A Geek History of Time - Episode 246 - The Hidden Influence of Michael Moorcock Part I

Episode Date: January 13, 2024

Okay, so there's there there are two possibilities going on here. One, you're you're bringing up a term that I have never earned before. The the other possibility is that this is a term I've heard before, but it involves a language that uses pronunciation that's different from Latin it, and so you have no idea how to say it properly. And intensely 80s post apocalyptic schlock film. Oh, and schlong film. You know, it's been over 20 years, but spoilers. Oh, okay, so the resident Catholic thinking about that. We're going for low earth orbit. There is no rational here. Leave it on me after. And you know I

will. They mean it is two o'clock in the fucking morning. I don't think you can get very much more homosexual panic than that. No, which I don't know if that's better. I mean you guys are Catholics, you tell me. I'm just kind of excited that like you and producer George will have something to talk about that basically just means that I can show up and get fed. This is a geek history of time. Where we connect Nurtory to the real world. My name is Ed Blomelonke.

I'm a world history and English teacher at the middle school level here in Northern California. And this afternoon, earlier today before we're recording, I had the opportunity to actually go and buy a hobby book for the first time in months. It was almost kind of giddy making. Because I went to my friendly local gaming store and I had pre-ordered the book in question. It came in yesterday and so I went in to go pick it up today and I'd already partially paid for it. But just there was something about going into the store and knowing that I had something waiting for me. It was very nice. I went out and did that as part

of an errands trip to go get groceries and stuff. But it was, yeah, I haven't done that in a while. And it felt very good. So it's nice to have done that. And I actually have have the book sitting on the table in front of me right now as I'm recording. And I'm just looking at it and it's just being being happy. So that's that's kind of what I had going on today. Who are you and what's happened with you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I am a high school US history teacher up here in the northern California area. And what is happening with me is,

so, you know, it occurs to me that in my attempt to keep this timeless, this may or may not ruin it, but every year, I ask myself, is this the year? Is this the year? And every year the answer is no, this is not the year. And the question that I ask myself is, is this the year I start wearing shorts to work? This year is the fucking year. This was it. Finally, yes, you broke down. Yes, anytime the temperature of the day is going to be over 70, I let myself wear shorts. And I do not give a shit. And I already just wear t-shirts anyway.

Yeah. So it used to be like, you know, like, oh, he's the wacky guy with the wacky t-shirts, you know? Yeah. Now it just full on. And as it turns out, my teaching hasn't suffered at all. Okay. Did it, were you concerned?

I was not. But a lot of people do that whole like, well, you know, they're not going to see you as a professional. I'm like, yeah, but you know what? They know I know my shit. And I'm teaching them to do some cool stuff. Yeah. And the pants have nothing to do with it.

Yeah. Well, that's true. And my, my, my, my go to just in case somebody comes at me about it, has, and this place tried to kill me two years ago. Fuck them. So I'll go with that. Like I 110% back that. What drives me nuts, you know, talking about that in our profession is,

I make the mistake on a regular basis of like going on to Reddit and looking at stuff. And one of the groups I'm in are our slash teachers. I hear it like I have to wonder like what kind of fucking fashus dictatorships are you all teaching under because people are, are, you know, posting stuff about, you know, I wore jeans to work and like they wrote up a letter on me. Yeah, they're not like they're in right to work states is what it is. I go, my God. Yeah. And I'm over here like all entitled shit of like, you tried to kill me, fuck you, you know, but like, and nobody's coming at me either. That's the thing. Yeah. I think part of it is my personality is nobody wants to come at me. But I think a bigger part of it is they've got bigger fish to fry too. That's true. They

genuinely do have bigger fish to fry. And the other thing is, I think not just your personality, but your particular reputation and the culture that we are working in. Yeah. I think disincentivizes, because we're in different districts, but the state that we're in. Yes. I think that the culture disincentivizes administrators like picking on picky-yoon crap like that. Yeah, it really is. I remember years ago, somebody came to me

and administrative that I admired quite a bit actually, one that I respected. He was formerly a teacher, then became an administrator. He came to me and he's like, Harmony, you gotta, is there anything in the contract where we can tell like teachers to wear pants? And I said, you're coming to a union rap asking for me to do your job for you. Like I'm sorry, you called me, but you called me by my last name.

Did it say quizzling on my name tag? Right. But then I told them I said, let me ask you this, is this teacher that you you have in question? Is this the only complaint you have? And they're like, yeah, I'm like, be grateful. Yeah. Because there are plenty of teachers that you and I have to sit in meetings about all the time. Right. Whereas this person, you and I put it right back out of them like you acknowledge that this person is one of the best and most effective teachers We have on campus. So maybe leave them alone. Maybe yeah, so yeah, like I'm wearing shorts every time it's nice When I tease the kids a little bit. I always tease them and I always end it with think how bad things are for you

You just got teased by somebody in a muppet t-shirt wearing cargo shorts, our girl socks, and orthopedic shoes. Oh, that's see, that's that's a way to leverage it, though. Oh, yeah. Brilliant. I like that. So I like that. Like, like on those occasions, when I, when I wear my quilt to work,

when if, if kids give me trouble, I have, I have decided I'm going to look at it. I'm going to get really, really, you're going to give that to a man who's brave enough to wear a skirt to work. Yeah, you're going to pick on a man who's got a man skirt on. It's crazy enough to do that. Yeah, and you think I won't get up to my nash in your ass with a referral? think I won't get up to my my Nash in your ass with a referral. Well, I wish I could get away with using that specific language with six graders, but yeah, the theme, the theme would be there. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, what you got tonight, because I brought nothing. Okay. Well, that's okay. Because because you know, as you just discussed, you

didn't know, I, you have brought plenty recently. So it's only fair that I, you know, bring something to the table other than my devastating good looks. And we lead with our strength said, yeah, well, you know, yeah. Mine is clearly doing research because I'm not smart enough. And yours is being handsome. So I want to talk to you about an author. So this is going to be another couple of episodes on a specific author. And the reason I want to because he is incredibly influential, but nobody, like in order to recognize his name and understand how influential he is, you have to be a literary science fiction nerd.

