Smoke And Mirrors

One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock

When I was asked to write a story for an anthology of Michael Moorcock's Elric stories, I chose to write a story about a boy a lot like I was once and his relationship with fiction. I doubted I could say anything about Elric that wasn't pastiche, but when I was twelve, Moorcock's characters were as real to me as anything else in my life and a great deal more real than, well, geography lessons for a start.

"Of all the anthology stories, I liked your story and Tad Williams's the best," said Michael Moorcock when I ran into him in New Orleans several months after finishing the story. "And I liked his better than yours because it had Jimi Hendrix in it."

The title is stolen from a Harlan Ellison short story.

I've worked in a number of different media over the years. Sometimes people ask me how I know what medium an idea belongs to. Mostly they turn up as comics or films or poems or prose or novels or short stories or whatever. You know what you're writing ahead of time.

This, on the other hand, was just an idea. I wanted to say something about those infernal machines, computers, and black magic, and something about the London I observed in the late eighties-a period of financial excess and moral bankruptcy. It didn't seem to be a short story or a novel, so I tried it as a poem, and it did just fine.

For The Time Out Book of London Short Stories I reformatted it as prose and left a lot of readers very puzzled.