Des nouvelles de Michael Moorcock

[jerome]

Michael Moorcock a donné de ses nouvelles. Il sera tout d'abord à St Malo pour les Etonnants voyageurs fin mai.

Il a également écris deux histoires avec ses héros Elric et Rackhir.

Celle de Rackhir sera publié dans le livre "The Roaming Forest in Cross Plains Universe", celle d'Elric dans une anthologie dont le nom n'a pas encore été dévoilé.

http://www.multiverse.org/fora/showthread.php?t=5385

[Papageno]

En parlant de Moorcock, qui a lu son «Mother London» qui vient d’être réédité. Est-ce vraiment, comme certains l’affirment, son meilleur roman ?

[jerome]

Moorcock a donné une longue interview sur Ballard qu'il a eu l'occasion d'éditer dans New World. Il en a profité pour revenir sur la collection sur ses écrits de "non-fiction" et aussi sur ses projets, notamment sur un récit sur Jerry Cornelius

"As a writer, you’re famously prolific. I understand there’s a collection of your non-fiction writings in preparation, Into the Media Web, to be published by Savoy Books. How did that come about?
It was Savoy’s idea to get John Davey to collect my non-fiction and publish it. I haven’t seen the collection yet and probably won’t until it appears. Personally I didn’t think there was enough of my non-fiction worth reprinting, but they seemed to think there was. It will be strange to see so much of my forgotten past coming up in print.

What are you working on at the moment?
I’m working on the Jerry Cornelius story I mentioned, Modem Times. Coincidentally, Jimmy has been very insistent on my having Jerry return to take a look at modern London, which he does, though it’s also a return to 60s London, a sort of reassessment. My publisher has suggested I write a memoir of the 60s. I’m not sure I want to, really, but I’m making notes. I’m still working on the memoir of Mervyn Peake and having a bit of a hard time. Certain memories are very painful and Mervyn’s decline and death is still hard for me to get a grip on. I’m writing an Elric story for the new Weird Tales, for the fun of it. I have a set of Seaton Begg stories, The Metatemporal Detective, coming out in September or October. I’m supposed to be doing a Conan comic for Dark Horse. I’m probably going to give reviewing a bit of a rest, unless something really engages me.

Like Jimmy, I think I’ve grown angrier and more radical in most respects as I’ve grown older. We’re both as disgusted with what’s going on in politics and business as we ever were. I just did a ‘fighting editorial’ for Interzone, calling on writers to take the kind of risks Burroughs (from whom Interzone took their title) took. The kind of risks Ballard took, for that matter. We’re living in cautious, retroactive times and I think we need to make an effort to resist what we too easily accept as the zeitgeist. I know this is also how Jimmy feels. I don’t think either of us is especially nostalgic or querulous, but it’s comforting to know that when we get together we’re a couple of Angry Old Men with as much invested in the present and, indeed, future as we ever had."


Toute l'interview : http://www.ballardian.com/angry-old-men ... jg-ballard

[jerome]

Un nouveau recueil de Michael Moorcock sort ces jours-ci en anglo-saxonnies.

C'est la première fois que sont réunies en recueils les nouvelles avec pour héros le détective Sexton Blaked et une sorte de Docteur Watson Taffy Sinclair. Par contre je ne sais pas si on a pu lire ces nouvelles en France. Ca sort fin octobre. Et il y a une nouvelle inédite : “The Flaneur of the Arcades d'Opera.”



Le résumé.
Seaton Begg and his constant companion, pathologist Dr "Taffy" Sinclair, both head the secret British Home Office section of the Metatemporal Investigation Department--an organization whose function is understood only by the most high-ranking government people around the world--and a number of powerful criminals.

Begg's cases cover a multitude of crimes in dozens of alternate worlds, generally where transport is run by electricity, where the internal combustion engine is unknown, and where giant airships are the chief form of international carrier. He investigates the murder of English Prime Minister "Lady Ratchet," the kidnaping of the king of a country taken over by a totalitarian regime, and the death of Geli Raubel, Adolf Hitler's mistress. Other adventures take him to a wild west where "the Masked Buckaroo" is tracking down a mysterious red-eyed Apache known as the White Wolf; to 1960s' Chicago where a girl has been killed in a sordid disco; and to an independent state of Texas controlled by neocon Christians with oily (and bloody) hands. He visits Paris, where he links up with his French colleagues of the Sûreté du Temps Perdu. In several cases the fanatical Adolf Hitler is his opponent, but his arch-enemy is the mysterious black sword wielding aristocrat known as Zenith the Albino, a drug-dependent, charismatic exile from a distant realm he once ruled.