Like me, and I think that's a shame because I really wish his properties got the kind of mainstream attention that a lot of the stuff that is in one way or another derivative of his work has. Like Dungeons & Dragons has gone mainstream. Warhammer 40k is very close to being pretty mainstream. Lots of people, you know, or, you know, non-nordes know about it, know about the lore, know about the university play video games about it, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. But this author, like there's been all kinds of art created by people who've been inspired by him,

created by people who've been inspired by him, but unless you're a fan of that art who has read further, nobody knows his name. And so I wanna try to rectify that, and I just wanna talk about all of the ways in which he has impacted genre fiction and video games and metal music and a whole bunch of other things. Okay. And I know, and this is a gift for you because I'm going to tell you his name, and it's going to launch a thousand puns. Oh, okay. So many of them inappropriate.

So, okay, so you're welcome ahead of time. I'm gonna make two guesses here. Yeah, does his name start with an H? No, it does not. Did he spend time in the Navy? No, he did not. And I actually have a note here about that. Okay.

No, his name is Michael Morcock. And there it is. And there it is. What's not even my birthday? Okay. Yeah. I knew I knew that you were just going to be like, oh my god, really? Is that his real name? That is, in fact, his real name, his name, under that name. He did. He didn't have a nom de plume with like craving forehead. Yeah. And there it is. Or Richard Fitzwell or Richard Fitz Simmons or. No, no, no, he did write under some, there are some of his works that were written under an omdebloom, but they're not anything like that. No, no, no. And by the way, I hit my union vice president with some names in a group chat, because there's just a question of a parliamentary procedure. Can we bring members to come and observe so that they can get a feeling for what it takes to be a rep. So we're trying to expand our, you know, and there's a very

good reason for doing that, right? Yeah. But then again, there's the, you don't necessarily want to open yourself, open up close proceedings to the general public, even though they are members, right? So there's a bit of that. But so they're like, well, you know, let us and we're all still meeting on zoom. So they said, you know, let us know the names. And then we'll know to look out for them. And then, you know, done it. Okay, cool. And so that was the other person asking that. And so he said, you know, what are the names? And I chimed in with some names. And so I chimed in with Hugh Morris. chimed in with some names. So I chimed in with Hugh Morris and Ila Vloosey. And he comes back with, I can't find any members whose last names are Vloosey. And I was like, he's like, where do they

teach? And I was like, oh, man, those were obvious. um, those were jokes. I didn't, I didn't realize I needed to angle the guns lower. And, and you know that moment on a group chat where someone is categorically silent. We're previously, they weren't. You know, they're missed at you. Yeah, I had that moment. So I texted him separately. I said, Hey, man, I'm real sorry to have added to your work day.

If it makes you feel any better, I got suspended for doing that once in eighth grade, which is true because, because of course you did because we had a sub because like, and they asked, is there anybody whose name I haven't called? And because we had the the scantrons. And you have to, you know, you, but the subs don't get a scantrons, but they get a copy of it. So then you have a absent slip, where you write down all the names and then that goes to front office, front office, inputs the names, and those kids get marked as absent. And I said, yeah, Neil. And she's like, Neil, I said, she's a wood says last name, Smith. She's like, he's not on this list. I'm like, I know they made

the list on Monday. He transferred transferred in on Wednesday today's Friday. And I'm like barely holding it together. So she writes down Neil Smith takes it up to the goes up to the office. Apparently that system worked in such a way that like it was kind of like the Y2K bug that if you know added in a name that didn't exist, it would throw everything off by one. And it crashed the entire attendance server in 1992 in that middle school. So yeah. Only you. But apparently, like that's that's the kind of thing that would be in a John Qsack movie from from the late 80s and and like you actually did that. So yeah, I did not use Michael Morkock.

That might have actually been more obvious. That point of humorous. He was humorous. Yeah. And I love Lucy. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so Michael Morkock, Craven Morkcock. Richard Fitzpatrick.

And Richard. He he was born in 1939. Oh, oh, wow. Yeah. In England, in England. Okay. This is an important detail because he's part of a generation that came of age in the post war era. Yeah.

And he has a distinctly different attitude toward authority and the conventions of fantasy and science fiction than his predecessors. Sure. He was six when the war ended. Uh-huh. So that's old enough to remember things, but not old enough to have like a meaningful grasp on issues.

Right. You remember impressions and you almost remember context emotionally rather than ads context. Yeah, yeah, yeah And he grew up under the post-war consensus and the welfare state because remember the NHS started up in 1947 Right when he was nine and the National Insurance Act established a universal health insurance and old age pensions had passed in 46 yeah, cuz England didn't have the party of exact establishing universal health insurance and old age pensions had passed in 46. Yeah, because England didn't have the party of way, way, way, you mean black people will get taken care of too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, they didn't have that party. No, they didn't, they didn't have that problem.

They had the party of, all right, fine, even the black people like that. Yeah, yeah, okay. It's, yeah, it's outside of that coin. It's still shitting, but it's still healthcare. Yeah, still sucks, but like yeah. So as we've mentioned before in in earlier episodes where we where we talked about the UK in the in the inter post war period, rationing was actually tighter in the United Kingdom immediately post-war than it had been before. Right. And so that sense of things that I don't want to say privation because there's no indication that he like ever actually went hungry or anything, but that emotional weight of having rationing be something going on in the background would have been a thing.

