Gormenghast, Internet and enlightening people

Excerpts from a Guardian interview published today. The complete article is available here. 

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."

You can read the complete article here.