There's a lot of your work
that says quite a lot of interesting things about the 20th century.
Certainly the first thing that sprung to mind was From Hell,
was an idea in From Hell, which was a big inspiration in my KLF book,
but the idea was that the act of Jack the Ripper, um,
was what gave birth to the 20th century. I was just curious where that idea came from.
Well, that was my conceit that resolved a lot of the material
that had emerged during my research into From Hell.
Um ... when I was just looking into the 1880s,
I noticed all of these things that had happened,
that I think in 1882, Michelson and Morley actually performed the experiments
which were meant to iron out a couple of last wrinkles in the theory of the aether,
but ended up completely disproving that aether existed,
which was a kind of result, but not the one that they were looking for.
You'd got France going into Indochina.
You had got the beginnings of the modern art movement with Walter Sickert.
You'd got some of the first kind of modern realist writings
with people like Emile Zola.
You'd got a surprising amount of focusing upon prostitutes in literature and the arts.
And all of these things, which had gone on to really colour and shape the 20th century,
and then in 1888, these senseless, violent murders.
It just seemed to me that symbolically, I could kind of
position the Jack the Ripper murders as the birth throes of the 20th century,
with Jack the Ripper as a kind of really ghastly midwife.
[chuckles] Yeah, and there's the whole tabloid sort of thing growing up around it
and that sort of violent sort of stew, so it sort of ...
What struck me about reading Providence,
even though it's not so overtly about the 20th century,
is the Lovecraftian world view probably sums up that time
better even than my book or anything deliberately about the 20th century.
Do you see it as a ... ?
Well, yeah, I mean, I see ... Researching Providence was quite an eye-opener,
and it changed my opinion of Lovecraft. Not of his stature as a writer --
in fact, I think that only continues to increase the more I think about it --
but more of an understanding of him in relation to his times.
The thing is, Lovecraft is generally positioned as an outsider,
probably because that was the name of one of his most famous stories,
so it's not much of a reach. But you actually look at Lovecraft,
he was homophobic. This at a time when gay men, principally gay men,
some gay women as well, but that was different,
were starting to emerge quite vocally and very visibly onto the streets of New York.
There was a huge gay subculture in the early 20th-century New York.
It wasn't just something that started after the Second World War.
And these were becoming more visible.
You'd got women; I mean, Lovecraft was certainly not a misogynist, but ...
he was perhaps somewhat awkward or conflicted in his relationships with women.
This was at a time when women were just about to get the vote.
There had been 20 years of the biggest influx of immigrants that America had ever seen,
up until 1910, 1920, um, and that had led to conservative fears
that American identity was going to be lost beneath a tidal wave of miscegenation,
inbreeding, sort of. All of these fears were exactly those of the white,
middle-class common man. I mean, the Russian revolution had just happened in 1917,
and in America there were all of these strikes, which at the time
looked like, oh, it's going to happen over here.
In fact, most people, when you talk about the Red Scare,
they think, oh, that's the 1950s, that's McCarthyism.
The Red Scare was 1919, and in some ways Lovecraft became a perfect barometer
because he was so sensitive, so unbearably sensitive,
that all of the fears of the early 20th century,
including the fears of ... uhhh ... man's relegation in importance,
given what we were starting to understand about the cosmos.
Lovecraft was unlike other people of his day. He actually understood that stuff.
He was very quick.
He didn't like Einstein, but he was very quick to assimilate Einstein's ideas.
He didn't like quantum theory, but he almost understood it.
Yeah, this was it. He, in some ways his stories represented the kind of landscape
of fear, the territory of fear, for the 20th century as a whole.
So he didn't like the modernists at all, in terms of writing and things like that.
But he was a closet modernist himself. I mean, yeah, he hated Gertrude Stein,
T.S. Eliot, James Joyce. He wrote a brilliantly funny,
and actually very well-written parody of The Wasteland,
called Waste Paper.
But, you actually look at Lovecraft's writing,
and much as he's decrying all of the modernists,
and much as he's bigging up his favourite 18th-century authors,
people like Pope, um, actually Lovecraft is a modernist.
He's using stream of consciousness techniques,
he is using glossolalia more impenetrable than anything in Finnegan's Wake,
he is using techniques of deliberately alienating the reader or confusing the reader.
His descriptions tend to be along the lines of,
"Here's three things that Cthulhu doesn't look like."
Or he would describe the colour out of space as only a colour by analogy,
so what, is it a sound, is it a rough texture, or a smell? What?
These are deliberate kind of techniques. They're not flaws.