I mean, if you drop the butter on the floor, it's a problem. That's actually not. Yeah, you're not getting more for another week. Yeah. So yeah, if you go back, for listeners, if you go back to episodes four and five specifically, that would all the way back there, you will find the way back machine. Yeah, you will find this talking about rationing

amongst other episodes, but that's one of the more obvious ones. Yeah, that's where it was a critically important part of the historical context. And so in the UK, during his childhood, the conservatives and labor, I mean, fought like feral cats for seats in parliament. I mean, you know, there was a vicious kind of scheming and looking to try to paint each other as villains and there was this very high pitch of competition. But they both largely agreed on the points of the post-war consensus. Like immediately post-war, both of them were like, no, no, we need to have a significant level of centralization in the economy. We need to establish the welfare state. And these are the things we're not going to touch.

We're not going to mess with unions, we're not going to mess with old, we're establishing old age pensions. These are institutions and bits of infrastructure that we're going to leave alone because we need them to literally rebuild the country. And so there's all this political back bite against snarling, but on the street level, especially when you're a little kid but on the street level, especially when you're, you know, a little kid.

And then when you're a teenager into young adult on ground level, they're the same. Yeah, there's going to be there's going to be this perception that it's no, there, they're, they're each painting the other is these villains, but like, no, what's the difference? That's if you as a kid pay attention. Yeah. I mean, I grew up during Reaganism and during Iran Contra. Yeah.

And I didn't spend that much time focusing on those. Oh no. When you're nine, 10 years old, it's irrelevant to your daily existence. Right. You know, so, and then with the Cold War raging, that just made it all seem that much more irrelevant. Sure.

Sure. Because all of that domestic politics back and forthing is going on in the foreground, while in the background, you know, is the literally the destruction of the planet. Right. You are you are publishing fire. Fire. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. You know, um, and so for somebody, especially somebody who's a cynic, which

Moorcock either either was born with a pre-delection to be or, you know, became one or little column A, little column B, like this, this is going to look like Posturing as there's no there's no meaningful difference, you know, yeah, and at the same time that's going on He's growing up in a world in which Britain's position as a world power was on a very swift crashing decline Right, it was losing all the empire. Yeah, and in foreign affairs that became a junior partner to the United States You know, especially after the Suez crisis was kind of the capstone moment on that was like, no, we won. We went to Suez and we succeeded. And then the US president came in and said, the hell you do?

Well, not only the US, but the USSR, like the two groups that were longer heads about most things came together to tell England. No. Yeah, no, sorry. No. Yeah. And so I'm pointing all of this out because, and here's where the note comes up, it's become a running joke whenever I talk about an SF or fantasy author. Okay, how many years was he in the Navy? Right. Right. Right. So now we have somebody who, he's from a distinctly different generation with a very different worldview than Asimov or especially Heinlein,

like particularly, like talking about authors that I've done time about here. Sure. And I have a quote actually from him from an interview that Mark Ock did in 2002. He said, I'm very more realistic. I'm sorry. You have a quote from somebody who about more cock from two. I'm just like, Oh, he's used in, you know, chiming in. Yeah. Okay. All right. Anyway, focus. I'm very moralistic. I think I bear a certain responsibility for the effect of the fiction I write.

Anger at injustice, cruelty, or ignorance is what tends to fire me up. I try to show readers where we might all be wearing cultural blinders. I hate imperialism, so therefore much of my early work was an attempt to show admirers of the British Empire, say, what kind of injustice, prejudice, and hypocrisy such an empire is based on. I'm very uneasy with current anglophone rhetoric about responsibilities to other parts of the world,

for instance. So he's a vertically anti-imperialist. Yeah. In other interviews and other writings of his, he has described himself as an anarchist. Okay. He specifically has stated that he does not believe anyone should accept anything from gods or masters, his own words, that we should champion ourselves, essentially. So, you know, it sounds like a more, it sounds like a more, what's the word I'm looking for optimistic maybe sense of objective is them. Yeah. Like if if Anne Rand got hugged more. Yeah. If Anne Rand, if Anne Rand, the mommy gave her more attention to the child. Yeah. Right. You know, because we're out here alone, we're doing this thing and we should not accept.

Because I'm just thinking of the letter that Anne and wrote to her niece, who would ask her for help, and she was just such an asshole to her. Oh, yeah. Will you pay me back no matter what, and if not, will you accept that I will never have a relationship with you? It's like, yo, but like,

that at the core of like, you know, we gotta look out for ourselves. Like, know, we got to look out for ourselves. Like, no gods, no masters look out for ourselves. Like that's still very an end. It's she took it to the wrong way. Like that's. Yeah. He's, he's, he's, he has the, you know, we need to look out for ourselves.

But he, he then, he balances it out with. We, we need to also look out for each other. We shouldn't, it's more anti-authoritarian. It's like we shouldn't be accepting anything from on high. We should be our own masters kind of thing should be our own master's kind of thing. Now, did he care about the result or was it just the stance? That I'm not 100% sure about. I wasn't able to find a whole lot there, but I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure the result was important to him. From what he says about injustice, cruelty, ignorance.

So he cares about consulism then. Yeah, he does. Yeah. Okay, so it's not that existential, like you are legislating for humanity. It's, no, we're trying to have a goddamn society here. Yeah, okay. Yeah, we're trying to have a goddamn society here. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we're trying to have, we're trying to have a society and we should not bow to our betrayery authority.

