Back in 2009 I wrote about how I had started to play the so-called Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, 'World of Warcraft'. My early views of the hazards of playing the game were posted back in July 2009: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/07/online-behaviour-world-of-warcraft.html I am still playing it, probably even more because with me being long-term unemployed, losing my house and having no clear idea of where I am going to end up, escapism is vital. During the Depression of the 1930s and the mass unemployment of the 1980s, consumption of alcohol and tobacco increased and funerals became more elaborate (if you have had a grim life people feel they need to give you a good send off, just witness any funeral in Mile End or Poplar in East London). People seek escape and I am not exempt from that.
Of course, computer games of any kind have the danger of becoming addictive and you finding the hours passing by quickly. Rather than doing the housework or the shopping, instead you keep playing even into the early hours of the morning. With a game like 'World of Warcraft' in which there is not just a single character progressing down a chain of missions, but you can go and produce things like weapons or clothing and market them or go on quests for rewards or duel with other players or take part in the regular seasonal events, such as around the Solstice or Valentine's Day, there is even more to keep you engaged. You can have up to 50 different characters so even if you tire of running around as a troll hunter you can log on and be a werewolf druid in a different location. To stop players tiring of the settings and quests, periodically those running the game, a US company called Blizzard, recreate their world. In December 2010 they launched 'Cataclysm' which saw regions of their world flooded, some split apart by earthquakes or volcanoes and new areas appear from the sea; new races were introduced and players could now rise up to level 85 rather than 80. There were numerous new missions and even new skills that players could train in. The game is always evolving and sometimes this is for gameplay reasons (such as no longer needing to buy ammunition for bows and guns or putting more mail boxes in certain cities) and sometimes to develop new storylines. In such a fantasy continent there has to be lots of drama, invasions and betrayals.
This is all great. Though I do not always agree with the changes made, and smaller updates and alterations come between the big relaunches like Cataclysm, it certainly keeps my interest which is why I am still playing it 20 months after I started. The key problem for me and what makes me keep thinking I should turn away from the whole thing, is the people. Of course, many of them are teenagers, you expect that with any computer-based game. However, there are also older people with partners and children and work to go to. Certain 'guilds' only permit people over 18 to participate in their group. The range of nationalities is diverse. There are different servers for the main language groups of Europe (and others for China and many for the USA), so being located in the UK I do not mix with French or German or Italian speakers. However, the British server does have players from many minor states across Europe especially the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark, but also Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece. I quite enjoy playing with people from such diverse backgrounds. Though English is the language for the server once in a while people go off into Dutch or Danish and some guilds intentionally recruit people of a specific nationality. Of course, in this age of semi-literacy among English speakers, a lot of the online discussion is in fact in a hybrid of text speak and simply bad spelling. 'LFG' - Looking for Group, 'JC' - Jewel crafter; one of the professions you can study and the whole range of smilies; 'OMFG' for 'Oh My Fucking God' seems unnecessarily hyperbolic in its anger/condemnation. However, new terms develop simply because so few people seem to be able to spell, 'Rogue' (a character class) is always rendered as 'Rouge' and now 'give' has been replaced when it is a demand by 'geif' which seems to be turning into some form of German. Again, being a man in his forties, I recognise that with the English language changing far more sharply between my generation and the one that is following than between my generation and that of my parents or even my grandparents, I am happy to accept that when online I need to use a different language. I can type far faster than the bulk of the gamers, so accept the need for abbreviations.
What is more of a challenge is not really how discussion is had but what is said and beyond that, the behaviour of the people it betrays. Someone said that the 'World of Warcraft' was like a Gold Rush town in California of the 1840s. This is unsurprising, people are doing missions and fighting monsters to win magic items and gain gold. With such funds they become better fighters or magic users and get access to higher level areas and so on. This is the basic dynamics of numerous fantasy fighting computer games. The problem is that many of the people gamers are interacting with are not computer generated they are people with feelings. In the game two warriors with the same equipment will be equally matched and in combat it comes down to luck and which combination of buttons you press. A well-equipped person playing for 3 months could beat someone who has been playing the game for 5 years, though the latter generally pretends his/her knowledge somehow makes them stronger. In fact people who have that attitude often lose because they have no flexibility in their thinking. So, how do you show you are 'better' than the derided 'newbies' or 'noobs' as it is typically abbreviated to?
Status is clearly important. People aim to reach that level 85. However, this can take weeks and months and while your character is rising through the ranks, how do you show you are better than the others around you? It is by making divisions. In many ways whilst 'World of Warcraft' is like California of the 1840s it is also like London society of the 1840s, snobbery is rife. People put out a call to get a group of assorted characters together in order to attack a castle or run through some caves, fighting monsters. Now, of course, the opponents are of differing levels depending on the location and so a level 10 warrior would die quickly if fighting level 20 dragons. However, the person soliciting recruits does not stop there in separating out the volunteers, s/he insists that they have equipment of a certain rating, their 'gear score' has to be so high or they are 'kicked' from the group. They are commanded to go to a location for inspection, i.e. a player looks at all the equipment the character has. Many players simply preen around the centres of the big cities showing off what they have like so many peacocks or prostitutes. Those volunteering rather than preening are grilled about their 'dps', from damage per second, how much damage their weapons or spells can inflict. If it falls below some arbitrarily set figure then the person is refused. Now that level 85 is the peak, recruitment advertisements in the game often say 'level 85s only' even when going off to a level 70 dungeon. At level 83 I asked if I could join in as my damage and spells were only a little lower than the level 85 set and, of course, I was refused.
Once you have got through the equipment inspection, you have to have your 'achievements' checked. This is the list of successful missions and quests that you have already completed. If you have not been felt to have achieved enough already, again you are refused. This is a chicken-and-egg situation, because people often volunteer so that they can win an achievement, and yet because they do not have it, they are refused. A lot of this reflects the lack of maturity of thinking on the part of the recruiters, no matter what age they actually are. Even if you recruit a group yourself you are quite likely to find a member leaving mid-way through some battle because s/he feels the rest of the group is not up to scratch. Even more criteria are piled on to segregate and demean other players. One is speed. There are no benefits for charging through a castle quickly. In fact you often find if you do this then some monsters appear out of a room behind you that you have rushed by and start attacking you from behind. However, warriors, paladins, death knights, the physical attack people, are very impatient and charge on. If they upset a whole room of monsters and die due to rushing through it, then, of course, they blame everyone else for being pathetic. These people should be compelled to play games such as the paper-based 'Dungeons and Dragons' role-playing game and know that to succeed in such fantasy settings bravado has to be tempered with caution and forward planning.
This brings us to 'tactics'. 'Must know tactics' is another criteria often set for volunteers to groups. This does not mean how best to use your character's particular weapons or spells, but precisely where to stand in a castle room when a specific monster attacks. Again, of course, if you have never done that mission before then how are you supposed to know that. If you are even a little wrong then you get a long lecture about how wrong and stupid you are. In addition, everyone thinks their tactics are the only feasible ones and any alternatives are derided. This is often how arguments start out in groups. I have done the same missions with differing groups all insisting that their tactics are the only correct ones and if you do anything different then you are kicked out. There is a sense of a single truth. It is not surprising that numerous wiki pages and websites have been created to provide players with very precise details about what to buy and where to stand in a particular room of a particular castle or cave. Like most computer game players I use walkthroughs and other resources that are not part of the game. However, because specific knowledge is used to denigrate other players, you end up having to read as much as if you were doing an Open University course, just so you do not 'blunder' when you go on a mission. You ask for help in the game and are told you must be an idiot for even asking, because, of course, to any intelligent person, the answer is obvious or are told to go off and open up numerous webpages outside the system. The reason for this is supposed superior knowledge is the only real way that one player can make themselves seem superior to another.
Pride in your achievements is a fair trait. However, the sense that anything you have achieved or know (however wrongly in fact that information might be) should be constantly used to put down others as vocally as it is in the game is unnecessarily nasty, but seems to be a constant behaviour in the game. I suppose this is a reflection of our contemporary society, especially in the UK: you can only get on in life if you not only eliminate potential rivals but you humiliate them too.
If assistance is offered it is never in a constructive way, it is patronising. I might expect too much of the average 'World of Warcraft' player to know the difference. It is great to share knowledge, tell people about bargains in the auction house or how to get through a new mission or quest. However, that is never enough. The bulk of players who share information (and they in themselves are a small minority) want you to abase yourself before their greatness and acknowledge that you were stupid until they decided to pity you and shower you with their grace. Trying to find a specific trainer I asked for help and one player decided to advise me. Initially I was grateful. However, he felt he had to lead me through the city and if I said something which disagreed with how he saw the world he went 'WRONG' at me in the text. The one useful function is 'Ignore' which blocks communication from certain characters if you choose. Unfortunately it does not block it from specific players and I have had some switching from character to character, pursuing me across the continents of the game repeatedly telling me how wrong or stupid I am until I have blocked every character they can spring on me. Then they send me messages in the in-game postal system continuing their diatribe.
