Michael Moorcock parle de Gloriana

[jerome]

Michael Moorcock a donné une longue interview au site wetasphalt.com. Il évoque notamment Glorianna (que l'Atalante réédite).

Extrait :

"ER: I am reading Mother London now, and have read Gloriana (which I think I consider literary fiction, all alternate universe trappings aside), The Cornelius Quartet and the stories in Best of of course. I haven't read the Pyat books, mostly because I've read so much about WWII at this point it takes a lot for me to be willing to get back into it. The Brothel at Rosenstrasse is on my to-read list, though.

MM: Gloriana was certainly conceived as lit fic. Pyat’s not about WW2 – it starts in 1900 and ends in 1938. It’s about the ‘causes’ of the Holocaust. Attitudes which ‘permitted’ Nazism. They are mostly about racism. It has very little about either WWs In it. The first is set in Ukraine and Russia, second in 20s US, third mostly in Middle East and N. Africa and fourth in Italy and Germany with barely a reference to war – all of them have chunks set in England.

ER: For all your "literary" work, you still describe yourself in Death is No Obstacle as a "popular" writer. Is there a sense that your non-generic books are still aimed at the populace rather than, say, the academy? Should we even make a distinction between "popular" and "academic" writers in fiction? Are such distinctions meaningful? Especially since the situation now seems to be that the academy has warmly embraced SF writers like Dick and Ballard while the populace is still widely caught up in genre labeling.

MM: I think of myself as a popular writer addressing a smart popular audience. A lot of my readers have come to read ambitious literary fiction after reading mine, a fact I’m very proud of. I assume my readers are smart. Many of them come to my work via my supernatural adventure fiction and go on to read, say, King of the City, which means I hope that I’m acting as a two-way bridge helping unite lit fic and pop fic. This is what I set out to do, seeing SF as a form which attracted smart readers and could therefore form the best bridge. The US ‘New Wave’ was more about improving the genre. In the UK I think it’s fair to say it was mostly about building bridges, taking the best from SF and creating ambitious lit fic. I wanted to destroy the distinctions. Some of that seems to have happened at last."