OFF: Moorcock on sci-fi

Nick Medford nick at HERMIT0.DEMON.CO.UK
Thu Mar 15 08:22:24 EST 2001


In message <a05010401b6d628178765@[10.0.0.5]>, Carl Edlund Anderson
<cea at CARLAZ.COM> writes
>Moorcock would be a bit left-wing, then ... ;)

Well he generally styles himself an anarchist and I think the essay Doug
quoted was in some anarchist journal originally. He has also written that the
most important thing is to be a feminist first and anything else second. He's
apparently a big fan of radical feminist Andrea Dworkin.

To be honest- dons flameproof suit again- his political moralising is one of
the things that puts me off his writing. In the aforementioned essay, while
he rightly comments on the far-right nature of certain sci-fi writers, he also
basically says that one shouldn't read any of this stuff, and that the political
thrust of a piece of writing is more important than anything else about it.
To me that's dangerously close to the PC-gone-mad argument that if you
like (say) Shakespeare then you must be a racist, 'cos he's a Dead White
European Male etc. etc. Or if you're interested in Nietzsche then you must
be a Nazi, because Hitler liked him too.

I dunno, I used to read MM a lot, and after a while I just felt I was being
beaten over the head with the same none-too-subtle arguments rather too
much. "The Entropy Tango" retains a special place in my heart though.
--
Nick Medford



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