Okay. If that makes sense, no, it does. I'm not sure if that's, I'm not sure if I'm, if I'm phrasing it right to explain it, but that's the, that's the sense that I get from him. And so, you know, he grew up, and of course, so, I mean, and you look at the circumstances under which he was growing up, and it kind of all makes sense that this is going to be his viewpoint, right? Because as far as he understood it, there never was anything really great about the British Empire. Yeah, like he didn't see it stand out to Nazism. He wasn't conscious enough to see that. Yeah.

And he only saw it bleeding out at the end. Yeah. Yeah. And for him, the experience of seeing the collapse of the British Empire It wasn't necessarily a bad thing You know, it was it was the world is moving on right and this old outdated You know racist, you know structure is being undone and, there is, there is nothing bad about that, right? Right.

What did you say what his parents did? Or how do you find, I wasn't able to find very much information. I know that his background was, was bourgeois. Okay. Um, he, he was not, um, you know, know, the child of factory workers, and he was also not, you know, he educated. So, solidly, you know, what we would call middle class. So came home from school every day. Yeah, not not not not boarding school kid. Yeah, no, okay. No, not not not anything like that. Okay.

Yeah, no, no, not anything like that. Okay. And so all of this is a really strong divergence. This is a huge change departure. That's what I was looking for. This is a huge departure from Highliner Asimov. Asimov was kind of liberal, but he was still very much an establishment pro-authority figure. You look at what Asimov writes, it's all very much, you know, organized society and benevolent authority is what, you know, we need. And then, K Highline was somewhere to the right of Chingist Khan, politically speaking,

who wrote an entire political philosophical polemic because he got mad finding out that we'd signed a treaty that we were going to test fewer nuclear weapons. Like, you know, I like being the guy who's mad about that. Yeah, well, and he was coming from a very specific, a viewpoint in time and space that was informed by a very specific set of things. You know, and so, you know, Heinlein, and I haven't talked about when Heinlein got weird later in the 60s, Heinlein went from being, you know, a militarist, right-winger to a free love, what's we're looking for?

Iron Rans people. Libertarian. Yeah. Wanted to be in a free-level libertarian free-go. I haven't talked about stranger to strange land yet. At some point, I'm gonna have to, but in all cases, Heinlein was still way over on the right hand and of the political spectrum.

And he was even when he wrote, stranger to strange land, he did not go so far as to become an anarchist. And Morcar was one from day one. And so these these outlooks and actually the last individual I need I need to talk about comparing Morcock to is Tolkien because what we're going to be talking about is fantasy. And every Brit who's writing fantasy is responding to Tolkien on some level. On some level. And more cocked new Tolkien admired him as a person,

even, but considered Lord of the Rings to be lacking in weight. He considered it a disappointment. He wanted, as he put it, he wanted there to be more of a sense of mankind's impermanence. Oh. And, and consider that Tolkien, of course, was writing all of that as a devout Catholic and a royalist. Right. You know, in, in the universe of the Lord of the Rings, in Middle Earth, Erragorn's status as rightful king. Just the existence that there is that. Yeah, one, two, his status as rightful king

carries metaphysical weight. It's not merely a political thing. It is, it is a spiritual and a, like, it has an impact on the universe. And Tolkien's universe is essentially one in which there is ultimately a benevolent God, and the evil in that universe is coming about because of the efforts of a fallen angel. Right? And there is. And ultimately beyond even that, there is good. And there is evil. And those things are, again,, real and they carry metaphysical weight. There's good in this world and it's worth fighting for Mr. Frodo. Yes, there you go. Yes.

And so that's, that's, I mean, you know, as we've mentioned when we've talked about Tolkien, he didn't set out to write an allegory, but he did. Right. Right. right and allegory, but he did. Right. Right. Because because it was, it was just so much a part of, of what informed his view of the universe that, that that's how his fictional universe turned out. So we're car wish that he was more intentional with that and had leaned into that more of that. Like, he sang like allegory the fuck out of this because that's what we're supposed to do. Well, I there might it there like that might have been part of it, but the other thing is

because of his inherent anarchism and his inherent cynicism, he considered it all like hopelessly twee. There have been a whole, there are lots of incidental quotes from him where he shakes his head and just talks about, oh my god, it's just so schmaltzy. It's, you know, Lord of the Ring, oh God, and the fucking hobbits. And, you know, it's all just too happy, fluffy, you know. And so his worldview was just fundamentally very different. None of that stuff carried any weight. And, you know, going back into what he was seeing in the world around him, India became independent and got partitioned in 1947.

Right. Okay. And eight years old. Eight years old. And as much as recently, we have commentary in the UK, there's this, there's this thread of commentary from, from pundits on the conservative end of the spectrum in the UK, there's this thread of commentary from pundits on the conservative end of the spectrum in the UK who look back on how humiliating the loss of India was. Right.

And what a terrible thing this was for our prestige, and it was such a blow to our national psyche. to our national psyche, if you actually look back at the time, uh, getting up into a, was actually broadly supported by both political parties. Yeah, because it was, um, it's, you've got, I mean, Jesus, I don't like this metaphor, but it works. You've got the tiger by the tail. Yeah, you, you, you can't hang on, you can't let go. Like there's nothing that's good that's going to come of this Yeah, and yeah, we we don't have the money To demonstrate it. We can't maintain it. We can't defend it right

You know, it's like okay. No, it's just time for us to let it go And you know Churchill was actually it go. And Churchill was actually a wing nut by comparison to even members of his own party in terms of how desperately he clung to the Empire. Everybody else around him was like, no, it's too expensive. We don we know it's not doing anything for us. Just, you know, let it go and, you know, make it part of the common wealth and like move on, right? And we've talked about the dissolution of the British Empire in a bunch of other episodes, Sherlock Holmes.

