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| Art by Paco Anguita |
Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images to achieve changes in consciousness.
Dearest Brazil,We are fast running out of last chances to save the planet and its peoples. Our world is changing, faster than it’s ever changed before, and forcing us to adapt more quickly if we are to survive. From hunter-gatherer society to agriculture, from agriculture to industry, from industry to whatever is taking shape now – this new condition that we do not as yet have a name for – humanity has seen these kinds of monumental shift before, although not often. These transitions are not caused by political forces but by the unstoppable tidal movements of history and technology, which is a tide that we can either steer our vessels to take advantage of, or we can be washed away by. The Earth is turning, turning of necessity into a new place, and we can only turn with it or else lose the biosphere that sustains us forever. Most people, I believe, know this in their hearts and feel it in their stomachs.And yet, over this past five or so years, we have seen across the globe a ferocious resurgence of exactly the political and economic ideas that led us into this clearly disastrous situation in the first place. The unconcealed aggression of this extreme right advance seems to me so forceful, and yet so disconnected from any reality, that it can only be born of desperation; the hysterical fear felt by those most invested in the power structures of the old world, who know the new world can, ultimately, have no place for them. Afraid for their very existence, for the existence of the worldview from which they benefit, they have crowded the world stage over this last half-decade with increasingly loud, overblown and blustering pantomime characters, for whom no course of action is too corrupt or inhuman, and no line of reasoning too blatantly absurd.Unashamedly monstrous, these have persecuted racial and religious minorities, or their native peoples, or the poor, or women, or people of different sexualities, or all of the above. During the still-evolving pandemic they put their political posturing and their financial doctrines before the safety of their populations, presiding over hundreds of thousands of potentially unnecessary deaths; hundreds of thousands of devastated families, devastated communities. With their nations on fire, or flooded, or parched by drought, they insisted that climate change was a leftist hoax to inconvenience industry, and branded environmental or social protestors as terrorists. Adopting the fascist circus-act style of Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, we have had the dangerous insurrectionary theatrics of Donald Trump in North America, and the ruinous indignities of Boris Johnson and his understudies in the (at present) United Kingdom. And, of course, Brazil has had Jair Bolsonaro.Although we in the Global North obviously contribute much more than our fair share of horrifying political figures to the world’s situation, I don’t know anybody with an ounce of conscience and compassion who isn’t appalled by what Bolsonaro, riding into office on Trump’s bow-wave, has done to your huge and beautiful country, along with what he continues to do to our relatively small and somehow-still-beautiful planet. We’ve watched despairingly while, singing from the same hymn-book as his North American inspiration, Bolsonaro has railed against Brazil’s indigenous people, its homosexuals and the rights of its women to safe abortions, fuelling an uncontrolled bonfire of hatred as a distraction from his social and economic agendas, while simultaneously flooding your culture with guns. We’ve seen him attempt to swagger his way through the pandemic by spouting his anti-vaccination idiocy, and we’ve seen Brazil’s increasing acreage of hastily-prepared graveyards; those pigeonhole grids in grey soil with here and there dead flowers or painted markers as a drip of colour.We’ve also looked on while he responded to the prospect of new international environmental laws by simply speeding up his suicidal destruction of the rainforest, choking our communal atmosphere with burning jungle, displacing or dispatching people who had lived in these regions for generations, and seemingly colluding with or turning a blind eye to the murder of journalists investigating this brutal ethnic cleansing. A respected British science magazine that I subscribe to, New Scientist, has recently described Brazil’s imminent elections as a potentially crucial point of no return in our species’ life-or-death battle with the climate catastrophe we ourselves have engineered. Simply put, Jair Bolsonaro can continue, profitably, to please the corporate interests that support him, or our grandchildren can eat and breathe. It’s one or the other.As an anarchist, there are very few political leaders that I could completely tolerate, much less endorse, but from all that I have heard or read about him, Luiz da Silva, Lula, seems to be one such rare individual. His policies appear to be fair, humane and practical, and, as I understand it, he has promised to reverse many of Bolsonaro’s most disastrous decisions. Repairing the damage of these last five years would surely not be easy or without cost, and da Silva would be inheriting a badly disfigured political landscape. At the very least, however, from this distance he at least has the look of a candidate who acknowledges that mankind is going through one of its infrequent seismic transformations, and realises that we must change how we live, if we are to live at all. He seems a politician committed to the future, with its hard work and its just and wonderful possibilities, rather than the flailing and destructive death-throes of an unsustainable past.Brazil’s forthcoming election is, I’m told, balanced on something of a knife edge and, as discussed above, the whole world is riding on it. If you have ever enjoyed any of my work, or have felt any sympathy with its humanitarian leanings, then please go out and vote for a future that is fit for human beings, for a world that is more than the golden latrine of its corporations and their puppets.Let’s put the iniquities of the last five, or perhaps the last five hundred years, behind us.With love, and trust,Your friend,
The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting.