They are techniques of alienating the reader,
of putting the reader into an uncanny space,
where language is no longer capable of describing the experience.
Yeah, and that sort of -- for horror, it was, it was ...
all the Gothic horror had sort of gone and it was just the sort of modern horror.
Yeah, well that's important because all horror, or most horror up 'til Lovecraft,
had all been predicated upon the Gothic tradition,
which is a tradition where you have an enormous vertical weight in time
that is bearing down upon a fragile present.
A history of dark things in the past that are leading up to
some terrifying denouement in the present day.
With Lovecraft, yes, there is an awful lot of talking about Rimmer,
antiquity and the past.
But with Lovecraft I think that it's a much more present horror of the future.
He's talking about that time when man will be able to organise all of his knowledge
and when that time comes, the only question is
whether we will embrace this new illuminating light,
or whether we will flee from it into the reassuring shadows of a new Dark Age,
which is very prescient, given, say, current fundamentalism,
which is a direct -- a response to too much knowledge, too much information.
Let's take it all back to something that we're sure of,
that God created the world in six days.
Yeah. In that way Lovecraft was sort of ...
yeah, he was really exploring all of the -- he was a very --
he is still a very contemporary writer.
I think that if you wanted to do as Michael Moorcock did, in the '60s,
Michael Moorcock was mainly interested in modernism.
He noticed that the science fiction genre was laying around with its wheels up,
and that nobody was doing much with it apart from kind of cowboys in space,
so he thought, "Why don't we hijack this,
"and make science fiction a vehicle for modernism?"
And then, yeah, J. G. Ballard, all the rest.
I think you could do the same thing with Lovecraft, alone amongst horror writers.
I think that Lovecraft's preoccupations were so forward-looking that --
and his writing techniques were so unusual -- that yeah, you could use Lovecraft
as the starting point for a new kind of modernist horror, if you will.
That sense of linking the 20th century to this sort of impending horror, um,
reminds me a bit of Century, or League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol. 3,
the Century one, which for my mind is probably the bleakest of all the Leagues
sort of thing. It's got that sense that the creative imagination withers away
during the 20th century. Is that what you were aiming for?
Yes, it was. I got quite a bit of criticism for that.
I know that people were saying, after reading the third book, they said
that it was my equivalent of saying, "It were all fields 'round here once."
Which it wasn't. That wasn't what I was saying.
But what I was saying was that I don't think it was unfair to choose
The Beggar's Opera as representing a big, important cultural event of 1910.
I don't think it was unfair choosing Donald Cammell's Performance
as representing a big, important cultural event in 1969.
And I don't think it was unfair choosing J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter
as representing a big cultural event from the early 21st century.
I would say that if you were to plot those things on a graph,
the line isn't going up. [JH, laughing] Yes.
I think that it's a fair comment
that our approach to culture
in the mainstream has degenerated.
That the values that people used to put into a work of art,
those have been eroded.
And, yeah. I was trying to express that in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
because the whole of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,
it's about this massive planet of fiction that has been a kind of a counterpart
to our own world for as long as we've had fiction.
That we've made up this world that, it's the world we want,
the exciting world where exciting things happen and meaningful things happen,
and if you look at those two worlds, there's interesting points of comparison,
that they have similar events that shaped them,
but slightly different, and they worked out slightly differently.
So in Century it was using The League to look at the 20th century
from the point of view of 20th-century culture,
and to draw what conclusions seemed accurate.
I wasn't saying that all culture in the late 20th century was rubbish.
I wasn't saying that culture was doomed.
I was saying that mainstream culture was becoming repetitive,
was not having original ideas,
would no longer be capable of coming up with a Performance,
let alone a Threepenny Opera.
Yeah, it's, I mean, what struck me when I was doing my 20th-century book
was especially all the guys who took us into space, took us to the moon --
Sergei Korolev, Wernher von Braun -- the importance of Jules Verne to them.
And then that culture of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and things like that.
And I was thinking about that when I was watching -- d'you know, have you seen, um,
Prometheus, the, uh ... [AM] I haven't.
It's really grim. Basically they realize humanity's been, uh,
built by aliens, so they go off to find these aliens,
and they finally find the aliens to say, "Oh, godlike thing, why did you create us?"
And the alien goes, "Oh, are these things, these beings still around?"
and just starts like punching them in the face to sort of kill them.
And it's about as bleak an idea as you can imagine,
and I just kind of wonder if Wernher von Braun and those guys
were growing up with that level of science fiction,
whether they'd have been quite so keen to go for the moon and push us forward.