It was part of the context for that. When we talked about 40K in episodes 40 episodes, Sherlock Holmes, it was part of the context for that. Right. When we talked about 40K in episodes four and five, it was part of that. But it's worth noting right now that this was happening while Moorcock was old enough to remember the time before and to see the changes that decolonization had on his own world.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So as he's growing up, England and the United Kingdom at large is becoming more diverse. The Windrush generation is shortly after this. Immigration from India, Pakistan, other decolonized commonwealth nations is a thing because there was a labor shortage. They were bringing people in from all over what had been the empire. Well, and just for our listeners who may not remember the Windrush generation, that's

named after the ship that brought people in from a large group of immigrants in from I believe Jamaica. Is that correct? Yes. Yes. Yeah. So you're talking what the English referred to as the West Indies. Yes. And this leads to, I believe we talked about this with punk rock actually because this leads

to that influence of music as well as that working class kind of culture and the multiculturalism of it. Yeah. And this is where all of these, all of this immigration leads to like all kinds of stuff going on. There's, well, I'm going to get to that in a second. I'm getting ahead of myself. At the same time, the UK has a list dominant role on the world stage. time, the UK has a less dominant role on the world stage. NATO forms in 1949. And in 1957, so around about the time he's 18, the European economic community forms with the UK not being part of it yet. And originally the European colon steel community. Yes. That was that was the year. I was in year before. Yeah, it might have been 53. I was thinking 56,

but it might have been 53. The EEC forms in 57. And that creates a competing economic block on the continent. Right. And that's the Treaty of Rome in 57. Oh, and so. Sorry, just real quick, I'm going to get to this. Okay, so the British mandate in Palestine, things shifted. And then, yeah, that's 48, that's the Nakba, right?

Or, is that how you say it? I not gonna say that. Knock-buh. And then also, most of deck in Iran, where the British, in many ways, it feels like that's kind of their first realization that the only way that they can be big movers and shakers is if they direct the big dummy, but the strong dummy to go do shit because they got so mad that Iran was nationalizing BP. Yeah. They then sicked Eisenhower and Dulles and the CIA. Yeah. You know, like that and Dulles on to most of that. and and and they're like see there. So it's

yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like so their only real power and influence is the ability to manipulate the golden retriever into biting people. Um, trying to think of a better dog breed because like golden retriever. I it's too nice. Yeah, it's clumsy, but it's too nice. The chow chow. Thorke, there you go. You know, it's still clumsy, but it's a prick. But it's a jerk. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, yeah. No, it's so, I mean, they're suffering defeat after defeat after defeat and through the through the 50s and they're having to seed things to overwhelmingly brown populations that they'd previously been dominant of. And then you've got, like you said, the wind rush, right? Yeah, the wind rush generation where it's you are bringing in a lot of not white people into the island. So there's this huge shift away from the normalized whiteness of England and of the UK. And to somebody of more Cox age, this would not have been a bad thing, like because he's not old enough to be attached to these older ideas of identity of what it means to

be English. He's not, you know, to him, you know, his attitude toward the crown, toward the empire, toward all of these institutions, is going to be entirely different. And in his case, it's, he is a lot less emotionally invested in any of them. I would say even more to the point, Morecock would have been seeing people having convulsions and fits about it. And yeah, seen that as like, oh, that's really fucking stupid. And like being the anarchist that he ends up being, um, you know, seeing that and how people empower aren't able to shift with demographics and just get angrier. And he's like, well, that's dumb. So I could even see him embracing that more. And, and, you know, making those choices.

Yeah. So, yeah. And so, you know, while we're talking about, you know, the wind rush generation and its impact on music, my next heading is rock and roll youth subcultures and the new waves. So rock and roll arrived in the UK thanks largely to US servicemen bringing records over with them and American movies. The Teddy and later the mod subcultures were closely associated with rock music. And predictably, the music and the subcultures elicited moral panic from older generations, just like they did here. Like you do. People freaking out about greasers. Um, what, what I find interesting though is we've, we've talked before about how, you know,

a very significant although sub-rosa part of the panic in the United States was racism. It was, oh my god, white kids are dancing to this, to this black music, right? Right. This, you know, I've got Alan Fried Concerts led to police riots where they beat the shit out of children in the 50s. Yeah. Because they played a country music and then soul music right after it. Yeah. And the police beat the kids, calling them cocksuckers and the parents were like, good. This is good. Yeah. Yeah, we need to make sure they don't, yeah, they need to be punished for that. They need to know that's not acceptable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because you know, the 50s were the idealized perfect decade in our society, right? Yeah.

What a hard one. It was great. Yeah, Cheamy. Fucking. Fucking Christmas. So the thing is, like, there's unions, there's really strong unions. I know. I know they're not based on racism. Yeah. Yeah. And yet, yeah. And yet so much other stuff is like, we can, we can point it to one or two really, really great things that we're like, yes, that's actually right. And everything else is the bullshit. Right. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. A full consensus. No, McCarthy. I'm going to goddamn it. Yeah. So what was what's what's weird about the moral panic in the UK to me as an American observer is that we can look at the moral panic that happened around rock and roll here in the States. And it's like obviously like so many other things.

Like if there's anything screwed up in American history, we can look at it and go well. Our original set in this country is racism. So like there you are. Right. In the UK, this music was being brought over in the form of Elvis. Like it was Elvis in the big bopper by the time it got to the UK. It wasn't black musicians. It was white people. It was white people. It was a G. I was white people. He was a black music. And total sidebar, but you say that,

and I immediately think of without me by Eminem, and him being so straight up honest about, you know, oh, yeah, yeah. 40 million other white rappers emerge. There's a bridge. Yeah. Best thing since Elvus, the last thing since Elvis, to use black music. So selfishly, to use selfishly, myself, self wealthy. Like, and then I think immediately of public enemy, Elvis was a king to most, but he never meant shit to me. Yeah.