In each story the Metatemporal Detectives' cases take them to worlds at once like and unlike our own, sometimes at odds with and sometimes in league with the beautiful adventuresses Mrs. Una Persson or Lady Rosie von Bek. At last Begg and Sinclair come face to face with their nemesis on the moonbeam roads which cross between the universes, where the great Eternal Balance itself is threatened with destruction and from which only the luckiest and most daring of metatemporal adventurers will return.

These fast-paced mysteries pay homage to Moorcock's many literary enthusiasms for authors as diverse as Clarence E. Mulford, Dashiell Hammett, Georges Simenon, and his boyhood hero, Sexton Blake.

Voici toutes les infos : http://www.pyrsf.com/MetatemporalDetective.html

[sandrine.f]

C'est la première fois que sont réunies en recueils les nouvelles avec pour héros le détective Sexton Blaked et une sorte de Docteur Watson Taffy Sinclair. Par contre je ne sais pas si on a pu lire ces nouvelles en France.

j'en ai lu une dans un des derniers Interzone (le spécial Moorcock) :The affair of the bassin les hivers, c'est pas mal fait, même si les auto-références aux autres héros moorcockiens sont, à mon avis, superflues.

[Eric]

Mother London, j'avoue ne pas avoir pu le finir. Néanmoins, c'est un roman d'une densité incroyable, qui m'a laissé des images très très fortes. Je pense que je m'y recollerai un jour ou l'autre.

Si tu es fan de Moorcock, je pense que ça risque de te décontenancer, mais c'est un excellent roman. Si tu es fan de la fantasy de Moorcock, laisse tomber.

[jerome]

Michael Moorcock a évoqué son nouveau roman : The Metatemporal Detective avec les aventures de Sir Seaton Begg, un détective temporel travaillant pour le "British Home Office".

Avec son ami Doctor 'Taffy' Sinclair, il voyage à travers le temps et les mondes parallèles au notre pour résoudre différents crimes. La première nouvelle du recueil a été écrite en 1966 et s'appelle The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius. Et j'en parle avec d'autant plus de plaisir ce matin que vous pourrez la relire cette nouvelle début 2008 dans un recueil édité par Actusf et avec 4 récits signés Michael Moorcock...

Pour le reste, Begg va devoir souvent affronter son ennemi préféré Count Zenith, un albinos qui fait évidemment pensé à Elric.

En voici un peu plus :

"In "The Case of the Nazi Canary," Hitler's girlfriend Geli Raubal is murdered, and the Nazis ask Begg to help solve the case, Moorcock said. "In 'The Texas Twister,' America is divided into a number of different nation-states, including Texas, Dineland (Navajo territory) and California, all of whom are rivals," he said. "Characters not dissimilar to George Bush and his Texan cronies are trying to track down Zenith, who has stolen plans for an internal combustion engine."

Moorcock's first metatemporal detective story—"The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius"—appeared in New Worlds in 1966, he said. "In the '90s I wanted a character who could look at some of the important issues of the 20th century and make use of research I'd done, for instance, for my sequence of non-fantasy books about the Nazi Holocaust," Moorcock said.

Seaton Begg is a nod to Sexton Blake, an old pulp detective whose adventures Moorcock read as a boy in pulps such as Sexton Blake Library, The Union Jack and Detective Weekly, originally published in the '20s and '30s, Moorcock said. "He saw print first in 1897, and new stories are still being written," he said.

One of Blake's greatest adversaries was a character called Zenith the Albino, a gentleman crook of great daring who might possibly have been an Eastern European nobleman, Moorcock said. "Zenith was an influence on my character Elric, so in some ways these stories are homages," he said. "But there are many other homages in the stories, too. For instance in 'The Affair of the Basin des Hivers,' there are characters from French pulp fiction and movies, as well as a victim from a Balzac novel."
"

Et il confirme également qu'il a écrit deux nouvelles histoires d'Elric pour Weird Tales

Tout est ici

[Papageno]

Mother London, j'avoue ne pas avoir pu le finir. Néanmoins, c'est un roman d'une densité incroyable, qui m'a laissé des images très très fortes.

C’est exactement ça, un livre assez chiant au moment de la lecture et que j’ai eu, aussi, du mal à terminer. Mais une fois la lecture faite, il prend une tout autre dimension. On se le repasse dans sa tête et rétrospectivement, on a le sentiment d’avoir lu un grand livre, peut-être même le meilleurs qu’est écrit Moorcock. On se rend compte alors que l’effort fait pour le terminer n’a pas été inutile.
Moralité, laisser un peu le temps passé, laisser mûrir, avant d’avoir un jugement trop abrupt sur un livre (en positif ou en négatif). Les premières impressions ne sont peut-être pas les plus pertinentes.

[jerome]

Pour ceux qui aiment entendre les voix des auteurs, voici un podcast de Michael Moorcock ici