), Behold the Man, Breakfast in the Ruins, the spy romps The Chinese Agent and The Russian Intelligence (which made me laugh a lot, and I'm afraid to reread them in case I hate them), Gloriana, and The Dancers at the End of Time (in three separate books), which became my most reread book ever and definitely my favourite fantasy book. Oddly, although there were many books which could be described as sword and sorcery, I don't think I read a single Elric book, not because of any prejudice but simply because he didn't turn up in the fifty or so Moorcock books I did manage to read.

For all their faults - and they're full of faults, largely because many of them are simply the residue of an epic flurry of typing Moorcock did between the early sixties and the late seventies - I'm enormously grateful to them for introducing me to a range of ideas (from gender fluidity to post-apocalyptic nihilism by way of Victorian fantasy literature) that I don't think any other single writer could have done. Anyone who tries to be Robert E. Howard, Mervyn Peake and J.G. Ballard at roughly the same time is destined to fail, but it's immensely entertaining watching them try.
posted by Grangousier at 5:41 AM on July 27, 2015 [6 favorites]

I've never read Moorcock's work, though I've read a lot about it and plan to in the future. However, his characterization of Tolkien and his books is just bizarre. First off, author/book dichotomy as has been mentioned before. But more importantly, I don't think Moorcock really understands what fascism is/was. Fascism isn't just a heavy emphasis of law in a society or having a place for everyone in society—the concept of the Great Chain of Being predates fascism by a thousand years. Fascism is revolutionary, and as much as it tries to recreate a mythic past, it is not conservative! It uses those conservative memories and tropes to create its brave new world. It's not law, but Law and Order. It's not merely the triumph of the society over the individual (Soviet Communism often stressed that), but the positioning of the society as the mythic hero, the collective nature molded by a singular brain of the leader who arbitrates the rest of the body. Once again, though fascism is right-wing and reactionary, it's not truly conservative in a political or social sense. It calls for massive changes to society to regenerate it both from the feudal and the democratic pasts.

The Lord of the Rings, like most fantasies, engages with some wistful conservatism. Woe be to those who discard the past without studying it. However, this is not fascism. Gondor and Rohan both are in need of regeneration due to both external threats and internal decay, but it's not found in creating a new order, but in healing the old. They position is not to found a thousand-year Reich built on Elf-magic, but on realizing that the world will change, and that society will adapt to the world, not vice versa. Nor are the good guys best when they are autocratic. The hobbits live in a basically anarchic, clan-based agrarian commune that is explicitly preserved at the end of the books. After ruling for over a thousand years, the position of Steward of Gondor is not done away with when Aragorn is crowned, but is rather reinforced. One nation is not supposed to reign supreme over all others with the reaffirming of the bonds between Gondor and Rohan (while Rohan is specifically less sophisticated and populated than Gondor). In fact, several times, it shows how a good ruler NEEDS good advisers to effectively rule, and when a king or chief gets rid of his council, that's a sign that he's turning into a tyrant or a fool.

The only fascism that appears in Lord of the Rings is within the Enemy's camps. Sauron is more of an old style tyrant that styles himself a god-king. He needs not just everyone's subjugation, but their worship. The few times we see him display fascist tendencies are when he's Chief Priest of Melkor in Numenor and when the Mouth of Sauron comes out. Only here do we detect more of the revolutionary reorganization of society that is entwined with fascism, and even then, it's more a method rather than a personal ideology. It's Saruman that's the true proto-fascist, with his earnest belief in power being needed to reorder the world, his focus on propaganda and euphemism to sway political realities, and his innate distrust for all other political systems/regions. "The Scouring of the Shire" shows the horrific proto-fascist society that is implemented in the Shire, and Tolkien doesn't just show how terrible it is, but also how unneeded it is. It's a society that vaunts the power of Law through mass proliferation of shirriffs rather than the true Order of a voluntary democratic society.
posted by Lord Chancellor at 6:53 AM on July 27, 2015 [16 favorites]

I had always thought Tolkein was a conservative writer, not a Fascist. In fact, Tolkien's ideal society of the Shire reminds me of Orwell's Coming Up for Air, or EM Forester's Howard's End. All three writers lamented the loss of pre-War Edwardian pastoral culture.
posted by Nevin at 7:09 AM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

If you combine this with a strongly environmentalist streak

Pastoralist isn't remotely the same thing as environmentalist.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:11 AM on July 27, 2015 [7 favorites]

I could not get into the Elric books, but the Dancers at the End of Time series was delightful and I recommend it. I need to re-read it, in fact.