Well, you know, and then they go on about how he was a liar and a big racist. Oh, yeah, everything. Yeah, because I mean, he was. Oh, yeah. I mean, he wanted to be a drug czar for Nixon because he was mad at the Beatles using pot. Like what he did for music was phenomenal. Yeah. But his personal politics were like the opposite of the effect that his music had. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. And he showed up wanting to be a drug czar for Nixon while he was blasted out of his mind on on booze

and benzos. But those were prescribed. So it's okay. And he had a big no, he had a big thing about that. Like it's okay if it's prescribed. I know. Yeah. And we sent him to the UK. So yeah, well, I mean, I mean, in Italy, when we sent him to the him the UK was before the the Benzo issue. Right. Um, I mean, we said it was Germany. Yeah. Well, we exposed this old music. Oh, okay. So, the music made, yeah, yeah. Yeah, as music showed up in the UK, um, him and the back, and the big popper were, were,

how that music showed up in, in, in the UK. And so like the racist context of the moral panic is at least more muted. It largely has a lot to do with, oh my god, these kids are just so loud and wacky. And kind of out of control. And they have, and just like here in the United States, the fear of teenagers is all of a sudden they have time and money that earlier generations hadn't. Did teenagers in England have money, though? Well, here's the thing. Compare it to their parents. Okay. They did. And the way that they're they had more trying to figure

out a way to phrase it, they had more cultural independence. And and because of the rapid changes in media, the kids who were becoming teenagers in the 50s and into the 60s had more access to a more rapidly shifting popular culture than their parents had. Yeah, I could see that. I mean, some of that is also how much more urban center, a lot of the places in England, because they were rebuilding. So they got to build with intention, whereas America was much more rural centric. And even though we hit that tipping point in 1900, you're still building it on top of a formerly rural society. So having cars was a very American thing.

You didn't need that in England. You didn't need that in most of the urban centers because they were like, we need to build better transport and we need to build urban centers back to bring businesses back. So kids would be 15 minutes from home anytime, but that also meant that you could care less about where they were. Yeah. And additionally, the UK had a real network that allowed four kids to go to the next town over or at the town beyond that a lot easier. Sure. And you know, get in trouble and pick fights.

Yeah. You know, or go to go to dance clubs and, you know, use amphetamines to dance literally all night. So I mean, you know, there, there are those things going on there. And if you compare and there's, there's also just the fact that comparing pre-war and postwar music, the rock and roll arriving in the UK from the States was loud, percussive, and aggressive. Sure. Sure. It was new. It was a dramatic departure from what had come before. It was very, very energetic.

It was going to say frenetic, even. Yeah. Yeah. And the youth cultures associated with it conflicted with one another. But all of them rejected upper class and older values in favor of self-expression. And we use this phrase specifically to talk about punk before, but kind of a do- yourself, identity formation. And like the teddies went on to get in a huge fight with fights with punks in the 70s because of their differing kind of outlooks on things. But

the teddies were actually the first recognized one of these subcultures. They showed up in the early 1950s and they earned their name because they wore clothes that were rooted in a revival of Edwardian fashions. So at the end of the war, there's going to be a whole bunch of young men coming back from the war and especially young officers who are coming back from the work and be coming back into civilian society, Savile Row tailors in London like the high high end of fashion people in Britain. Tried to push these Edwardian drape jackets, shawl collars, high-waisted trousers, and brocade waistcoats, as this is going to be the new thing. This is what you want to look like. And they tried to sell this to young officers coming home from the war, but young officers coming home from the war, we're looking at, okay, we'll know

in the States, it's a very different look. It's the gray flannel suit. It has those very, very clean mid-century kind of lines to it. It's all very sharply cut, you know, kind of sharp shoulders and all this kind of stuff. And that wound up being where the upper middle class and everybody else went. So all of these several retailers had all these clothes that they'd made. They're lying, lying, making them no money. And so they went and they then sent them out to other tailors around the country. They said, Hey, I have these clothes.

And they in turn sent these clothes out to other tailors in other parts of the country who cut the prices somewhat off of what they would have been. And then sold these clothes on installment plans to working class young men who for whom these were ostentatious kind of statements of, well, you know, we're all stuck in rationing and we have a list of going on but pay Look at the cut man. So this is the late 50s. This is yeah early 50s. Early 50s. Okay. Yeah. Yeah And so this in America you had I mean we have rationing here During the war and I'm just thinking of the Zoot suit riots of 43 hey for our sailors beat the shit out of people Specifically beat the shit out of Chicanos and

Jewish kids and really yeah, I don't go back in and take care But they beat the shit out of them for for wearing too much wool essentially or Daining to be too American. And so yeah. And the thing is, the same kind of urge that drove the fashion of the Zoot suit, the whole hey, look at the flash,

you know, in a time of scarcity, look at what I have spent most of my money on in order to stand out and look cool, right? It's the same- Because it's the same kind of motivation here. And so these relatively cheap but ostentatious, dandy kind of clothes became the uniform of a mostly white working class youth subculture. Okay. Now, a little bit later, we see rockers show up on the scene. They're also referred to as ton boys. And that's because of the British phrase doing a ton was a slang term for going a hundred miles an hour on a motorcycle. It would have the power to pull 2,000 pounds. I don't know. It's it's it's it's somehow, you know, in the same vein as carcass rhyming slang. It's just the way they referred to like, no, I had a hundred on the

way here. Yeah, man, I did it. I did a ton, right? Okay. So ton boys. Yeah, ton boys, they gravitated gravitated toward motorcycle culture, dressing in the letters and forming motorcycle clubs. Now, before the war, it's interesting to note, motorcycling had carried an aura of glamour. If you were a motorcycleist, there was this sense that you were this dashing figure sense that you were this, you know, dashing figure. It's almost because mechanized version of a gentry horseman. Kind of. Yes.

