Alan Moore talks to John Higgs about the 20th Century

There are many of your works that say many interesting things about the

20th

century

. Certainly the first thing that came to mind was Of Hell as Identification and Hell, which was a big inspiration where Care left the book, but the idea was that Jack the Ripper's act was what gave rise to the

20th

century

. . I was just curious where that idea came from. Well, that was my conceit that settled a lot of the material that came up during my research about how when I was just looking back at the 1880s, I realized all these things that had happened and I think that in 1892 Mitchellson and Morley actually performed the experiments that were meant to iron out a couple of last wrinkles in the ether theory, but ended up completely disproving that the ether existed, which was kind of a result, but not the one they were looking for, you have France entering Indochina, you have the beginnings of the modern art movement with what was the second, you have some of the first types of modern realist writings. with people or hemiola, you've called a surprising amount of focusing on prostitutes in literature and the arts and all these things that had really colored and shaped the 20th century and then in 1898, these senseless violent murders just seemed Me said that symbolically you could position the Jack the Ripper murders in the birth throes of the 20th century, it was Jack the Ripper as a kind of really gruesome middle water, yeah, yeah, and there's all this kind of tabloid stuff that's published around it and that's all a good stew, so, in a way, it does solve it well.

What struck me about reading Providence, even though it's not so overtly about the 20th century, is the cleverness and worldview that it probably encapsulates better at that time than even what you know my book or If there's anything deliberately about that about the century XX, do you see it as a good? Yeah, I mean, I see that researching Providence was a big eye-opener and changed my opinion of Lovecraft, not his stature as a writer, actually, I think. that just continues to increase the morality, think about it, but also a greater understanding of him in relation to his time, the thing is that Lovecraft generally positions himself as an outsider, probably because that was the name of one of his most famous stories, so it's not a big deal. a reach, but actually you look at Lovecraft, he was, he had a hammer phobia, this at a time when gay men mainly gay men, some men, women too, but that was different, we're starting to emerge vocally and very visibly on the streets of New York.

It was a big subculture of men in early 20th century New York, it wasn't something that started after World War II and they were becoming more visible. You have women. I mean, Lovecraft certainly wasn't a misogynist, but maybe he was a little uncomfortable. or conflictive in his relationships with women, this was at a time when women were about to obtain the vote; There had been 20 years of the largest influx of immigrants the United States had ever seen, until 1910-1920, and that had led to conservative fears that American identity was going to be lost under total endogamy/miscegenation, so that everyone These fears were exactly those of the average white middle-class man.

I mean, the Russian Revolution had just happened in 1917 and in the United States there were all these strikes that at the time seemed like they were going to happen here, in fact, most people, when you talk about the Red Scare, they think, oh , that's the 1950s, like McCarthyism, the Red Scare was 1919, and in a way, Lovecraft became a perfect barometer because he was so sensitive. then he was unbearably sensitive, all the failures of the early 20th century, including fears that man would be relegated in importance given what we were beginning to understand about the cosmos. Lovecraft was different from other people of his time, he actually understood those things, he was very fast.

He doesn't like Einstein, but he was very quick to assimilate the stones' orders. He didn't like quantum theory, but he almost understood it. Yes, this was it. In some way, his stories represented the corn of the landscape of fear, the territory of fear for the 20th century. century in general he didn't like modernists at all, though in terms of writing and things like that, but he was conflicted, he himself was a closet modernist. I mean, yeah, it was Gertrude towing TS Eliot James Joyce. He wrote a brilliantly funny book and a really well-written parody of Weiss's land called Wife's Paper Birds, you actually look at Lovecraft's writings and it's easy to denounce all the modernists and, as much as he's digging up his favorite, I took authors of the century, people or pulp, in reality Lovecraft is a modernist. using stream of consciousness techniques, he is using glossolalia, more impenetrable than anything in Finnegan's target, he is using techniques to deliberately alienate or confuse the reader, his descriptions tend to be along the lines of here are three things that Cthulhu, which He doesn't look like it or he will describe the color outside the space as just a color by analogy, so what is a sound?