Interestingly, Blizzard tries to engineer the game so as to promote a better level of co-operation between the players. You can block swear words to eliminate the harshest abuse, interestingly 'Nazi' counts as a swearword but 'wanker' does not, probably due to the game originating in the USA. Racism does sometimes break through. Periodically people condemn non-English speakers struggling to phrase things correctly, which is laughable given how many errors they put in their own writing. However, it is mob rule and if the bulk of players spell 'rogue' as 'rouge' that is acceptable in a way errors from someone using English as their second or third language is not permitted. A lot of general public dialogue seems to be as if it was between a group of drunken football supporters watching a match in a pub. The rules can shift quickly, but always to their advantage in denigrating other players not deemed to be part of the mob.
The sense that it 'that's the way it is, you cannot question it' is all pervasive. I have seen that phrase or variations of it banded around. Once I saw a discussion about so-called 'twinking' when people with characters who have a lot of money send it to their lower level ones to raise them quickly through the levels without much effort (sounds familiar behaviour to anyone who lives or works in the UK). Someone questioned if this was the right way to behave and whether it was fair on other players. Rather than put forward a reasoned argument for continuing the practice, the response was, 'it happens, live with it' and the player was condemned even for questioning it. I know it is a game, but these basic assumptions are carried out into the real world and you do wonder if the regimes in Tunisia or Egypt had changed if the bulk of the population had had that attitude. Perhaps British complacency and pervasive self-righteousness is what makes us behave this way. It does not seem healthy in a game, let alone real life. The worst case was a discussion about Hitler. I have no idea why it came up in the game. Some realms of the game insist you only speak about in-game things others start debating the football match or the weather or Michael Jackson's death. What alarmed me was the view that 'well he sorted out the Jewish problem' which seemed accepted without question. I started pointing out that any 'Jewish problem' had simply been an invention of the Nazis anyway, and yet was being taken here as something that everyone knew and accepted. I was barred from the game for three days for participating in an off-topic political discussion, but I was proud to be for challenging lazy, dangerous, Fascist assumptions.
To earn money in the game many players auction off unwanted items through one of the auction houses. This is a bit like eBay fantasy style. When fighting monsters you are quite likely to pick up armour or weapons or food or even scraps of fur or rock that you have no use for. Someone else might just need that item to improve their armour or make something using a profession skill like blacksmithing or leatherworking. You are not supposed to make a loss but the prices many people set are ridiculous. I remember having a level 20 character, who was recovering tens of pieces of silver from his quests. I looked to buy a pair of boots from the auction house. The best pair for my level was a level 19 pair of boots, but the cost was 799 gold pieces. There are 10 copper pieces in 1 silver piece and 10 silver pieces in 1 gold piece. I would be unable to afford them until I was many levels higher and by then their strength and certainly any magic on them would be too feeble for the kind of monster I would then be fighting. Hyperinflation is a real problem in the game which makes it very discouraging when bringing on a new character. It is exacerbated by 'gold sellers' criminals who sell gold in the game for real pounds or euros. This allows some players to simply buy their characters everything they need rather than having to earn it the way most players do. The gold sellers put software into the sysem which creates 'mining robots' or 'collecting robots' which go round scooping up the raw materials in the game, faster than any players can and then they auction it to raise game gold to sell to players. Of course, this is illegal, but because status-hungry players indulge in it, it helps upset the balance of the game play.
Hyperinflation always generates excessive behaviour. A key problem is even if the collection 'bots are not around high level characters go into low level areas, able to move around on mounts far faster than anyone of the appropriate level can do, and mines or collects all the raw materials to then take them back to sell them at incredibly high prices leaving the poor low level characters with nothing to practice their skills working on or to make any money themselves. Very quickly you have an elite of very high level characters whether migrated from another realm or who have bought their standing, simply selling to each other at very high prices, leaving poor lower level characters without a high level character to supply them, struggling to advance. Guilds are supposed to help lower level characters advance, but as I consider below, this does not really work either.
Blizzard's steps mean that you need groups to run through 'instances' and 'raids' specific missions in castles or caves or wherever that gives good rewards. Generally you cannot do it alone. However, as seen above this actually promotes division rather than collaboration. They encourage 'guilds', collectives of players focused on one or two activities in the game. You get a guild 'tabard' showing the logo of the guild and access to a guild bank where items can easily be shared between players. With Cataclysm Blizzard added other features, cheaper repairs to armour and weapons, access to greater funds, specific items, available to guilds that were thriving and successful. The basic idea is that players help each other and more experienced players and higher level characters help lower-level characters. Of course, you can be very experienced and yet be starting a new character among the 50 you are permitted to have, though you still seem to be treated as if you are new to the game as a whole. The guild system does not really work. There are some decent guilds. The woman in my house is a member of one, but I have not been able to find one that is like that.
On any given server there are tens of versions of the world, each with a specific name, so that you do not get tens of thousands of people trying to move through the same area mining for ore or picking specific herbs. When a 'realm' has too many players, people are offered free 'migration' to a new less populated realm. This does mean you can have hundreds of people in the same 'place' who cannot see each other as they are on different versions. Nowadays, random groups can be assembled automatically from across realms on the same server and it can be interesting to talk to people who generally play on an alternative version of the world to the one you are on. Factors such as the cost of items sold by other players, how crowded certain locations get and even the tone of discussion in the realm can vary greatly.
The other element Blizzard introduced to guilds with Cataclysm was that they could attain levels by their members completing missions and other achievements. I think the idea was to encourage people to become guild members, but it has completely back-fired and has simply added a new aspect to snobbery. As in real history, large guilds that can offer their members lots of facilities prosper. There is the snobbery 'I am in a level 10 guild, oh, but you are only in a level 5 guild, you must be a poor player, no-one else clearly wants you'. As in our society exclusive clubs are yet another way to segregate players. They have strict entrance criteria and anyone who does not fit with their arbitrary rules or does not carry out their designate tasks in time or simply is no longer liked, is excluded. Some US companies take into consideration if prospective employees have run guilds on 'World of Warcraft', but from how most are run, the only kind of organisation such experience would really suit you for is working in the mafia.
Blizzard tries hard to encourage players not to behave in the cut-throat way so many do. The 'hints' when you log on often advise players to be polite when playing with others and encourage them not simply to open a trade with a player or try to duel with them before actually talking with them. However, walking through a city my character is quite liable to be repeatedly challenged or offered some trade with absolutely no dialogue. You can see why many of us become 'backwoodsmen' keeping our characters in the less populated areas of the world. Generally the whole feel from the players I encounter is that somehow conservative if not Nazi values have become the norm. A lot of discussion is misogynistic. I suppose you would expect this in a game about battling monsters, but there are female characters and female opponents. Yet, a female character is often dismissed, even though a level 10 female warrior is no weaker than a level 10 male warrior in the game. Of course, just because a character is female or male does not mean the player is too; yet that is the assumption so patronising of female characters is quickly translated into patronising of female players. Some of the races are very glamourous, especially the elves and their accentuated femininity for the females, with tight fitting clothes, large breasts, slender waists, long hair and often large earrings, does not help. However, saying this, troll and even orc females have a certain elegance but certainly a strength about them. When you come across male characters named things like 'Hymenripper' then you have a sense that misogynism is not really challenged.
How 'World of Warcraft' ruined my life was not because I spent so long playing it and neglected other hobbies such as writing fiction or swimming. What it has alarmingly shown me is that the norms of the next generation are focused on segregation of society by status. That status has to be maintained rigidly by codes and that those outside have to be regularly humiliated. The best the ordinary person can hope for is to give up their dignity and be told patronisingly how wrong they are and try to ape their 'betters' in the vain hope of being accepted. It is a society in which people grab all the resources they can and shut out those coming on after them out of the opportunity of advancing themselves unless they can pay. It is a society which is discriminatory to women who are assumed to be weak and interestingly that it is demeaning to accept assistance from a woman, no matter what your own gender. It is a society in which bad language is used to show your level of anger at the 'stupidity' of people who have views different to your own. It is a society in which you always believe you not have the correct answer but the only possible answer. It is a society in which things should not be challenged and to even dare to question them opens you up to attack. What I have seen in 'World of Warcraft' players is the very worst of British society distilled. The government with all its plans for a very stratified society with opportunities for the few and people all 'knowing their place' should look to 'World of Warcraft' players for their footsoldiers. These people have the perfect attitude to fill the ranks of the 'little Hitlers' that any authoritarian regime thrives on. 'World of Warcraft' ruined my life by not offering me the escape that I yearned for, but rather shoving the worst of everything I encounter in real life forcefully into my face every time I log on.