The truth of the world is that it is chaotic.
The truth is that it is not The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Aliens or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control.The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.The world is rudderless.
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| Photo by Josh Hight |
Alan Moore: [...] I suppose the comics were a very big thing in my life until the age of about 14, 15. I had absorbed an awful lot of completely pointless and unnecessary lore about superheroes, all of these excessive, insane, meaningless details of continuity. I have a very sticky memory. Not so much these days, but back in my pomp, I remembered everything. It was very embarrassing when, at a comics convention that I attended after becoming a professional, they had a trivia quiz that they persuaded me to take part in. And, horrifyingly, I knew the secret identity of Chameleon Boy [a minor member of DC’s Legion of Superheroes]. That was when I realized that, no, you gotta back away from this. It’s sort of an illness.[...] I would be the last person to want to sit through any adaptations of my work. From what I’ve heard of them, it would be enormously punishing. It would be torturous, and for no very good reason. There was an incident—probably a concluding incident, for me. I received a bulky parcel, through Federal Express, that arrived here in my sedate little living room. It turned out to contain a powder blue barbecue apron with a hydrogen symbol on the front.
And a frank letter from the showrunner of the Watchmen television adaptation, which I hadn’t heard was a thing at that point. But the letter, I think it opened with, “Dear Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen.” That wasn’t the best opener. It went on through a lot of, what seemed to me to be, neurotic rambling. “Can you at least tell us how to pronounce ‘Ozymandias’?” [Another of the vigilante characters in Watchmen.] I got back with a very abrupt and probably hostile reply telling him that I’d thought that Warner Brothers were aware that they, nor any of their employees, shouldn’t contact me again for any reason. I explained that I had disowned the work in question, and partly that was because the film industry and the comics industry seemed to have created things that had nothing to do with my work, but which would be associated with it in the public mind. I said, “Look, this is embarrassing to me. I don’t want anything to do with you or your show. Please don’t bother me again.”[...] I’m an atheist. No, there wasn’t some guy in the clouds who created everything. However, the pagan idea of gods, and the way they were regarded in the classical world, that interests me. The idea that these gods were essences of whatever their particular field of endeavor was, that Hermes is the essence of language and intelligence and also theft. I can accept gods on that level, that they are pure ideas that may have become, through their complexity, self-aware, or which have become so complex that we perceive them as being self-aware, whether they are or not. So it’s perhaps a heavily qualified theism, not quite atheism. [...]
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| Art by George Vega |
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| Sir Gawain and the Green Knight |
John Reppion: Yes, we have a truly lovely introduction from Alan. He absolutely loved the zine edition when he read it back in November last year, and had nothing but lovely things to say about it, except for the fact that it was a bit too small… and he lost his copy really quickly. So again, another vote for a larger edition. When we started putting the new edition together, I asked if he’d be interested in doing a little intro, and he was really into it. The intro ended up being about twice as long as we were expecting, but we’re certainly not complaining about that. It’s a wonderful addition to the book. A great way to open it. And, of course, it’s always nice when Alan Moore says nice things about your comic.
[...]
Has Alan contextualised the material at all or simply talked about why he likes it?
John: Both, really. He’s not a man to do things by half. He really understood what we were trying to do with the book, and we were both delighted with how he’s articulated that in the intro. Full disclosure: Alan is also my father-in-law and every week he reads to his grandkids over the phone. That’s mine and Leah’s kids, and his other daughter, Amber’s son, my nephew. So, Alan is revisiting a few books he hasn’t read in a few decades and some of that has also informed the into. The way Victorian sensibilities about knightliness informed some children’s literature well into the 20th and 21st centuries.