Is it a rough texture or a smell? What are these deliberate techniques? They are not defects, they are techniques to alienate the reader of putting the reader in a strange space where language is no longer able to describe the experience, yes, it was a kind of horror, it was all gothic horror. The gonorrhea ODAs were just some kind of modern horror, yeah, well that's important because ohhara almost. Horror until Lovecraft had been based on the Gothic tradition, which is a tradition where you have a huge vertical target in time bearing down on a fragile present, a story of dark things in the past that are bleeding toward some denouement. terrifying in and dying with Lovecraft yes, there is a lot of talk about remote antiquity and the past, but with Lovecraft I think it will be a much more present era of the future.

He is talking about that Tolan when man will be able to organize everything. knowledge of it and when that time comes the only question is whether we will embrace this new illuminating light or flee from it into the calming shadows of a new Dark Age. Yes, which is very prescient given, say, today's fundamentalism, which is a direct response to too much knowledge too much information let's go back to something we are sure of: God created the world in six days yes, that's the way Lovecraft was yes, he was really exploring all that was very still very contemporary writer hmm I think if you wanted to do what morkul morkul did in the 60s, Michael Moorcock was mainly interested in modernism because he realized that the science fiction genre was abandoned and that no one was doing much with it other than some kind of cowboys in space, so he thought why don't we hijack this, a night of science fiction, a vehicle for modernism and then, yes, JG Bauer, everything else.

I think the same could be done with Lovecraft among horror writers alone. Yes, I think Lovecraft. His concerns were so progressive and his writing techniques were so unusual, but you could use Lovecraft as a starting point for a new kind of modernist horror if you want, because that feeling of linking the 20th century with this impending horror reminds me a little century, you are the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, volume three, the first century, but which in my opinion is probably the bleakest of all, the kind of league that has that feeling of the creative imagination withering during the 20th century, this is what "I'm aiming for yes, it was.

I got quite a bit of flack for that. I know people said after reading the third book that it was my equivalent of saying "the world fails around here once, but it didn't." I don't think it was unfair to choose the beggar's opera as representing a big important cultural event in 1910. I don't think it was unfair to choose Donald Camels' performance as representing a big important cultural event in 1969 and I don't think it was unfair mm-. hm choose JK Rowling's Harry Potter as a representative of a major cultural event of the early 21st century, I would say that if you plotted those things on a graph, the line is not going up yes, I think it's a fair comment that our approach to culture in the mainstream has degenerated mmm-hmm the values ​​that people used to put into a work of art have been eroded and yet I was trying to express that in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen because the whole League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is about this huge fictional planet that has been a sort of counterpart to our own world for as long as we have created this non-fictional world. it's the world we want, the exciting world where exciting things happen and meaningful things happen and if you look at those two worlds there are interesting points of comparison: I had similar events that shaped them but slightly different and they functioned slightly differently hmm and so yeah, in century was using the league to look at the 20th century through the lens of 20th century culture and draw conclusions that seemed accurate.

I wasn't saying that all culture in the 20th century was garbage. I wasn't saying that culture was doomed to fail, I was saying that the dominant culture was becoming repetitive, it had no original ideas, I would no longer be able to create a performance let alone a throne, opera, yes, it's what called me attention when I was in my 20th century. The book was especially all the guys who took us to space, the doctors to the moon, Sergei Korolev, Wernher von Braun, the importance of Jules Verne's talent, you know, in that culture of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and things like that, and I was thinking that when I was watching, you know, have you seen Prometheus?