Sunday, 3 April 2011
Friday, 1 April 2011
Unfortunately Feeling Compelled To Be A 'Nimby'
For those unfamiliar with the term, 'nimby' comes from 'not in my back yard' referring to people complaining about developments in their area. Such an attitude has caused immense problems for the UK and is one reason why we have a shortage of prisons, drug rehabilitation centres, social housing, wind farms and even graveyards. UK residents despise change. They do not like 'others' coming into their area. This was noticeable in the new town, Milton Keynes, where I used to live. The town is laid out on a grid pattern and one-by-one over the past four decades these grids are filled in with new housing. The trouble is much of the housing is very middle class, fine for people who can afford it, but it has meant that shops like Tescos have to bus in lower-paid staff from Luton, 27 Km away as none of them can find affordable accommodation locally. The sensible solution seemed to be to build social housing in one of the grids close to the large shopping centre in the South-East of the town. This was too much for the residents of neighbouring grids who went and vandalised equipment on the building site in an attempt to stop social housing coming anywhere near their middle class enclaves. It is fascinating how such residents portray the potential newcomers as feckless, drug addicts, alcoholics, noisy and dirty. They do not connect them with the people who serve them their luxury delicatessen items in the supermarket or clean up when one of their offspring makes a mess. The main concern for the residents was that the value of their houses is sliding as a result of these social housing areas. There is no sense that if the supermarkets close for lack of staff then the price will fall anyway. In Milton Keynes the districts are divided by dual-carriageway roads on which most of, cars travel at 70 mph, which is as good a ghetto forming barrier as any.
Having seen such a narrowly focused 'nimby' response and utterly despairing over the virulent attacks on wind farms in the place of nuclear or coal-fired power stations, I am always careful not to fall into that trap myself. Yet, on a small scale, I find I have done and consequently feel like a hypocrite. My own consolation seems to be that I am not actually stopping progress like most nimbys, but that I am trying to reduce a quite clear contribution to crime in my street. I have moved the location of the computer in my house so that I now sit in a room facing out over the street. Dead opposite the window is a detached house built in the 1920s. It has been empty for over three weeks now. It was split into two flats, both rented out by a local social housing company. The residents moved out more than three weeks ago and a few days later all the windows were stripped from the house and the front door was left open. We had assumed that the windows would be replaced. However, as time has passed nothing as been done to the house, it has not even been boarded up. Of course, this offered too much temptation to drunken men coming back from the pub and twice over the weekend they decided to simply walk into the property and trash it.
Despite the house being vacated a lot of things had been left behind including a vacuum cleaner, a fridge and the cardboard tubes from the interior of carpets. These were distributed all over the street. Inside the vandals did a pretty good job of stripping the plaster and breaking up interior fittings. Naturally we rang the owners and they said they had no concern as the property is due to be demolished anyway to provide access to a new close that is going to be jammed in behind the current line of houses. What this is going to do to the already congested street I live on, though for not much longer, I have no idea. Of course, if cars went down it at the legal 30 mph, then it might be alright, but no-one seems capable of keeping their speed down that low or wait for people coming on to negotiate around the lines of parked cars down both sides of the road, leading to lots of incidents of shouting and horns hooting.
After the second occasion I telephoned the police on their non-emergency line. Being a low crime area two officers arrived as fast as they would have done to an emergency in many towns. The perpetrators had fled. Despite this nothing has been done to the house, it still remains full of debris (we pushed the stuff that had been thrown into the street back into its front garden). My concern is less with the damage to the value of the property, as we have already sold it, but the hazard such a derelict site makes. Are companies not obliged to board up empty houses? These days the average building site is surrounded by defensive fences and is usually covered in alarms, though I gather that is more to dissuade people from stealing the scaffolding than from discouraging people from trespassing. I know that development and letting companies are powerful in any town, their kind of people tend to fill councils the length of the country. However, I have been surprised that there is no legal requirement to make a derelict property secure especially when it is so close to inhabited properties. The house will be a wonderful refuge for rats and a source of bricks and other debris for vandalism elsewhere; the police officers expressed concern that cars parked within metres of the house would be damaged. My concern is that the property will be burnt down; perhaps that is what the company is hoping in order to save on demolition costs. Whilst it is detached house, one wall lies less than a metre from an inhabited house, ironically owned by the same letting company.
These circumstances have turned me into a reluctant nimby. I hoped the police would put pressure on the company, but days passed without change. I contacted the local forum which seems to be a one-man organisation for complaining about students. However, the forum's chair welcomed my complaint and it seems he has the ear of at least a few councillors. The matter has to be raised at committees and so I imagine I will be long gone and the house burnt to the ground before anything is done. I know that David Cameron's 'Big Society' is simply a sham to explain away cuts in local services, but it is bitter that, in fact, it is so apparent that at a local level residents have absolutely no control even over things that will be a focus of crime. Developers and property owners are, as they probably always have been, the true power in a town and it allows them to ignore complaints and to adopt an approach that costs them the least even to the extent on saving on buying some boards and nailing them to empty windowframes for a few weeks before they get round to knocking the house down. People complain that health and safety regulations are too obsessive, but it seems, that they can simply be ignored if that is done by those with money and influence. Many people opposed the building of the new houses, saying they could not be fitted in. I accepted that there was nothing we could do to stop the construction, but I do feel that in the meantime the derelict house should be made safe and not a draw for rats and vandals. However, clearly, even that attempt at nimbyism is a step too far too succeed.
Having seen such a narrowly focused 'nimby' response and utterly despairing over the virulent attacks on wind farms in the place of nuclear or coal-fired power stations, I am always careful not to fall into that trap myself. Yet, on a small scale, I find I have done and consequently feel like a hypocrite. My own consolation seems to be that I am not actually stopping progress like most nimbys, but that I am trying to reduce a quite clear contribution to crime in my street. I have moved the location of the computer in my house so that I now sit in a room facing out over the street. Dead opposite the window is a detached house built in the 1920s. It has been empty for over three weeks now. It was split into two flats, both rented out by a local social housing company. The residents moved out more than three weeks ago and a few days later all the windows were stripped from the house and the front door was left open. We had assumed that the windows would be replaced. However, as time has passed nothing as been done to the house, it has not even been boarded up. Of course, this offered too much temptation to drunken men coming back from the pub and twice over the weekend they decided to simply walk into the property and trash it.
Despite the house being vacated a lot of things had been left behind including a vacuum cleaner, a fridge and the cardboard tubes from the interior of carpets. These were distributed all over the street. Inside the vandals did a pretty good job of stripping the plaster and breaking up interior fittings. Naturally we rang the owners and they said they had no concern as the property is due to be demolished anyway to provide access to a new close that is going to be jammed in behind the current line of houses. What this is going to do to the already congested street I live on, though for not much longer, I have no idea. Of course, if cars went down it at the legal 30 mph, then it might be alright, but no-one seems capable of keeping their speed down that low or wait for people coming on to negotiate around the lines of parked cars down both sides of the road, leading to lots of incidents of shouting and horns hooting.
After the second occasion I telephoned the police on their non-emergency line. Being a low crime area two officers arrived as fast as they would have done to an emergency in many towns. The perpetrators had fled. Despite this nothing has been done to the house, it still remains full of debris (we pushed the stuff that had been thrown into the street back into its front garden). My concern is less with the damage to the value of the property, as we have already sold it, but the hazard such a derelict site makes. Are companies not obliged to board up empty houses? These days the average building site is surrounded by defensive fences and is usually covered in alarms, though I gather that is more to dissuade people from stealing the scaffolding than from discouraging people from trespassing. I know that development and letting companies are powerful in any town, their kind of people tend to fill councils the length of the country. However, I have been surprised that there is no legal requirement to make a derelict property secure especially when it is so close to inhabited properties. The house will be a wonderful refuge for rats and a source of bricks and other debris for vandalism elsewhere; the police officers expressed concern that cars parked within metres of the house would be damaged. My concern is that the property will be burnt down; perhaps that is what the company is hoping in order to save on demolition costs. Whilst it is detached house, one wall lies less than a metre from an inhabited house, ironically owned by the same letting company.
These circumstances have turned me into a reluctant nimby. I hoped the police would put pressure on the company, but days passed without change. I contacted the local forum which seems to be a one-man organisation for complaining about students. However, the forum's chair welcomed my complaint and it seems he has the ear of at least a few councillors. The matter has to be raised at committees and so I imagine I will be long gone and the house burnt to the ground before anything is done. I know that David Cameron's 'Big Society' is simply a sham to explain away cuts in local services, but it is bitter that, in fact, it is so apparent that at a local level residents have absolutely no control even over things that will be a focus of crime. Developers and property owners are, as they probably always have been, the true power in a town and it allows them to ignore complaints and to adopt an approach that costs them the least even to the extent on saving on buying some boards and nailing them to empty windowframes for a few weeks before they get round to knocking the house down. People complain that health and safety regulations are too obsessive, but it seems, that they can simply be ignored if that is done by those with money and influence. Many people opposed the building of the new houses, saying they could not be fitted in. I accepted that there was nothing we could do to stop the construction, but I do feel that in the meantime the derelict house should be made safe and not a draw for rats and vandals. However, clearly, even that attempt at nimbyism is a step too far too succeed.