[...] “I started out doing comedy stuff,” he explains in his unmistakable Midlands baritone rumble. Indeed, his first published work was as a cartoonist in the 1970s for music magazineSounds, for which he supplied the anarchic comic strip Roscoe Moscow under the wonderfully punk nom de plume Curt Vile.“After the early stages of my career in America, I think that people tended to see me as that guy who does the dark gritty dystopian material and that I was some kind of grim, dark gritty guy. Even in the most horrific things that I’ve done, there’s generally a joke or two in there somewhere. I like humour. Nobody wants to be a dark British dystopian guy forever, you know? it’s not a good look.”His playfully dry humour is definitely to the fore in several of the stories in Illuminations. [...]
Order your copy HERE!
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| Art by Shawn McManus |
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| Art by Christopher Flork |
Alan Moore:[ ...] I have to admit, I was never a fan of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, I never watched Game of Thrones. I think a lot of fantasy is kind of – perhaps lazy is too strong a word but something in that region. It falls back on standard tropes. Whereas fantasy should always be unique and new. For me, a wonderful fantasy would be Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, which hasn’t got a dragon or a wizard or a dwarf. It’s just about this crumbling castle and its ritual-bound inhabitants. Or Brian Catling’s Vorrh trilogy. Which is a completely original idea: this neglected garden of Eden that has overgrown space and time. The problem with fantasy at the moment is that most of it is purely escapist. It isn’t fantasy that’s going to tell you about the real world. It’s not using its symbols to illuminate, but give you access to another world that doesn’t have the problems and responsibilities of this one. I mean, take the Metaverse, which is a massive data harvesting project, apparently. I think people are trying to bail out of this universe into – I dunno – the Marvel Cinematic Universe...[...]We need to move beyond capitalism. We need to move urgently beyond growth and our obsession with growth, because that is a fantasy and it always has been. We do not live in a world of infinite resources, so infinite growth is clearly not possible. It’s becoming very urgent. We don't have to be ruled by GDP. There are other ways that progress can be measured: the wellbeing of a country, for example.A lot of this would entail the introduction of a universal basic income scheme. Which again is very possible. There are places where they’ve tried it out. It seems to be a very workable thing. And we know that the money’s there. The thing is that amongst conservative thinkers, it is unthinkable that people should get something for nothing, even though that is what their entire careers are often based upon.We need something drastic very soon. A lot of this stuff, it’s not going to work unless there’s some top-down adjustments. Big initiatives like the Green New Deal, which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was pushing in America. I don’t think the Green New Deal actually dares to talk about the possibility of a life after capitalism. But at least it sounded like people started to address the issues. We need to show people what a world beyond growth might look like.[...]The idea of a VR future is, at the moment, quite a frightening and disturbing one. And we’re going to be in the hands of big tech companies who simply want all of your data so that they can sell it. But that is not to say that there won’t be possibilities in the idea of virtual reality. Technology is pretty much neutral, it depends on how we use it.I experienced a little bit of VR and it is a very compelling experience where your body is not obeying your instructions. I have tried to step off a VR cliff, knowing that there was solid floor there, and I’ve been unable to do it. I’ve tried doing it with my eyes closed. Now, that didn’t work either, because my brain was telling me, ‘no, we don’t step off a cliff, even with eyes closed’. That's worrying, but it does indicate the depth of effect of this technology. And it occurred to me that you could recreate a transcendent experience which is very rarely visited upon people by making that available through something like virtual reality.The first time I heard about virtual reality, I said somewhat cynically, ‘Oh, yeah, like there’s another kind…’ because we already have a virtual reality, it’s just that our headset is our head. We don’t experience reality directly, it’s compiled somewhere on the loom of our consciousness from the sensory expressions that we receive. And we do that moment by moment. So it’s not that big a leap between reality as we experience it and virtual reality. Would it be possible to recreate a mystical experience using VR? It would take a great deal of artistry. [...]
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| Art by Zander Cannon |
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| Art by Zander Cannon |
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We have also included below a reading list of writers and works mentioned by Alan and Stewart during the discussion. [...]Reading ListAlan and Stewart talked about several different writers who had influenced Alan's work - and a few of you have asked for a reading list. Here are some of the authors and books they discussed...