Gloriana I never made it through. It seemed both to be taking forever to get anywhere and also to be going nowhere I wanted to go.

His output is so varied and odd that I have never made a serious attempt to read much of it, though I run across occasional short stories in collections.
posted by emjaybee at 7:16 AM on July 27, 2015

The article feels of a lot of punching up.

As someone who grew up reading the classics (Asimov, Tolkein, Bradbury, Niven, PKD, LeGuin), I haven't heard of, nor read Moorecock, probably to my demerit. He's sounds like a crank of the Chompsky bent, punching up.
posted by k5.user at 7:16 AM on July 27, 2015

Tolkien was reactionary – in the sense that he wanted a return to an idyllic status quo ante without the brutality of industrialization. (He was also thoroughly reactionary in his social views, being a line-toeing patriarchal Catholic.) Moorcock, whose views remain steeped in the '60s, is part of a generation that called this "fascist." Tolkien wasn't remotely sympathetic to the Italian Fascisti or the German Nazis, but he really and sincerely was a reactionary. The problem is in the terminology, not in the fact that Tolkien's politics were, to a progressive or leftist, awful.
posted by graymouser at 7:22 AM on July 27, 2015 [5 favorites]

he wanted a return to an idyllic status quo ante without the brutality of industrialization.

Hardly surprising. He'd been in the trenches. Same thing that sent Robert Graves to the then idyllic village of Deia.

Here's some food for thought. Tolkien was cradle catholic. Fascism's first serious debut was the Spanish Civil war, with the left doing a number on the Church. Where does that leave one like Tolkien? Probably next to Waugh (1937): "If I were a Spaniard I should be fighting for General Franco [...] I am not a fascist nor shall I become one unless it were the only alternative to Marxism."

Of course, since the war, fascist carries more emotional baggage than communist (even despite its all too often sloppy use as an insult). It wasn't always so.
posted by IndigoJones at 7:42 AM on July 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

Also I hope anyone for whom English is their first language will understand that Spinrad's Iron Dream is about science fiction itself, and is one of the most vicious parodies ever written, in the vein of A Modest Proposal and Yet Another Effort.

Yeah, the payload of Iron Dream is not the actual story itself but the lengthy alt-historical introduction, which tells how "after briefly dabbling in radical politics," Hitler came to America and became the pulp SF writer who produced the story in question. At his most obvious and nasty, Spinrad notes that Hitler's characters have long been fan favorites of SF convention costume activities.
posted by Naberius at 7:52 AM on July 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Tolkein's "well-ordered world" doesn't seem to terrible to me. I mean, isn't that the way things are in works that are essentially for kids?
posted by beau jackson at 7:56 AM on July 27, 2015

Tolkien was reactionary – in the sense that he wanted a return to an idyllic status quo ante without the brutality of industrialization.

And also one where we just don't look at the prominent hobbits who run conveniently far-away plantations where they work armies of slaves to death.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:04 AM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Moorcock always makes me think of the awesome Half Man Half Biscuit...

Mention the Lord Of the Rings just once more
And I’ll more than likely kill you
Moorcock, Moorcock, Michael Moorcock you fervently moan
Is this a wok that you’ve shoved down my throat
Or are you just pleased to see me?
Brian Moore’s head looks uncannily like London Planetarium

I read everything I could find like this stuff as a kid, piles of sci-fi and fantasy. I thought Moorcock and Fritz Leiber were way cooler than Tolkien. Philip K Dick ended up my favourite and seems the most prescient of them all.
posted by jiroczech at 8:06 AM on July 27, 2015 [5 favorites]

I mean, isn't that the way things are in works that are essentially for kids?

The prevalence of the English pastoral ideal in children's literature is a topic that could (and I'm sure has) supported any number of graduate theses. Whether a pastoral timeless ideal is intrinsic to children's literature is an interesting question. But I wouldn't assume the answer is "yes."

I've never felt like LotR is a children's series, though. Tolkien took it seriously. The Hobbit was aimed at children, specifically, but even then Tolkien didn't talk down to the reader much. So the fact that LotR idealized the English country life as personified by hobbit villages doesn't necessarily have anything to do with appealing to children.
posted by emjaybee at 8:09 AM on July 27, 2015

Tolkein's "well-ordered world" doesn't seem to terrible to me. I mean, isn't that the way things are in works that are essentially for kids?