Monday, 21 March 2011
As Iraq Was To Blair; Libya Is To Cameron
I imagine I am not the only person making this comment, but you know me, as I read in 'The Guardian' yesterday when it was talking about bloggers, 'I would rather be right than read'. I guess most (political) commentators would feel that. In a world where I feel, like most people, utterly powerless to alter anything about my own life let alone broader society, at least I can testify that 'I contested, I did not collaborate' and that is probably all we can do in the fixed-up society we live in.
For a brief moment it seemed, last week, that David Cameron had retained some standing, that, at last, he appeared to be a world statesman. It appears, though perhaps less obviously than Tony Blair (though these are still comparatively early days) that our present prime minister yearns for that international recognition that his predecessor-but-one battled so long to achieve. In addition, Cameron is from a political party which has always drawn strong support from the armed forces, and, in general, has supported them in return. It is different at present because of the severe cutbacks in the armed services that are already upsetting traditional Conservative supporters and closes off a source of employment for many young men and women in hard economic times like these.
Soldiers like to have a clear purpose, this does not mean a war, but something that gives them action and credit. The UK has been at war constantly since 2001 and having managed to extricate ourselves from Iraq after seven years, we are down once again to participating in only one war at the moment, Afghanistan. The casualties seem tolerable, and keep the public in a military frame of mind. Public support for injured soldiers and families of those killed has reached an all-time high. Thus, military action is a good way to distract the population. Margaret Thatcher did this spectacularly well with the Falklands Conflict of 1982 at a time when unemployment was spiralling out of control and many were suffering from her regime. The battling won enough of the population to her side that she could increase her majority at the 1983 election. It seems that prime ministers since then, whether John Major in 1991 or Tony Blair in 2001 and 2003 have sought, in vain, to replicate that experience.
Situations like that in Libya always put liberals like myself in a dilemma. On one hand, clearly I want to see the end of Colonel Gaddafi's 42-year long authoritarian regime and the installation of democracy in a country which has basically gone from being a colony under the Ottomans and the Italians, through a brief period of constitutional monarchy 1951-69, it fell under an indigenous dictator who has held power ever since. Of course, it was hoped that Gaddafi would fall the way the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt, lying to the West and East of Libya had done. However, Gaddafi has managed to retain the loyalty of sufficient forces to bring about the civil war he had warned of earlier. Of course, western states have complicated the situation. With Algerian oil effectively under the control of the French, Libya is the key short-haul oil supplier for Europe. The relationship with Gaddafi has been confused, ranging from bombing of the country by US aircraft in 1986 to Tony Blair trying to foster good relations. In the meantime the West has often sold arms to Gaddafi, to some extent pleased that he was not an Islamic fundamentalist, much as they were with Saddam Hussain before 1991. With China's quest to secure raw materials around the world and its willingness to support dictatorships, the situation has changed again and the West might be hoping for a more liberal regime in Libya which will look to the West, despite the turbulent history of the relationship, rather than to China as Sudan has done.
Intervention in civil wars is always complex. It is always a gamble. Of course, most people in the West do not want to see the rebels crushed as this week seemed very likely. There will always be a humanitarian aspect too. The view of China and Russia is simple, that no outside power should interfere with internal suppression of uprising, even if the peoples being suppressed claim they are not a true part of that state, as the Tibetans and Chechens do. For the West it is not so simple. This is why states hang on for a United Nations resolution, a permit for them to intervene. This allows governments to appear strong, yet spreading the blame if it all goes wrong. They also adopt a staged approach. Remember that no-fly zones preceded intervention in Iraq. To some degree this is fair as it balances the conflict between government and rebel forces. There is a value judgement. Imagine if the situation was reversed and, as in 1969 (and, of course, in Spain in 1936), the rebels were authoritarians seeking to overthrow the constitutional government? Then, I suppose money and oil access would be the judgement. There seem to be rules, but it is more a kind of shouting match between the various world powers and sometimes it falls one way and sometimes the other.
Stepping back from the international dimension, this posting is focused on the impact for the UK government. Like Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, it seemed David Cameron was eager for an international distraction from domestic economic difficulties. Controversy over the US arms company brought in to run the census, revelations that the new approach to local authority funding will shift millions from the poorest councils to the richest, concerns over damage to the National Health Service and ill-conceived ideas in education, meaning Cameron and his government remains unpopular across the board. A friend of mine argued that allowing local authorities to keep their business rates rather than send them to central government will encourage 'lax' councils to put more effort into generating business in their area. This is fine in principle, but neglects the uneveness of the playing field. Business will boom in areas of the South East, possibly the West Midlands and the Manchester-Liverpool and Tyneside regions, but more peripheral regions are going to suffer. Many parts of South-West England lack even a decent dial-up service for internet connection, let alone broadband, so what company will want to locate in those regions. Other areas have high unemployment, greater numbers of poorly qualified population, higher levels of asylum seekers, poor infrastructure and other issues that may make it hard to compete with the already rich areas of the South East, this approach will simply widen the divide.
Anyway, Cameron has got the war he was seeking. It seems to be a 'light touch' affair, policing the skies over Libya to stop Gaddafi's airforce bombing the rebels. However, as was seen with the US intervention in Somalia (and back in Vietnam) these days pilots are not immune to attack from ground forces let alone fighter aircraft. What will the UK do when downed aircrew are paraded on Libyan television? Presumably send in George Galloway to negotiate their release? The first British incursion, the SAS team, failed almost immediately, the soldiers being captured, ironically, by the rebels. Will the UK, France, the USA be able to resist having ground troops sent to the country as well? It seems likely even if the rebels win, that foreign troops will go in to establish some form of stability. Islamist groups must already be looking to expand their influence in the country, the one thing the western powers fear. Once there are ground forces there, then it will just be like Iraq all over again and sometime in 2018 we will be able to bring UK troops home from Libya.
A no-fly zone does not guaratee a rebel victory, and at the end of last week it appeared as if the rebellion was about to be crushed. Gadaffi controls the bulk of Libya and has extensive armed forces at his command. Foreign troops above or in the country will play to his propaganda, allowing him to portray the conflict as patriotic. A victory for him will not only mean the end of the rebellion and presumably refugees fleeing into Egypt, but it will mean that the UK will be spurned by Libya. In many ways that is no bad thing, I feel we have been too close to Gaddafi in the past decade achieving very little for the UK except more arms deals to equip him with the weaponry to suppress rebellions. It seems like Gaddafi will turn to China who will have secured their first major supply of oil despite its distance from China. It will reinforce China's 'footprint' in Africa another level. As members of the Security Council of the United Nations, China and Russia need to be challenged more. They need to be involved in peace-keeping, not constantly supporting dictators, pleading poverty (I found it incredible a couple of weeks ago when the Department for International Development said it was ending aid to China; why were we giving aid to the second largest economy in the world anyway?) when they go in afterwards and find a new source of raw materials and yet another market.
I accept that the situation in Libya has put many governments in a difficult position. However, Camerons bullishness in approach, puts him at the forefront of the blame when things begin to go wrong as so many cases have shown they will. Remember the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 and how that was supposed to bring Hussain's regime in Iraq to an end? No, it simply led to even more brutal suppression of Iraqi people exacerbated by sanctions that cut necessary supplies to them. I can certainly see Cameron before a committee of inquiry in 2019 shuffling awkwardly as Tony Blair did in front of Chilcot. I guess Cameron saw that and thought 'well, he got off lightly'. Blair spent a short time answering questions about the intervention in Iraq, got useful publicity for his autobiography, 'The Journey' (2010) adding to his already vast wealth (and he gave £4.6 million to a charity for rehabilitating injured soldiers); he charges US$250,000 (£157,000; €182,000) for a 90-minute speech. In 2010 it was estimated that Tony Blair received at least £14 million in earnings of all kinds and he bought one house in London for £4.45 million and one in Buckinghamshire for £5.75 million, and, quite accurately is estimated to be the wealthiest former prime minister in British history.
