Lately I’ve been listening to — and loving — a science fiction oriented podcast called the Sofanauts. Sadly, just as I got to the point where I had listened to all of the thirty plus episodes and was eagerly awaiting more, the man behind the ‘cast, Tony C. Smith, announced he was putting the project on indefinite hold. Tony runs another weekly podcast ezine (podzine?), Starship Sofa’s Aural Delights, full of short spec fic and related material that I’ve also enjoyed, and I can’t honestly understand how he ever managed to do both productions on a weekly basis in the first place. Alas, my interest in listening to stories is much less than the enjoyment I get out of hearing writers and other industry professionals sound off and discuss the week’s news — and for those of you that like the latter sort of thing I highly recommend going and listening to the Sofanauts podcasts.
I’m posting all this by way of introduction for the following nicely done video interview conducted by the Starship Sofa lads with none other than Michael Moorcock. This is a fairly recent interview and takes place in Paris (marvel at the Parisian traffic sounds!) and deals a lot with Moorcock’s New Worlds days, and his current semi-retirement.
And, as a sort of tangential follow-up, over at The Cimmerian Brian Murphy has posted an in depth refutation of Moorcock’s notorious ‘Epic Pooh’ essay (which can be found in ‘Wizardry and Wild Romance’) in which he, basically, condemns Tolkien’s work as hopelessly juvenile. I disagree with Moorcock’s thesis, which I always thought had less to do with literary criticism than it did iconoclasm and political fashion, and Murphy’s exhaustive article does a great job addressing the claims Moorcock made in his 1978 piece.
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Thanks for the tip o’ the cap, Bill. I’ve had this essay formulating for some time now.
It was hard trying to parse out Moorcock’s textual and literary criticism from the political screed running throughout the essay, but once I did, I felt like he mis-read The Lord of the Rings (and The Silmarillion) rather badly.
I think you did a really good job — and that your focus was much more sober and well-constructed than his original (which reads something like a ranting blog post from what I recall).
Do you happen to know if he ever revisited his thesis? It’s been thirty years, I wonder if he’s ever modified his position.
Hi Bill, I don’t own Wizardry and Wild Romance so I can’t say how much the essay has changed over the years. But since the online version of the essay contains references to Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, it’s safe to say he revisted/updated it in the late 1990s, if not later. It appears he still stands behind what he wrote.
I didn’t know that, interesting.