Well, I mean, I think that science fiction -- it's interesting what --
the way that science fiction was handled in the 20th century.
I mean, science fiction, all right, there's a lot of precursors for it,
but a non-controversial starting point would probably be Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
[JH] Yeah.
And then you'd move on to people like Wells and Verne,
about a century later.
Now, all of those are actually kind of grim warning visions of the potential future.
They are potentially alarmist about the nature of technology and what it will mean.
With Mary Shelley, she was reacting to the Industrial Revolution,
which was actually starting up around her while she was writing Frankenstein
in 1814 or whatever it was.
Wells, he is, all of his science fiction books are for the most part dystopias.
Time Machine, with its view of the class system of Wells' day,
even more stratified, literally, so that you've got working-class cannibals
living underground and feeding upon these dopey, drippy middle-class
sort of food animals, basically. [JH] It's the austerity story.
[AM] Yes, exactly. And Jules Verne. Now, obviously Jules Verne
is getting much more of a kick out of his big machines, but he always says,
"And imagine if these machines were to fall into the hands of a madman!
"Like Captain Nemo, who I secretly admire." But at least it is a warning.
1910, 1915, America discovers science fiction in the form of Tom Swift.
And it is a different thing altogether.
It is not about giving dire warnings for the future.
It is about saying, "Look how great America's going to be in the future."
It's almost, I suspect ... The tendency, in older nations,
when we want to big ourselves up, is to reach back to the past,
to something imaginary in the past, like King Arthur or something like that.
America hasn't got that amount of history to deal with,
so in some ways what America needs is science fiction.
When we're trying to say, "Look at what we were,"
then America more or less has to say, "Look at what we will be."
And so their science fiction from the 1920s, with the boom of the pulp magazines,
it was all of this bright, optimistic new frontier stuff,
where it was going to be Cowboys and Indians all over again,
only it was going to be Earthmen and Neptunians.
But you could just go through the whole of the tropes of the Western genre
and pioneer fiction, but in space. And it became this ... in my opinion,
that was probably one of the worst things to ever happen to science fiction.
It took until the late 1940s, after Hiroshima,
for these new voices that had got a radical sense of doubt
to start to creep back into science fiction, and that gave a brilliant era,
probably the best era, of science fiction. From, say, late '40s to the mid-'70s,
when George Lucas brought out Star Wars,
a piece of fundamentalist science fiction if ever there was one,
and turned the clocks back to the science fiction ideas of 50 years before.
Now we're in the position -- that whole idea between science fiction and the real world
interacting with each other -- now we get things like Black Mirror, with the pig,
and then, on Monday, that's no longer science fiction, it's the, uh ...
whether this is the sort of level of leeway between fiction and nonfiction
that we wanted at the end of this period.
Well, I mean, I have said in the past that I believe that the membrane
between fiction and fact is porous and semi-permeable,
and I have become used to my most ridiculous ideas,
whether that be coming up with V for Vendetta
and then suddenly seeing a load of Guy Fawkes-masked anarchists
invading the world stage -- which is a good thing --
or having come up with the idea related to my film project, Jimmy's End,
of having a sinister clown manifesting in various locations around Northampton,
and returning from holiday and finding that a sinister clown had manifested
in Northampton, at the end of my street, about a hundred yards from my front door.
You start to get the impression that, yes, sometimes things can percolate through
from the realm of ideas into the realm of actuality.
I would say to Charlie Brooker that it's his own fault.
That, sort of, he shouldn't have written about British prime ministers
in an unholy relationship with a pig if he didn't want this to happen.
Y'know? So ... happy now?
This is assuming, of course, that it's not true,
which -- I like to think it probably isn't true, and that Lord Ashcroft
is enough of a shit to have done that,
but part of me just sort of, it fits a bit too well,
it just feels a bit too much like a real occult initiation sort of ceremony.
I remember somebody saying --
this might have been someone like Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo --
saying about the idea of Donny and Marie Osmond being married,
and he was saying, "Yeah, I know that that's not really true,
"but in my heart it's true." And I think that that is the way I feel
about the revelations about David Cameron, that, we all know that in his secret soul,
David Cameron is exactly the man who would do something like that.
If he has not done it literally, he has certainly done it metaphorically.
So, yeah. I say, without a shred of evidence,
that I am going to believe that for the rest of my life.
Lovely, thanks very much, Alan. [AM] You're very welcome.
We'll go forward to the 21st century
with that as the start of our [unclear] of imagination. Thank you.