That is the kind of penalty that Cameron can expect when everything goes wrong with the intervention in Libya that he has led. No charges for war crimes; apparently no cause to regret the ongoing links with yet another regime which has been persecuting its citizens for decades. The regret will come from those British aircrew and soldiers who are killed or maimed or detained in appalling conditions. Yet again young British people are going to be sent to die for some ill-thought out cause, poorly planned and even more badly executed. Yes, it is probably morally correct to intervene in states to help democracy thrive over dictatorship. However, as yet, the world has not found a method of doing this which does not involve even greate loss of life and hardship lasting for years. There is an assumption now that the dictatorships of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula will tumble the way that the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe fell so quickly in 1989. However, while we remember the 'velvet revolution' of Czechoslovakia and the fall of the Berlin Wall, so quickly have we forgotten the model of Romania, which suffered bloodshed in its effort to shake off the regime.
In some ways I am glad Cameron has blundered so badly in this way. It will provide something to haunt him with throughout this decade. He has been so active in wrecking so many people's lives in the 11 months he has been in office, it will be good to have something to point the finger at him for, that he cannot squirm out of. I resent the fact that the intervention will probably do little of benefit for the Libyan rebels. That will continue to be the case until the United Nations has the funds and the force to oversee countries having experienced regime change, and that is very unlikely ever to happen. I mourn the ruined lives of British, Libyan and other citizens that can be the only outcome of this current policy.
For a brief moment it seemed, last week, that David Cameron had retained some standing, that, at last, he appeared to be a world statesman. It appears, though perhaps less obviously than Tony Blair (though these are still comparatively early days) that our present prime minister yearns for that international recognition that his predecessor-but-one battled so long to achieve. In addition, Cameron is from a political party which has always drawn strong support from the armed forces, and, in general, has supported them in return. It is different at present because of the severe cutbacks in the armed services that are already upsetting traditional Conservative supporters and closes off a source of employment for many young men and women in hard economic times like these.
Soldiers like to have a clear purpose, this does not mean a war, but something that gives them action and credit. The UK has been at war constantly since 2001 and having managed to extricate ourselves from Iraq after seven years, we are down once again to participating in only one war at the moment, Afghanistan. The casualties seem tolerable, and keep the public in a military frame of mind. Public support for injured soldiers and families of those killed has reached an all-time high. Thus, military action is a good way to distract the population. Margaret Thatcher did this spectacularly well with the Falklands Conflict of 1982 at a time when unemployment was spiralling out of control and many were suffering from her regime. The battling won enough of the population to her side that she could increase her majority at the 1983 election. It seems that prime ministers since then, whether John Major in 1991 or Tony Blair in 2001 and 2003 have sought, in vain, to replicate that experience.
Situations like that in Libya always put liberals like myself in a dilemma. On one hand, clearly I want to see the end of Colonel Gaddafi's 42-year long authoritarian regime and the installation of democracy in a country which has basically gone from being a colony under the Ottomans and the Italians, through a brief period of constitutional monarchy 1951-69, it fell under an indigenous dictator who has held power ever since. Of course, it was hoped that Gaddafi would fall the way the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt, lying to the West and East of Libya had done. However, Gaddafi has managed to retain the loyalty of sufficient forces to bring about the civil war he had warned of earlier. Of course, western states have complicated the situation. With Algerian oil effectively under the control of the French, Libya is the key short-haul oil supplier for Europe. The relationship with Gaddafi has been confused, ranging from bombing of the country by US aircraft in 1986 to Tony Blair trying to foster good relations. In the meantime the West has often sold arms to Gaddafi, to some extent pleased that he was not an Islamic fundamentalist, much as they were with Saddam Hussain before 1991. With China's quest to secure raw materials around the world and its willingness to support dictatorships, the situation has changed again and the West might be hoping for a more liberal regime in Libya which will look to the West, despite the turbulent history of the relationship, rather than to China as Sudan has done.
Intervention in civil wars is always complex. It is always a gamble. Of course, most people in the West do not want to see the rebels crushed as this week seemed very likely. There will always be a humanitarian aspect too. The view of China and Russia is simple, that no outside power should interfere with internal suppression of uprising, even if the peoples being suppressed claim they are not a true part of that state, as the Tibetans and Chechens do. For the West it is not so simple. This is why states hang on for a United Nations resolution, a permit for them to intervene. This allows governments to appear strong, yet spreading the blame if it all goes wrong. They also adopt a staged approach. Remember that no-fly zones preceded intervention in Iraq. To some degree this is fair as it balances the conflict between government and rebel forces. There is a value judgement. Imagine if the situation was reversed and, as in 1969 (and, of course, in Spain in 1936), the rebels were authoritarians seeking to overthrow the constitutional government? Then, I suppose money and oil access would be the judgement. There seem to be rules, but it is more a kind of shouting match between the various world powers and sometimes it falls one way and sometimes the other.
Stepping back from the international dimension, this posting is focused on the impact for the UK government. Like Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, it seemed David Cameron was eager for an international distraction from domestic economic difficulties. Controversy over the US arms company brought in to run the census, revelations that the new approach to local authority funding will shift millions from the poorest councils to the richest, concerns over damage to the National Health Service and ill-conceived ideas in education, meaning Cameron and his government remains unpopular across the board. A friend of mine argued that allowing local authorities to keep their business rates rather than send them to central government will encourage 'lax' councils to put more effort into generating business in their area. This is fine in principle, but neglects the uneveness of the playing field. Business will boom in areas of the South East, possibly the West Midlands and the Manchester-Liverpool and Tyneside regions, but more peripheral regions are going to suffer. Many parts of South-West England lack even a decent dial-up service for internet connection, let alone broadband, so what company will want to locate in those regions. Other areas have high unemployment, greater numbers of poorly qualified population, higher levels of asylum seekers, poor infrastructure and other issues that may make it hard to compete with the already rich areas of the South East, this approach will simply widen the divide.
Anyway, Cameron has got the war he was seeking. It seems to be a 'light touch' affair, policing the skies over Libya to stop Gaddafi's airforce bombing the rebels. However, as was seen with the US intervention in Somalia (and back in Vietnam) these days pilots are not immune to attack from ground forces let alone fighter aircraft. What will the UK do when downed aircrew are paraded on Libyan television? Presumably send in George Galloway to negotiate their release? The first British incursion, the SAS team, failed almost immediately, the soldiers being captured, ironically, by the rebels. Will the UK, France, the USA be able to resist having ground troops sent to the country as well? It seems likely even if the rebels win, that foreign troops will go in to establish some form of stability. Islamist groups must already be looking to expand their influence in the country, the one thing the western powers fear. Once there are ground forces there, then it will just be like Iraq all over again and sometime in 2018 we will be able to bring UK troops home from Libya.
A no-fly zone does not guaratee a rebel victory, and at the end of last week it appeared as if the rebellion was about to be crushed. Gadaffi controls the bulk of Libya and has extensive armed forces at his command. Foreign troops above or in the country will play to his propaganda, allowing him to portray the conflict as patriotic. A victory for him will not only mean the end of the rebellion and presumably refugees fleeing into Egypt, but it will mean that the UK will be spurned by Libya. In many ways that is no bad thing, I feel we have been too close to Gaddafi in the past decade achieving very little for the UK except more arms deals to equip him with the weaponry to suppress rebellions. It seems like Gaddafi will turn to China who will have secured their first major supply of oil despite its distance from China. It will reinforce China's 'footprint' in Africa another level. As members of the Security Council of the United Nations, China and Russia need to be challenged more. They need to be involved in peace-keeping, not constantly supporting dictators, pleading poverty (I found it incredible a couple of weeks ago when the Department for International Development said it was ending aid to China; why were we giving aid to the second largest economy in the world anyway?) when they go in afterwards and find a new source of raw materials and yet another market.
I accept that the situation in Libya has put many governments in a difficult position. However, Camerons bullishness in approach, puts him at the forefront of the blame when things begin to go wrong as so many cases have shown they will. Remember the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 and how that was supposed to bring Hussain's regime in Iraq to an end? No, it simply led to even more brutal suppression of Iraqi people exacerbated by sanctions that cut necessary supplies to them. I can certainly see Cameron before a committee of inquiry in 2019 shuffling awkwardly as Tony Blair did in front of Chilcot. I guess Cameron saw that and thought 'well, he got off lightly'. Blair spent a short time answering questions about the intervention in Iraq, got useful publicity for his autobiography, 'The Journey' (2010) adding to his already vast wealth (and he gave £4.6 million to a charity for rehabilitating injured soldiers); he charges US$250,000 (£157,000; €182,000) for a 90-minute speech. In 2010 it was estimated that Tony Blair received at least £14 million in earnings of all kinds and he bought one house in London for £4.45 million and one in Buckinghamshire for £5.75 million, and, quite accurately is estimated to be the wealthiest former prime minister in British history.