His best works were, sadly that is not a category that includes Lord of the Rings.
posted by Artw at 8:10 AM on July 27, 2015

IndigoJones, the last link in your comment goes to the website of the Institute for Historical Review, a notorious Holocaust-denial organization. Folks may want to be careful about clicking or giving them traffic.
posted by graymouser at 8:13 AM on July 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Of course, since the war, fascist carries more emotional baggage than communist (even despite its all too often sloppy use as an insult). It wasn't always so.

Well, the British public just got to see a bunch of photos of the royal family circa the 1930s vigorously Sieg Heiling, in case there was any doubt as to how the aristocratic elites felt about things.
posted by Artw at 8:14 AM on July 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

I don't think there ever was much question as to Edward VIII's opinions on the matter.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:25 AM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Al Reynolds:

@AquilaRift: Somewhat odd comment about Clarke from Michael Moorcock in The New Statesman - http://t.co/VaAFHNrqiH

@AquilaRift: "The technology-led, military-led big names like Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur got it dead wrong..."

@AquilaRift: "They were all strong on the military as subject matter, on space wars, rational futures"

@AquilaRift: Other than Earthlight, which deals with a very low-key space war, I don't think ACC was at all interested in wars or the military.

@AquilaRift: ...and of course while it's true that Pohl, Dick etc thought a lot about social change, so did ACC.

@AquilaRift: Clarke was never a "machine fetishist", either - whatever that is.
posted by Artw at 8:27 AM on July 27, 2015

Well, the British public just got to see a bunch of photos of the royal family circa the 1930s vigorously Sieg Heiling, in case there was any doubt as to how the aristocratic elites Edward VIII felt about things.

Best. (British) Abdication. Ever.
posted by chimaera at 8:31 AM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

In another universe, where Iron Dream was a bit better-executed and became a beloved gay/camp SF classic, there's a deluxe illustrated version by Tom of Finland, and a Kenneth Anger film adaptation that saw wide release.
posted by griphus at 8:35 AM on July 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

I had never seen the Epic Pooh reference. It is short and the man definitely had a point. The people who I know who are most fond of Tolkein will argue first how much fun they have reading it to their small children.
posted by bukvich at 8:50 AM on July 27, 2015

Artw,

Yeah, it did seem odd that Moorcock is lumping Clarke in with militarists like Heinlein. Clarke did focus on tech, but he was also all about humanity changing and evolving into a higher, better, more peaceful state like in Childhood's End or 2001.
posted by Sangermaine at 8:51 AM on July 27, 2015

Relevant: Return of the king by Benjamin Dueholm - "The ‘cosplay Caliphate’ of ISIS is a deadly fantasy, but a familiar one in the West. It feeds the same urges as Tolkien"

This article points out the broad past-romanticizing themes that underlie many backwards-looking ideologies. They need not all be fascism.
posted by Apocryphon at 9:21 AM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

But more importantly, I don't think Moorcock really understands what fascism is/was

Eh, Moorcock was basically a hippy, so "fascist" really translates to "Anyone over the age of 30." Then "Anyone over the age of 40." If it follows the standard hippy progression, these days it's now "Anyone under the age of 30."
posted by happyroach at 9:28 AM on July 27, 2015 [7 favorites]

I'm really trying to think of an Arthur C. Clark "space war" book. He's hard sci-fi, not space opera.
posted by Nevin at 9:34 AM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

the broad past-romanticizing themes that underlie many backwards-looking ideologies

As I recall, Eco wrote an essay or two in the 70s making similar points - I'd look them up now (see Travels in Hyperreality), but I've got a cat firmly set on my lap.
posted by wotsac at 9:45 AM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Late to all this but ...

RE: Removing Scouring of the Shire from Return of the King (the movie)

Scouring the Shire was perhaps my favorite part of the book, but it would only have made an overlong movie longer. The solution, of course, would have been to make two less Hobbit movies and made Scouring etc its own movie (and then invested the rest of the unspent money in something important like a proper sequel to Buckaroo Bonzai). In other words, give folks a great happy-ever-after in Gondor with the crowning of the king, then follow it up with a troubled (at best) return home for the hobbits, short on magic, long on PTSD.

Are people actually not aware that there is more than one school of regressive thought besides fascism

This.

Double "THIS". Reminds me of the early punks who declared 1977 Year Zero and HATED ALL HIPPIES FOREVER even as they embraced many of their so-called anti-establishment values. Simplicity sells but it always ends up biting one in the ass big time.