Because there was a class element and an economic element involved in being able to afford a motorbike. Right. After the war, motorcycles became less expensive and they became a poor men's transportation. And so the cachet associated with it went away. And so the connotations immediately became much more low class. And of course, the moment anything becomes more low class, it also becomes more dangerous and more unpredictable

and scarier, right? Right, right. Okay. And then next, and last of the subcultures, I'm gonna talk about here, we have the mods. The mods, generally speaking, tended to come from Tony or backgrounds. They weren't upper class, but their parents were more middle class. They weren't factory worker working class. And mods tended toward modern jazz and later towards scaw, which is interesting because they're overlap with

skinheads with whom they got into fights. As I recall from our explaining punk episode, Jason B, while that was true, you could often find skinheads going to places, oh, and also with Keith Lowell-Jensen, author and punching Nazis, where skinheads would go to places where the mod gals were, because they were the cutest. And that's what also would bring them into conflict. Yes. Yeah. And if you want to think about the aesthetic of mod culture, a lot of the iconography, a lot of the imagery that we have of the swing in 60s baby, yeah.

In London is taken straight out of mod culture. It's the kind of mob top looking haircuts. It's the very jackets. Yeah, quarterly or tartan jackets, turtlenecks, wetters, you know, those kind of clean lines, bright colors, you know, all of that kind of stuff. Oh, and Vespas scooters of all kinds. kind of stuff. Oh, and Vespas scooters of all kinds scooters were a huge thing. Is this why we see that pop up in Kenobi? Is that an homage to this? Yeah. Well, the the modders in in was it Kenobi or was it in Book of Bobefett? I'm trying to remember if they showed up in Kenobi was Book of Bobefett. Oh, it was, okay. The modders, the modders or mods in Book of Boba Fett

are, yes, a hundred percent. Right. Like stolen. Yes, straight up. Like, no, I'm gonna take this, I'm gonna make it Star Wars. And knowing what I knew about the historical subculture, I looked at that in the show and I was like,

I don't know how I feel about this. Like on the one hand, this is awesome. On the other, I feel like it's kind of lazy. I don't know. Well, there was also a biker gang of Niktot in that one too. Remember who were picking on Cammy and Fixer. Yep. So, you know, very much blending martial Westerns with Biker gang. So the reason I thought it was Kenobi by the way is because Ion McGregor's daughter plays one of the modders. Uh-huh. Yeah.

So, okay. So anyway. So, yeah, Vespas. Yeah. Okay. So anyway, that's yeah, yeah, Vespas. Yeah. And so we have, this is this is all happening in the 50s into the 60s. This is the youth culture that Morkock would have been a part of. Morkock is a musician. In addition to being an author, he has been a part of a couple of bands. He has written music for a couple of prog rock bands, written lyrics at least for a couple of prog rock bands. So like his whole ethos is influenced by rock and roll and by this this energy and this vitality of this youth culture that he was in whether he was a moderate rocker or what I don't know. I wasn't able to get any

definitive answers about that, but you know, this was the environment he was in. Sure. And so the energy and the vitality of all of these subcultures had a massive influence on music, cinema, literature, like all, all of the various kinds of art that was being created at the time. And this is where we get to the new wave, which I've discussed before, particularly when we talked about New Android's Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick. And now I realize that both of the new wave authors I've done significant work on have

Fality jokes built right in for you. Again, you're welcome. Yeah, no, it's good. But for anybody who hasn't listened to those episodes yet, the new wave was a movement in science fiction that ran concurrently with the new wave in cinema, particularly French cinema and other art forms. It is notable for centering psychological and social elements. A character and complexity of character was much more important in new wave stuff than it had been previously. Right. The ethos of all of it was deliberately

contrary to the pulp conventions of earlier science fiction. Of the whizz bang. Yeah, yeah, extra galactic distances traveled and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's this, this is also tied in very much with the death of the pulps themselves and a shift to two paperback book formats. Right. Um, so you're not, you're not just selling, you know, a cheap, you know, uh, a yellow, yellow paper magazine. Right. Yeah. you know, a yellow, yellow paper magazine. Right. Anymore, you're selling a skinny novel.

Well, so the length and the complexity has to go up. Yeah. And then with that. And the analysis of familial relations within these things also goes way up. Like, you don't have people doing things for cause anymore. Now, like with Philip K. Dick stuff, they're doing it for for skin. Yeah, that was a well erected joke. Yeah, yeah, don't be so stiff. I don't mean to be so hard on you. Good day, sir. I need you to stop with all these emissions, please.

So I'm being extra e-jocular, really. Nice. Yeah, I hate you. So the topics and themes of these works were tied to psychedelia, the Vietnam War, racial politics, racism, civil rights movements. If there's a space empire in a new wave sci-fi book, it's going to be deconstructed or it's going to be portrayed with a lot of cynicism. with a lot of cynicism. Right. Dune is a really good example of this. Dune is a hundred percent of new way of book. It is a problematic step forward to paraphrase Dr. Cruz. But it is, like, it's an intergalactic empire, and we see all of the dirty doings behind the scenes and the moral vagueness of it.

Style was a lot more complex and the language was much more literary and self-aware. Which makes sense because we're talking about somebody who's coming from a generation where their identity is very much more self-aware constructed. Yes. Whereas previous generations, just fucking, we're trying to exist here, man. And things just happen organically. Whereas this is, we're declaring ourselves on some levels. We are, yes, things have been handed to us or passed down to us or or shoveled off to us, but also we are deciding on some levels, like we're not just going with the momentum of the past.