- When talking about the story "Illuminations," Stewart referenced Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury - a story about lost childhood. The character in Moore's story finds a copy of The Silver Locusts by Bradbury in a junk shop.
- When they spoke about Moore's story "The Improbably Conscious High-Energy State", Stewart compared Moore's experimental writing to Italo Calvino.
- When talking about the story "American Light: An Appreciation" Stewart said it read like an affectionate parody of 50s-60s beat poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Alan Ginsberg. Alan is a subscriber to Kevin Ring's Beat Scene magazine.
- When talking about the first story, "Hypothetical Lizard", Stewart said he was reminded of the grotesque fantasy world of Clark Ashton Smith's novels. He also referenced the illustrations of Barry Windsor-Smith - particularly for Conan: Red Nails.
- When talking about Northampton in Alan's work, Stewart referred to A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre. They both talked about Steve Aylett, in particular LINT, which contains what Stewart called a similar "collision of words that ought not to go together" - and Stewart recommended another title by Aylett, Hyperthick.
- Alan said the first of his new Long London series, The Great When - is influenced by Arthur Machen's writing, set in London - particularly his novel The Green Round and the short story, "N".
- Alan talked about writing about specific places - in his case Northampton and London - and referred to William Hope Hodgson's novel The House on the Borderland, which was inspired by Hodgson seeing a house balanced precariously at the top of a clifftop chasm in Galway. In the 60s Iris Murdoch wrote The Unicorn after visiting the same place - both novels were similarly about a recluse threatened by supernatural visitations from below.
- When asked what he'd recommend for a 10 year old boy to read, Alan recommended Alan Garner - in particular his latest book, Treacle Walker. He also read Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost at the age of 10.
- When asked his favourite ghost story, Alan picked Lost Hearts by MR James. He also praised the ghost stories of Robert Aickman.
Alan Moore: "[The Gormenghast novels] were probably the first books where I began to understand just what you could do with writing: how he could conjure this entire complex environment and these almost fluorescent characters that stayed in your mind for ever”.[...] "When the internet first became a thing," he says, "I made the decision that this doesn’t sound like anything that I need. I had a feeling that there might be another shoe to drop – and regarding this technology, as it turned out, there was an Imelda Marcos wardrobe full of shoes to drop. I felt that if society was going to morph into a massive social experiment, then it might be a good idea if there was somebody outside the petri dish." He makes do, instead, with an internet-savvy assistant: "He can bring me pornography, cute pictures of cats and abusive messages from people."[...] "I’m probably a pretty much unreconstructed member of the psychedelic left from 1970, where the agenda was just: let’s drop LSD in the reservoirs and thus enlighten everybody. Luckily, before I could implement that, I did grow the fuck up and realise [it] would be a terrible idea. But nevertheless the idea of enlightening people as a way of changing society probably remained my strongest directive."
Prox: [...] could you tell us about some ideas and themes you have been wanting to explore throughout your career that you haven’t been able to yet?Alan Moore: [...] As to any ideas that I haven’t had a chance to express yet…no, that isn’t really how it works, or at least not for me. That seems to imply that creators are somehow female in their mental biology, and that ideas are like ova: one is born with all the eggs or ideas that one will ever deploy, and you’d best hope that you live long enough to realise them all. In reality, this isn’t the process. While odd fragments – a character’s name here, a brief scene there – might linger in the mind and be useful as material for some new endeavour, in practice it will always be the ideas that are newest and freshest to you that will provide the energy and inspiration for your best work. This plays into a common assumption that people often make about the act of writing: they assume, not unreasonably, that a writer will first have an idea, and then they will write it down. What actually happens is that most ideas are engendered, mysteriously, in the act of writing itself. So, no, any ideas that I’ve had that were worthwhile have been taken care of somewhere in my extensive bibliography. Sooner or later a new idea will slowly coalesce and will be immediately incorporated into whatever seems to be the most suitable vehicle at that time. I’ve recently considered, for example, that it might be interesting to engage more seriously with poetry, although the content of that poetry is something that I’ll only recognise when I’m actually sitting down with the intention of writing a poem. Premeditated ideas that have been idling around the brain for years will probably turn out to be stale and useless. After all, if they’d really been that good, how would you have been able to resist using them sooner?