It's really, it's really grim, they basically realize that humanity has been built by aliens, so they go looking for these aliens and they finally find an alien that is, oh, you know, something divine why he did it. believe us and the alien does these things, being still there starts like punching them in the face which kind of killed him and it's about as grim an idea as you can imagine and I just tried to wonder if Werner von Braun and those guys grew up with that level of science fiction, whether they were so enthusiastic about going to the moon and moving on, well, I guess I knit science fiction, it's interesting how science fiction develops. was handled in the 20th century hmm in science fiction, okay there are many precursors, but an uncontroversial starting point would probably be Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, yes, and then you would move on to people like Welles and then about a century then, you know, all of those are actually bleak warning visions of the potential future, they're potentially alarmist about the nature of the technology and what it's going to mean.

Mary Shelley was reacting to the Industrial Revolution that was actually starting around her while she was writing Frankenstein in 1814 or whatever, it was Welles, he's all his science fiction books, they're mostly dystopia, the machine of the time with his vision of Wells's class system, his era even more stratified, literally, so that you have to work. class cannibals who live underground and feed on the dumb and dripping middle class of basic edible animals with the story of austerity yes, it's a and Jules Verne now, obviously, Jules Verne is enjoying his great machines much more, but always He says, imagine if these machines had fallen into the hands of a madman like Captain Nemo whom I secretly admire but at least it is a warning 1910 1915 The United States discovers science fiction in the form of Tom Swift and it is something completely different, I don't know.

It's about giving warnings to dolls for the future, it's about saying look how great the United States is going to be in the future. I almost suspect what the tendency is in older nations when we want to unearth ourselves is to go back to the Past, to something imaginary from the past. Arthur or something like that America doesn't have that much history to deal with so in some ways what America needs is science fiction when we try to say look what we were and then America more or less has to say look what we will be and then the science fiction of the 1920s would have the rise of pork magazines, it was all this bright, optimistic new frontier stuff where they were going to be cowboys and Indians again only they were going to be Earthmen and Neptunians , but you could go over all the tropes of the Western genre and pioneering fiction, but in space and, in my opinion, it became this thing that was probably one of the worst things that ever happened to science fiction; had to wait until the late 1940s, after Hiroshima. so that these new voices that had acquired a radical sense of treatment began to return to science fiction and that gave a brilliant era, probably the best era of science fiction, from let's say the forties until the mid-seventies, when George Lucas He brought out a Star Wars piece. mentalist science fiction if ever there was one and we turned the clocks back to the science fiction ideas of fifty years ago now we are in a position that the whole idea between science fiction and the real world interact with each other now we have things like the mirrorblack with the pig and then on Monday that's no longer science fiction, it's the question of whether this is the kind of level of leeway between fiction and non-fiction that we wanted at the end of this, well, I've said it in the past that I think the membrane between fiction and reality is porous and semi-permeable and I've become accustomed to the most ridiculous ideas, whether it's proposing a vendetta and then suddenly saying a bunch of Guy Fawkes masks inviting amicus onto the world stage, which is a good thing or having had the idea related to more movieThe end of the project Jimmy has a sinister clown that manifests in various places around Northampton and he returns from vacation and finds a sinister clown that manifested in Northampton at the end of my street, about 100 meters from my front door, you start to get the impression that yes, sometimes. things can seep from the realm of ideas into the realm of reality.

I would tell Charlie Brooker that it's the Eighties to blame, so he shouldn't have written about the British Prime Minister's unholy relationship with a pig if he hadn't. I don't want this to happen mmm, happy now, this assumes that of course it's not true, which I like to think is probably not true, since Lord Ashcroft is good enough to have done that, but a part of me is something like that. it fits too well, it feels too much like some kind of royal cult initiation ceremony. I remember someone saying this could have been someone like Mark Mothersbaugh from daiva saying about the idea of ​​Donny and Marie Osmond getting married and he was saying Yeah, I know that's not really true, but in my heart it's true and I think that That's how I feel about the revelations about David Cameron that we all know were in his secret soul.

David Cameron is exactly the man who would do something like that, if he hasn't done it literally, he certainly has done it metaphorically, so yes, I say this without the slightest evidence that I'm going to believe that for the rest of my life. Thank you very much Alan, you'll keep going. to the 21st century with that as the beginning of all imagination