And finally, from the article:

“We live in a Philip K Dick world now. The technology-led, military-led big names like Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur got it dead wrong. They were all strong on the military as subject matter, on space wars, rational futures – essentially, fascist futures – and none of these things really matters today. It’s Dick and people like Frederik Pohl and Alfred Bester who were incredibly successful in predicting the future, because they were interested in social change, ecology, advertising. Look at Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Google . . . These are Philip K Dick phenomena.”

I've started a few Moorcock books, but never finished any, for various reasons. But I do agree with him big time here, though I'd add JG Ballard to the mix. And yeah, I'd also add Star Trek to the "fascist futures". I mean, can we please imagine a future of space travel/exploration (going boldly etc) that isn't militarized?
posted by philip-random at 10:16 AM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

I was into Moorcock when I was in high school but I forget that he exists until I stumble across the box with my Elric paperbacks in my basement every couple of years. I always mean to re-read them but somehow I never do. I'm guessing they won't be as interesting to me thirty years down the road (LotR I re-read every few years). I think I've filed Moorcock away in the "odd, cranky old burnout" file alongside Alan Moore.
posted by MikeMc at 11:36 AM on July 27, 2015

I read Moorcock's Elric books back in the 70s and some others in the Eternal Champion mythos/series. Dark stuff indeed but not nearly as fun as Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. I gave up on Moorcock after reading Gloriana, which seemed to me at the time to be a little clueless. I mean really, all she needed was an orgasm?

Moorcock taking up the anti-Tolkien banner again now just seems to be a decades-long pique of jealousy.
posted by Ber at 11:49 AM on July 27, 2015

Once again, odd synchronicity attends my reading of MetaFilter. Just a couple of weeks ago I became aware that a British publisher has recently re-release all of Moorcock's genre work in what is supposedly its "final" revision. Being the sucker that I am for a set of matched bindings arranged on a shelf, and not having read Moorcock for many years, I quickly ordered a couple of them from Amazon's UK site ("Corum: The Prince in the Scarlet Robe" and "Gloriana, or, The Unfulfill'd Queen"). These aren't books that I've read previously. I've started with "Corum".

I'm enjoying it enough, but I don't think it makes a great deal of sense. The plot is rooted in some version of "evolution" that works in a directed manner, and over time frames far too short. The social order depicted features segregated communities of multiple different sentient humanoid species living within tens of miles of each other, and all speaking the same language, without being aware that the others are any smarter than wild animals. A genocide is prominently featured that seems to have involved a number of victims smaller than what you'd normally see featured in any given serial killer of the week police procedural. The protagonist is described as having "discovered" a whole host of different emotions for the first time only in his adulthood.

Honestly, I can't tell if this thing is incredibly prescient or just incredibly sloppy.
posted by Ipsifendus at 12:00 PM on July 27, 2015

Ever since 9/11 I have thought that PDK was prescient. We're basically living in the world of Ubik, where the "bad guy" (post-9/11 it was Osama Bin Laden, in Ubik it was Ray Hollister) can appear at any time to mock and harangue a global audience.
posted by Nevin at 12:29 PM on July 27, 2015

A bit over twenty years ago, when I still wore a Student Journalist hat, I was fortunate enough to have the chance to interview Michael Moorcock. I was terrified, as he was at the time my Absolute Favourite Author Of All Time. I'm pretty sure it was also actually my first go at interviewing someone.

He was extremely lovely about it, clocked very quickly that I was (literally) shaking with fear, and did everything he could to put me at my ease. The interview went fine. Moorcock is a seriously Good Guy.

The Tolkien thing in this particular interview strikes me as a not hugely important aside in a much longer piece about Moorcock more generally; it's - to my mind - the least interesting thing in the article, yet it's been plucked out to make a headline and a whole meal made about it in the text which seems slightly unjustified.

In particular I am left wondering whether Moorcock would agree that to the extent Tolkien was a 'crypto-fascist', he was also hiding it from himself. TFA does not explore this.
posted by motty at 12:36 PM on July 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Moorcock taking up the anti-Tolkien banner again now just seems to be a decades-long pique of jealousy.