That is the kind of penalty that Cameron can expect when everything goes wrong with the intervention in Libya that he has led. No charges for war crimes; apparently no cause to regret the ongoing links with yet another regime which has been persecuting its citizens for decades. The regret will come from those British aircrew and soldiers who are killed or maimed or detained in appalling conditions. Yet again young British people are going to be sent to die for some ill-thought out cause, poorly planned and even more badly executed. Yes, it is probably morally correct to intervene in states to help democracy thrive over dictatorship. However, as yet, the world has not found a method of doing this which does not involve even greate loss of life and hardship lasting for years. There is an assumption now that the dictatorships of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula will tumble the way that the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe fell so quickly in 1989. However, while we remember the 'velvet revolution' of Czechoslovakia and the fall of the Berlin Wall, so quickly have we forgotten the model of Romania, which suffered bloodshed in its effort to shake off the regime.
In some ways I am glad Cameron has blundered so badly in this way. It will provide something to haunt him with throughout this decade. He has been so active in wrecking so many people's lives in the 11 months he has been in office, it will be good to have something to point the finger at him for, that he cannot squirm out of. I resent the fact that the intervention will probably do little of benefit for the Libyan rebels. That will continue to be the case until the United Nations has the funds and the force to oversee countries having experienced regime change, and that is very unlikely ever to happen. I mourn the ruined lives of British, Libyan and other citizens that can be the only outcome of this current policy.
Friday, 11 March 2011
What If 'The Anarchy' Of 12th Century England Had Turned Out Differently?
My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘On Other Fields: Alternate Outcomes of the Middle Ages’ by Alexander Rooksmoor. It is available for purchase on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/On-Other-Fields-Alternate-ebook/dp/B008LMT9WO/ref=sr_1_8?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1342436531&sr=1-8
Canadian
readers might prefer to access it through: http://www.amazon.ca/Other-Fields-Alternate-Outcomes-ebook/dp/B008LMT9WO/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1375772395&sr=8-4&keywords=Rooksmoor
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
What If The Gunpowder Plot Of 1605 Had Succeeded?
My views on this topic can be found in my e-book ‘Other Exits: REVISED. 'What If?' Outcomes for Tudor and Stuart Monarchs’ by Alexander Rooksmoor. It is available for purchase on Amazon:
UK readers might prefer to access it through:
Monday, 7 March 2011
Reading Michael Moorcock
Last month I read an interview of Michael Moorcock by Hari Kunzu: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/04/michael-moorcock-hari-kunzru I have probably read more novels by Moorcock than any other other, partly because in his long career he has been prolific but also because like Kunzu, in my teenage years I was drawn into Moorcock's multiple fantasy worlds, his 'multiverse' as he termed it very easily. I think the reasons for this were many.
Like many teenaged boys of the 1980s fantasy was what lifted our lives from the tedium of suburban life. There was none of this all-encompassing game worlds on sophisticated consoles or PCs that can take away hours. The most involving was something like 'Lords of Midnight' (1984) on the ZX Spectrum and if you showed that even a pre-pubescent child now, they would think it was painfully unsophisticated. So, instead, we escaped into sitting in our rooms reading fantasy novels and meeting up at weekends to play paper and dice role-playing games RPG, most famously 'Dungeons and Dragons' with our friends all afternoon. I was interested to read that Kunzu also played 'Traveller', 'Call of Cthullu' and especially 'Bushido' which was my favourite RPG (I still have the original boxed game) set in a medieval Japan where Japanese gods and mythical creatures were real. Much of this fantasy stuff, however, was very derived from 'The Lord of the Rings', with orcs, elves and dwarfs (or dwarves as Tolkien wrongly titled them), wizards and warriors, what is almost seen as the standard fantasy setting. Though you could buy prepared scenarios the bulk of adventures you played were thought up and written by one of the players, who would be the 'Keeper' or 'Dungeon Master'. Being keen on writing fiction, this was a role I often took.
Anyway, in this context of very traditional fantasy fare, in a kind of medieval setting with magic, Moorcock's books were refreshing. He is critical of authors like Tolkien who he has family said wrote 'Epic Pooh' (after Winnie-the-Pooh) stories. Moorcock met both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in his youth and liked them as men if not their fiction. This is not to say that some of Moorcock's books are not set in a world of sword fights and sorcery and like Tolkien he draws on Norse myths, notably in elements of the Elric sagas. However, being very much a product of the late 1960s rather than the 1950s like Tolkien, Moorcock always sought to twist and subvert genres. He is also very open in attributing his influences as diverse as they are.
One series I got into very early on was the A Nomad of the Time Streams triology. It features an Oswald Bastable a character from E. Nesbit stories who has grown to be an Edwardian army captain and travels to alternate versions of Earth in three novels which feature counter-factuals: 'The Warlord of the Air' (1971), 'The Land Leviathan' (1974) and 'The Steel Tsar' (1981). Kunzu wrongly portrays 'The Warlord of the Air' as the first steampunk book; this honour belongs to 'Queen Victoria's Bomb' (1967) by Ronald Clark, but Moorcock certainly gave bulk to the genre and took it in different directions. Today he is a friend of Alan Moore so there is a personal connection into contemporary steampunk. However, as I have noted before Moorcock bewails the fact that he feels the 'punk' is missing, replaced more with 'opera'.
Moorcock certainly enjoys counter-factuals especially messing around with outcomes in Europe of the 20th century. His Jerry Cornelius and Colonel Pyat characters often stumble briefly through some counter-factual setting not explored in depth, but mentioned in passing and outlined through some references. The Nomad of the Time Streams stories are more explicitly counter-factual exploring worlds in which the First World War never occurred and the balance between black and white people in terms of power has been different. Many of these stories are influenced by the airship novels of the late 19th century/early 20th century such as those by George Griffith including 'The Angel of the Revolution' (1893) and 'Outlaws of the Air' (1895) amongst others. I have yet to read Moorcock's 'The Metatemporal Detective' (2007) but it seems to be even more steampunky and features Monsieur Zenith a character from Sexton Blake stories (in Moorcock's early career he was editor of a Sexton Blake story magazine) who fed into the character of Elric too.
Another source that Moorcock has long acknowledged has been the work of Mervyn Peake, notably the Gormenghast triology, 'Titus Groan' (1946; TV serialised in 2000 as 'Gormenghast'), 'Gormenghast' (1950) and 'Titus Alone' (1959). Though Peake was a contemporary of Lewis and Tolkien his fantasy work is more of a humanist (perhaps Nonconformist given his background as son of Congregationalist missionaries) approach looking at the malaise of post-war society aware of the Holocaust and the exhaustion of the old established world. Saying this, his 'Mr. Pye' (1953; television production 1986) is a clearer tale of morality. His Gormenghast novels are jammed with eccentric characters, some benign, some avaricious, many ineffectual. The uber-Gothic castle of Gormenghast has probably inspired visual artists and even computer game programmers more than authors; he was an artist and a poet too. However, Moorcock has admitted the influence on him, most notably in 'Gloriana' (1978) in which a version of Elizabeth I inhabits a palace like Castle Gormenghast. It is a story which naturally also references Elizabethan stories too.
This subverting of genres is notable in his Elric series with the eponymous hero being anaemic and dependent on drugs or a life-draining sword to survive. He betrays his own kingdom and his amoral throughout. Moorcock's universes do not see a simplistic fight between good and evil, it is more complex than that, a contest between Law and Chaos. Of course, most people see Law as equating to Good. However, when you have it indicated in the context of say, hippies being chaotic and Nazis adhering very strongly to a law, then you can see that it is a more challenging concept. Moorcock wrote the Elric stories as an intentional contrast to the muscle-bound hero, Conan of the novels by Robert E. Howard.
The first Moorcock book I stumbled across was 'The Final Programme' (1969), the first in the Jerry Cornelius series. Cornelius is probably the most 1960s of Moorcock's characters. He is a bisexual (sometimes even trans-sexual and trans-racial) drug addict, alcoholic assassin who appears to be an epitome of London of the era. You see him as what Austin Powers was before he was watered down for family entertainment. It was one of only a handful of books that I have read in a single day. Moorcock's text is very engaging in his best novels. In his worse it is very fragmented and I felt that the latter Cornelius novels were too fragmentary to engage with and almost became a sequence of 'catchphrases' of very Cornelian scenes: 'A Cure for Cancer' (1971), 'The English Assassin' (1972), 'The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius (1976)' 'The Condition of Muzak' (1977) and 'The Entropy Tango' (1981). 'The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the 20th Century' (1976) features Jerry but is mainly about his sister and her lover and it is slightly less fractured.
Moorcock also wrote a couple of slightly more mainstream spy novels, 'The Chinese Agent' (1970) and 'The Russian Intelligence' (1980) though with a dry British humour rather than dramatic action. I remember the spy organisation being very short of money so much so that one agent had to take the bus to gather intelligence. Unlike Kunzu, I did not have to scour second hand bookshops because for some reason by 6th Form college had a very extensive collection of Moorcock books that no-one in the mid-1980s was borrowing (aside from me it seemed). I did hunt bookshops over a number of years for the various Elric novels, because Moorcock wrote and re-wrote them. I identified three sequences overlapping at points and I think I read them all, there may be more now.
