Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

people by a call for a revolution in science fiction. He deplored the lack of:
...passion, subtlety, irony, original characterisation, original and good style, a sense of involvement in
human affairs, colour, density, depth, and, on the whole, real feeling from the writer.
Guest Editorial, New Worlds No. 129 April 1963.
Reading these words today, more than thirty years after they were written, is a very depressing
experience. Nothing seems to have changed very much in the meantime.
Moorcock's sentiments were spot on, but given that his own publication record at that time showed only
a few heroic fantasy stories and one or two rather immature "literary" works (together with vast
amounts of juvenilia for organisations like Fleetway) he was hardly leading from strength. All his
published writings seemed to suffer from the very defects he accused others of. Perhaps all that could
be said in his favour was that at least he recognised this.
Consequently it came as somewhat of a shock to many people when, about a year later, he took over as
editor of New Worlds and proceeded to re-shape it in the image of his manifesto.
New Worlds became the epitome of the avant garde and in retrospect far too many of its writers took
themselves far too seriously. But even in the midst of all the preaching of serious literary theory,
Moorcock's sense of fun never let him down. For much of the life of the magazine, the artist Eduardo
Paolozzi appeared on the masthead as Aeronautics Adviser.
The magazine was very variable in the quality of the fiction it produced. Mainly this was because it was
put together as a sort of editorial collective. Moorcock and his friends would hammer out compromises,
each putting in stories that the others liked but that they hated, simply in order to be allowed to include
stories that they themselves liked!
However enough good material was published for the magazine to have a firm following and for a time it
even had an Arts Council grant. It gained a brief notoriety when it published Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack
Barron which contained the word "fuck" (unheard of in popular fiction). Questions were asked in
Parliament and the major book chains in England refused to sell the magazine any more. This was the
kiss of death and eventually it perished from lack of sales. The final issue was a special "good taste"
edition which had a very Victorian feel to it.
It was in New Worlds that Jerry Cornelius was born. (His initials are not a coincidence). He was the
archetype of the sixties era and so successful was he that many of the New Worlds writers wrote
stories in which Jerry figured largely. (Most of these were collected in The Nature of the Catastrophe
Hutchinson, 1971). But he was always Moorcock's character and it was with the Jerry Cornelius stories
that Moorcock found his own voice as a writer, outgrew the cheap fantasies of his youthful period and
emerged as a mature and skilful writer. (One of the later Cornelius novels, The Condition of Musak,
won the Guardian Fiction prize).
The stories are ironic and compressed, with large amounts of information concentrated in a small space.
The imagery makes contemporary references drawn from pop music, art, astronomy, physics, and
politics. They are a picture of an era and if nowadays some of them seem a little dated, that is no bad
thing in itself because they remain true to the times that they portray. The stories are peopled by
grotesques, caricatures of the types used so successfully a generation before by Charles Dickens (a
writer with whom Moorcock has much in common and whom he admires a lot. In an interview with Colin
Greenland, he discusses Dickens' Bleak House and praises it highly).
The most successful of Moorcock's grotesques is Jerry's horrible mum.
She sighed and lowered herself into the discoloured armchair. "Oooch! Them fucking springs. Damp
as Brighton Beach too." The complaints were uttered in a tone of comfortable approval. She had
been too long out of her natural environment. She reached up for the gin and began to unscrew the
cap. Frank handed her a dirty glass from the sink.