Moorcock has spent fifty years representing a different view in fantasy than Tolkien; why should he stop now? I mean, I've read a good deal of both of them, and find ways to enjoy each, but Moorcock is an artist with a definite view of art. If he weren't, he wouldn't have done what he's done.
posted by graymouser at 1:01 PM on July 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

As I recall, Eco wrote an essay or two in the 70s making similar points

He wrote this, which has, for a title, the greatest pun of all time:
Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt
posted by thelonius at 1:42 PM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yes, Asimov, who wrote the Foundation series, one of the seminal sci-fi works on social science, where the scientists defeated warlords and emperors with their wits alone, was a big ol' military fetishist.
posted by Apocryphon at 2:51 PM on July 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

I just saw someone favorited a comment of mine about Moorcock from years ago and rushed to the main page in a panic, where I was much relieved to see this FPP; don't freak me out like that, man!
posted by kittens for breakfast at 3:43 PM on July 27, 2015

Years ago, I had a job out in the suburbs. I was often forced to eat lunch at my desk, but I found a little sandwich shop nearby that killer tuna salad, so I frequented it. It was pretty busy, so I ended up waiting for my food a lot. It just so happened that the shop had a little bookshelf in the corner that no one but me ever touched. On it was a giant Moorcock Eternal Champion compendium. So, over the course of a few years, I read the whole thing in 5-10 minute intervals while waiting on my tuna sandwiches. Soon after I finished the book, the place closed down and I lost my job.
posted by vibrotronica at 3:57 PM on July 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Time travellers. You're going to find yourself in a situation some day where your knowledge of the Eternal Champion series is crucial to the outcome.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:37 PM on July 27, 2015 [4 favorites]

I think I've filed Moorcock away in the "odd, cranky old burnout" file alongside Alan Moore.

I've been thinking a lot about this, and one of the similiarities between Moorcock and Moore is that their first flare of fame and most definitive works are associated with a particular time and place, with being "against" a certain trend. Whereas as Moore himself noted in an interview a few years ago (I remember reading it, I can't find it with Google), a lot of what he put together with revolutionary works like V for Vendetta and Watchmen went on to become, in bastardized form, the new status quo in the 1990s.

I think a lot of what Moorcock contributed to the conversation made its way into the swords 'n sorcery, grim 'n dark side of fantasy (represented by folks like Abercrombie and Morgan and Brent Weeks et al today), which sucked a lot of the energy out of his stuff because a lot of the force and power came from writing against the times. Whereas Tolkien was at the time building on a basic set of values and cultural patterns which are still around (pseudo-Christian mythology, good vs. evil), and GRR Martin, as mentioned, is providing high-quality fantasy soap opera, whose attractions are more or less set.

Maybe revolutionary works have a shorter lifespan - they must either quickly generate a new orthodoxy or lapse into obscurity, because the world moves on and develops new concerns and issues?
posted by AdamCSnider at 8:18 PM on July 27, 2015 [8 favorites]

> And also one where we just don't look at the prominent hobbits who run conveniently far-away
> plantations where they work armies of slaves to death.

Cite, please, artw. In an entirely fictional world (not to mention universe) created by JRRT, there's nothing in it except what JRRT put in it. There are references to vast slave farms somewhere vaguely in "the East", but they belonged to Sauron and it's hard to imagine hobbits among the whip-wielding overseers instead of just rather larger badasses such as orcs and men. (Now if there had been House Elves in JRRT's universe I could imagine hobbits as plantation owners and slave-drivers. But House Elves, that's another fictional universe entirely. Sorry dude, your princess is done gone to another castle.)

Not that there weren't hobbits who might have had the inclination (one thinks of Lotho Baggins, maybe) but unless Sauron had some sort of Bigger-the-little-bugger spell he was willing to waste on Lotho Pimple it's hard to imagine Lotho or any other hobbit getting that kind of gig. Or even being allowed to own such an operation by Sauron. You're doing something big and nasty and profitable like that? You can plan on hearing from the Godfather with an offer you can't refuse.
posted by jfuller at 12:00 PM on July 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

Pastoralist isn't remotely the same thing as environmentalist.

Perhaps. I don't see why they would have to be exclusive. Think of the shock of coming back to the Shire: it's not just that a way of life has been lost or something; from what I remember what they tend to dwell on the most, and perhaps most sadly, are the trees that have been cut down. Sam in particular is distraught about the party tree being chopped. I think it's because they realize that, eg, Sandyman's mill can be destroyed, ways of life can be returned to, etc, but also, quite importantly, nature itself has value, and it's a kind of value that's not really commensurable with things like mills and brick houses and a booming tobacco trade.
posted by pdq at 3:33 PM on July 28, 2015

In another universe, where Iron Dream was a bit better-executed and became a beloved gay/camp SF classic, there's a deluxe illustrated version by Tom of Finland, and a Kenneth Anger film adaptation that saw wide release.

I almost wish I had a version I could ctrl-f to count the mentions of 'spotless black leather'.
posted by Sebmojo at 8:19 PM on July 28, 2015