Some of Moorcock's novels have more the style of mainstream fantasy novels, for example, the Hawkmoon series. These are set in an alternate, fantasy Europe (possibly a post-apocalyptic version of our Earth) ruled over by Granbretan, i.e. Great Britain which is connected to the continent of Europe by a vast bridge. The hero is Dorian Hawkmoon, Duke of Köln (the real German name for Cologne where he is based) who becomes involved with the still independent region of the Kamarg (which is the Camargue region of southern France).
Hawkmoon appears in four novels: 'The Jewel in the Skull' (1967), 'The Mad God's Amulet' (1968), 'The Sword of the Dawn' (1968) and 'The Runestaff' (1969). He was also the lead character in the The Chronicles of Castle Brass series, 'Count Brass' (1973), 'The Champion of Garathorm' (1973) and 'The Quest for Tanelorn' (1975). Another swords and sorcery series was that of Corum Jhaelen in 'The Knight of the Swords' (1971), 'The Queen of the Swords' (1971), 'The King of the Swords' (1971), 'The Bull and the Spear' (1973), 'The Oak and the Ram' (1973) and 'The Sword and the Stallion' (1974) which draw heavily on Celtic myths. One thing about Moorcock's work is that whilst his stories are epic, they are often covered in short novels. This contrasts with the 'doorstop' sized books that seem to characterise so many fantasy series seeking to ape 'The Lord of the Rings'.
Less typical of standard fantasy were Moorcock's, 'Dancers at the End of Time' series: 'An Alien Heat' (1971), 'The Hollow Lands' (1974), 'The End of All Songs' (1976), 'Legends from the End of Time' (1976), 'The Transformation of Miss. Mavis Ming' (1977) and 'Elric at the End of Time' (1981), more cross-series connections from Moorcock. The novels and short stories present a very hedonistic society in which a few individuals are left on what is Earth close to the end of its life. They are nearly ominpotent due to the powers imbued by rings they wear connected to self-running cities that they never enter nor have much understanding of. However, the powers allow them to create or adjust anything even themselves. They pass their time indulging in arts and parties and petty rivalries. In some ways it is like 'The Tale of Genji', set in the imperial court of early medieval Japan, cut off from any real concerns, the protagonists make a great deal of minor things whilst always being luxuriously elegant and hedonistic. Strangely the cast of eccentric characters in this fantastical setting always reminds me also of the children's series 'The Magic Roundabout'. Being at the end of time, time travellers from history (though not necessarily from our version of Earth, in a time travelling character's single reference to 'Waterloo Circus' you are shown that). These arrivals stir up the situation and in one case even trigger a hunt for the Holy Grail, though something else is found instead. The tone of these novels, though working with many of the themes featured across Moorcock's work, is lighter and these are easy to access stories, though no less thought provoking.
Moorcock's 'Behold the Man' (1966 in magazine/1969 as novel) deserves particular mention. It won the Nebula Award in 1969. On wikipedia for the entry on Moorcock it says 'some of Moorcock's work has criticized Christianity, most notably, "Behold the Man".' I suppose for any reader who finds any variation from the gospels, criticism, the books is a criticism. However, that is a very superficial reading of the book. In the story a Jewish time traveller, Karl, from 1970 ends up in 28 CE. He finds that Jesus of Nazareth is a low intelligence son of a carpenter. Karl is mistaken for the messiah and ends up living out the life of Jesus, ultimately being betrayed and crucified. This is certainly a heretical view if you believe Jesus was in fact the son of God. However, it is less of a challenge for someone like me who sees Jesus as an ordinary man, reminding us all that we are sons and daughters of God, and showing us we do not need to be divine in order to live a good life.
As well as issues around paradoxes, the novel clearly asks questions about predestination and personal choice, issues that have divided denominations of Christianity through the centuries. I would bracket it with 'Life of Brian' (1979), though in tone the two are very different, but both ask us the extent to which as ordinary people, how do we engage with living morally and also the challenges of expectations thrust upon us. I guess this novel probably would not get published now, but I believe it deserves all the acclaim it received if not just for Moorcock being bold enough to take on the story.
Some view Moorcock's fantasy novels as not really sitting properly in the fantasy genre. Partly this is because of Moorcock's concept of the Eternal Champion, in that many of his characters are in fact incarnations of characters featured in other series of his. In one story the characters travel to a kind of arena where all the different versions of this champion and his companions are shown. I find this concept pretty tiresome and, in fact, unnecessary. I feel that Moorcock gives more value to his characters if he treated them as distinct identities. Certainly having characters from different series appearing in other series feels at time very laboured and has led Moorcock to re-write some stories, not to refresh them but simply to make such connections even more apparent, for example introducing his Bishop Beesley character into 'The Land Leviathan' through a re-write.
Another reason why some commentators set Moorcock's works apart from other fantasy is that his heroes have 'issues'. I have mentioned the amorality of Jerry Cornelius and Elric, but many leading characters of Moorcock's fantasies are haunted by a sense of doom or of being manipulated. They make mistakes and can even put friends in jeopardy as a result. They all tend to be flawed heroes if not anti-heroes. To a great extent this reflects the period in which Moorcock was really establishing himself, in the late 1960s and 1970s when science fiction was reflecting more on the psychological than the physical and the opportunities and challenges from hallucinogenic drugs.
As was seen in my review of that 1952 anthology of science fiction stories, the concern with the psychological had been developing in science fiction since the 1940s but across fiction both in print and in movies in the 1960s looking to the inside of people's thoughts and motivations was a widespread trend. By the 1980s, however, with Reaganite demand for simple heroics and politicians using phrases like 'empire of evil' and 'star wars' as (supposedly) serious political statements, fantasy was pushed back more to the Robert E. Howard style of muscular heroes who can do no wrong.
Moorcock has noted how misogynistic so much of such writing was and particularly has spoken out against the Gor series of novels by John Norman (29 novels 1966-2011) which feature a society in which not only are women predominantly enslaved to dominant men, but are also shown to enjoy or at least come to accept as 'right' male physical dominance of women, including physical punishment. Moorcock's heroes are not simplistic, they are complex and at times unlikeable but that adds credibility to them when he is dealing with at times very fantastical worlds.
Though it is not expressed in such terms, Moorcock seems to be a representative of the trends of the late 1960s into the 1970s, in seeking a degree of libertarianism especially in terms of sex, sexuality and use of narcotics, but also tempered with attitudes which counter racism, sexism and authoritarianism. The converse side of this as shown by authors like Norman and Howard, aiming very much at the same kind of audience, young men, is a longer running attitude that might is right and that men should be dominant over women. Such attitudes were the norm in previous centuries and have endured, given new life especially in the era of the hard-right Republican presidencies of Reagan and the two Bushes. Each side sees the other as being 'wrong' and many of the attitudes of the 'promiscuous Sixties' are blamed for contemporary problems in the ways that liberal thinkers have attacked the attitudes of the partriachical, militarised society for today's problems too. The politics is never overt, but it is a relief that at least one voice of some of the values many of us hold to but seem rare in the 2010s remains in Moorcock's work.
Moorcock kept writing through the 1980s a period less fertile for his work. In this period you see the Von Bek triology set in a mythical town, Mirenburg in the state of Waldenstein, almost an archetype of Central Europe cities and states. In 'The War Hound and the World's Pain' (1981), 'The Brothel in Rosenstrasse' (1982) and 'The City in the Autumn Stars' (1986), Moorcock draws on a mixture of characteristics of 18th century/early 19th century German science, literature and fantasy, especially Faustian pacts and references to medieval myths and the kind of Weimar Republic styling of 'Cabaret' (1972). Moorcock, as always brings themes such as the Holy Grail into a new context.
The Von Beks become a sprawling trans-era/trans-dimensional family as much as the Corneliuses were and Oona Von Bek appears in three novels along with Elric: 'The Dreamthief's Daughter' (2001), 'The Skrayling Tree' (2003) and 'The White Wolf's Son' (2005) often delving into the dangerous fantasies of the Nazis. This 'untidiness' of Moorcock's work with characters straddling so many times and places, running into other characters often frustrates readers of Moorcock's novels. Personally I think he tries too hard to connect everything up and personally I try to take each novel as a distinct entity, judging characters featuring in it for their own sake in that story rather than what else they might be elsewhere. This may be the opposite of what Moorcock may intend.