So yeah, no precisely. And so to the extent that fantasy has historically been lumped together with its sibling science fiction, the new wave is an important milestone for both genres. Okay. That makes sense. And so Morcox importance as a figure within the new wave is really very hard to overstate. And I think this is going to be a good place for me to pause. Sure. And we can we can develop this further in our next episode. But stopping here at this point

in history and with this kind of background picture, having been painted for the forces that formed the man, what's your takeaway? What are you thinking? I'm very curious. And like you said, a lot of the research that you turned up came up dry. I'm very curious what his thoughts on the youth culture were and how that reflects in his work because he's again part of a generation that I'm not going to say was neglected by their parents, but there does seem to be an exhaustion amongst his parents' generation having just gone through the blitz. Yeah. And, and a willingness to trust the kids to, they can't get in too much trouble after all they're alive and we're happy about it.

Like, there does seem to be a, a willingness to let them kind of find their own feet. And so when you talk about his anarchism, when you talk about how distrustful of authority he is, all of that makes a lot of sense. I want to know how conscious he was of it. That's what I'm, I'm intent to curious about. Because of that quote that you started worth early on where he talked about morality of it. You know, and his, and that's 2002 where that quote was from. So he's an old man by this point. He's done his stuff. And I'm very curious as to how that interacts with,

because I keep thinking about other episodes we've done, how that interacts with the absurdism that we saw in the continent, waiting for Godot, the Samuel Beckett stuff, the sense of annihilation and nihilism that's entirely likely and which to me is like kind of fuck it, we're going to make our own meaning then, that makes sense for a group of kids to do. I would love to see what he thought about that going into it. Yeah, no, I wish I had been able to find more about that. But, you know, and there has been writing done on him, he's written a memoir and there's

been epigraphs written where people have interviewed him and all that kind of stuff, but I don't know. I was not able to find anything in the in the time I had for the research I was doing to go into detail about that. And I don't know how much of that was what he got asked about in the in the epigrams or if it was all like literary stuff. Yeah. Otherwise, what are you reading right now? So, recommend. Yeah, I'm actually going to recommend a movie tonight, just because I'm between books or I'm actually deeply

enmeshed in three, all of which I've recommended already. But I'm going to recommend that you go and find Iron Monkey. Okay. The early 2000s, it was during a time where Quentin Tarantino was platforming a lot of movies from the old Golden Harvest Vault it felt like. Okay, yeah. It was finding a lot of Wuzya that he had a platform and Iron Monkey was one of them.

And it has a very young Donnie Yen in it, playing the father of Wang Fei Hong. So it's just kind of... Yeah, it's a fun movie. It's only like 80 minutes long, too. Like it's... Oh, we're done. Okay. Short on plot. Yeah. But it's good. It's good. Okay like it's, oh, I'm sure it on plot. I'll buy it, but it's good. It's okay. Cool. Yeah. What about you?

You mentioned Donnie and you have my interest. I'm going to very strongly recommend that everybody go out and find a copy of the dreaming city, which is the first novelette in which Michael Morkawks signature character, who I haven't even gotten around to mentioning yet, but Elric appears for the first time in the Dreaming City. And I'm going to people don't know this. Ella Rick is Spanish for the Richard. Yes. So speaking of more. The Richard.

Yeah. Of course. Of course. So, but it's actually been adapted into a graphic novel. Marvel comics. So if you can, if you can find that. I'm not a huge fan of Marvel's visual adaptation. Okay. Love Elric. Dark Horse comics did a whole whole series of graphic novels in kind of

the same way that they did a whole series of graphic novels about Conan. Okay. And the artists who were involved in the Dark Horse Adaptations I prefer. But that's strictly a preference. The Marvel adaptation is a strong adaptation of the Ring City. So, you know, go ahead and take it. Just so we know. ELRIC. We know ELRIC. Okay. It does not just so you know, it does not show up on the Marvel ultimate app.

So that doesn't entirely surprise me because it's a bit niche. Yeah, but so anyway, I very highly recommend that because Elric is the character through whom Workhawk has influenced the genre as immensely as he has. So if you take a look at that story, you'll be that's kind of kind of homework for where we're going in the next episode. I like it. I like it. Cool. Do you want to be found anywhere? I do not want to be found. I am a shadow in the warp.

How about you? Yeah, actually. Now is about the time that you want to start marking your calendars, folks. By the time this drops, you'll be within a shouting distance of March 1st. March 1st is the triumphant return of capital punishment to the greater Sacramento area. We will be at the comedy spot our new home on March 1st and we are the second show of the night. I believe that starts either 8 30 or 9. or 830 or at nine. But go check out the comedy spot, Google search, the comedy spot Sacramento, it'll take it first hit and then look for upcoming shows

and you should probably find it there. But market calendars from March 1st and get out there and spin that wheel. So. All right. And we're gonna find this fine podcast. This fine podcast can be found on the Apple podcast app or on Spotify, wherever you've found us, you can also find us of course on our website. I almost forgot about

that completely. That's it. Wobble, Wobble, Wobble, Wobble.gear history time.com. Wherever you have found us, please take the time to hit the subscribe button and give us the five star review that you know, this is going to hurt to say Damien's phallic puns deserve. That wasn't so hard. You know, and on the website, of course, you can go back and go through our entire back catalog, that of course you can go back and go through our entire back catalog, find whatever topics catch your interest. And there's plenty of stuff we've touched on. And if you have any suggestions right now, I don't have an avenue for you to provide those to us, but we'll figure that out here soon. So yeah.

Cool. Well, cool. Thank you very much for a geek history of time. I'm Damien Harmony and I'm Ed Blaylock. And until next time, keep rolling 20 pages.