In the 1980s Moorcock also began producing the Between the Wars series: 'Byzantium Endures' (1981), 'The Laughter of Carthage' (1984), 'Jerusalem Commands' (1992) and 'The Vengeance of Rome' (2006) which, despite the titles, are really a crystallisation of all those bitty counter-factuals that peppered the Cornelius books. These stories, perhaps reflecting the times, despite having a cocaine and sex addict as their protagonist do not have the glorious romping nature of the Cornelius stories and are instead downbeat, low key. They follow Russian, half-Jewish, Colonel Pyat from 1900 onwards being wrapped up in various aspects of 20th century history.
To some degree, this marked Moorcock's progression to more realistic or at least partial magic realism in his novels 'Mother London' (1988) and 'King of the City' (2000) very much about London, though not precisely as we know it (escalators at Mile End underground station!?). Showing that he never adheres to one genre, he was also producing the very fantastical Second Ether stories about pirates in some alternative version of space: 'Blood: A Southern Fantasy' (1994), 'Fabulous Harbours' (1995) and 'The War Amongst The Angels' (1996), for me too 'rich' in terms of their fantastical nature to be that enjoyable.
Michael Moorcock's work will not appeal to everyone even among young men. However, if you are seeking something different in your reading that may be based in one genre but is liable to jump over the boundaries from time to time, then Moorcock's work is well worth looking at. There is such an assortment that many people will find something of interest among it. Expect to be challenged and expect for the ideas that are raised, even in a seemingly adventurous fantasy story, to nag at you long after you have finished the book. I am glad Moorcock is still writing, his latest book, a Doctor Who one, 'The Coming of the Terraphiles' (2010) possibly indicates that whilst he may not be mainstream, mainstream science fiction audiences are once again ready to delve into his ideas. This book is apparently jammed full of Moorcockian references including the Captain Cornelius and the multiverse.
Like many teenaged boys of the 1980s fantasy was what lifted our lives from the tedium of suburban life. There was none of this all-encompassing game worlds on sophisticated consoles or PCs that can take away hours. The most involving was something like 'Lords of Midnight' (1984) on the ZX Spectrum and if you showed that even a pre-pubescent child now, they would think it was painfully unsophisticated. So, instead, we escaped into sitting in our rooms reading fantasy novels and meeting up at weekends to play paper and dice role-playing games RPG, most famously 'Dungeons and Dragons' with our friends all afternoon. I was interested to read that Kunzu also played 'Traveller', 'Call of Cthullu' and especially 'Bushido' which was my favourite RPG (I still have the original boxed game) set in a medieval Japan where Japanese gods and mythical creatures were real. Much of this fantasy stuff, however, was very derived from 'The Lord of the Rings', with orcs, elves and dwarfs (or dwarves as Tolkien wrongly titled them), wizards and warriors, what is almost seen as the standard fantasy setting. Though you could buy prepared scenarios the bulk of adventures you played were thought up and written by one of the players, who would be the 'Keeper' or 'Dungeon Master'. Being keen on writing fiction, this was a role I often took.
Anyway, in this context of very traditional fantasy fare, in a kind of medieval setting with magic, Moorcock's books were refreshing. He is critical of authors like Tolkien who he has family said wrote 'Epic Pooh' (after Winnie-the-Pooh) stories. Moorcock met both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in his youth and liked them as men if not their fiction. This is not to say that some of Moorcock's books are not set in a world of sword fights and sorcery and like Tolkien he draws on Norse myths, notably in elements of the Elric sagas. However, being very much a product of the late 1960s rather than the 1950s like Tolkien, Moorcock always sought to twist and subvert genres. He is also very open in attributing his influences as diverse as they are.
One series I got into very early on was the A Nomad of the Time Streams triology. It features an Oswald Bastable a character from E. Nesbit stories who has grown to be an Edwardian army captain and travels to alternate versions of Earth in three novels which feature counter-factuals: 'The Warlord of the Air' (1971), 'The Land Leviathan' (1974) and 'The Steel Tsar' (1981). Kunzu wrongly portrays 'The Warlord of the Air' as the first steampunk book; this honour belongs to 'Queen Victoria's Bomb' (1967) by Ronald Clark, but Moorcock certainly gave bulk to the genre and took it in different directions. Today he is a friend of Alan Moore so there is a personal connection into contemporary steampunk. However, as I have noted before Moorcock bewails the fact that he feels the 'punk' is missing, replaced more with 'opera'.
Moorcock certainly enjoys counter-factuals especially messing around with outcomes in Europe of the 20th century. His Jerry Cornelius and Colonel Pyat characters often stumble briefly through some counter-factual setting not explored in depth, but mentioned in passing and outlined through some references. The Nomad of the Time Streams stories are more explicitly counter-factual exploring worlds in which the First World War never occurred and the balance between black and white people in terms of power has been different. Many of these stories are influenced by the airship novels of the late 19th century/early 20th century such as those by George Griffith including 'The Angel of the Revolution' (1893) and 'Outlaws of the Air' (1895) amongst others. I have yet to read Moorcock's 'The Metatemporal Detective' (2007) but it seems to be even more steampunky and features Monsieur Zenith a character from Sexton Blake stories (in Moorcock's early career he was editor of a Sexton Blake story magazine) who fed into the character of Elric too.
Another source that Moorcock has long acknowledged has been the work of Mervyn Peake, notably the Gormenghast triology, 'Titus Groan' (1946; TV serialised in 2000 as 'Gormenghast'), 'Gormenghast' (1950) and 'Titus Alone' (1959). Though Peake was a contemporary of Lewis and Tolkien his fantasy work is more of a humanist (perhaps Nonconformist given his background as son of Congregationalist missionaries) approach looking at the malaise of post-war society aware of the Holocaust and the exhaustion of the old established world. Saying this, his 'Mr. Pye' (1953; television production 1986) is a clearer tale of morality. His Gormenghast novels are jammed with eccentric characters, some benign, some avaricious, many ineffectual. The uber-Gothic castle of Gormenghast has probably inspired visual artists and even computer game programmers more than authors; he was an artist and a poet too. However, Moorcock has admitted the influence on him, most notably in 'Gloriana' (1978) in which a version of Elizabeth I inhabits a palace like Castle Gormenghast. It is a story which naturally also references Elizabethan stories too.
This subverting of genres is notable in his Elric series with the eponymous hero being anaemic and dependent on drugs or a life-draining sword to survive. He betrays his own kingdom and his amoral throughout. Moorcock's universes do not see a simplistic fight between good and evil, it is more complex than that, a contest between Law and Chaos. Of course, most people see Law as equating to Good. However, when you have it indicated in the context of say, hippies being chaotic and Nazis adhering very strongly to a law, then you can see that it is a more challenging concept. Moorcock wrote the Elric stories as an intentional contrast to the muscle-bound hero, Conan of the novels by Robert E. Howard.
The first Moorcock book I stumbled across was 'The Final Programme' (1969), the first in the Jerry Cornelius series. Cornelius is probably the most 1960s of Moorcock's characters. He is a bisexual (sometimes even trans-sexual and trans-racial) drug addict, alcoholic assassin who appears to be an epitome of London of the era. You see him as what Austin Powers was before he was watered down for family entertainment. It was one of only a handful of books that I have read in a single day. Moorcock's text is very engaging in his best novels. In his worse it is very fragmented and I felt that the latter Cornelius novels were too fragmentary to engage with and almost became a sequence of 'catchphrases' of very Cornelian scenes: 'A Cure for Cancer' (1971), 'The English Assassin' (1972), 'The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius (1976)' 'The Condition of Muzak' (1977) and 'The Entropy Tango' (1981). 'The Adventures of Una Persson and Catherine Cornelius in the 20th Century' (1976) features Jerry but is mainly about his sister and her lover and it is slightly less fractured.
Moorcock also wrote a couple of slightly more mainstream spy novels, 'The Chinese Agent' (1970) and 'The Russian Intelligence' (1980) though with a dry British humour rather than dramatic action. I remember the spy organisation being very short of money so much so that one agent had to take the bus to gather intelligence. Unlike Kunzu, I did not have to scour second hand bookshops because for some reason by 6th Form college had a very extensive collection of Moorcock books that no-one in the mid-1980s was borrowing (aside from me it seemed). I did hunt bookshops over a number of years for the various Elric novels, because Moorcock wrote and re-wrote them. I identified three sequences overlapping at points and I think I read them all, there may be more now.
Some of Moorcock's novels have more the style of mainstream fantasy novels, for example, the Hawkmoon series. These are set in an alternate, fantasy Europe (possibly a post-apocalyptic version of our Earth) ruled over by Granbretan, i.e. Great Britain which is connected to the continent of Europe by a vast bridge. The hero is Dorian Hawkmoon, Duke of Köln (the real German name for Cologne where he is based) who becomes involved with the still independent region of the Kamarg (which is the Camargue region of southern France).
Hawkmoon appears in four novels: 'The Jewel in the Skull' (1967), 'The Mad God's Amulet' (1968), 'The Sword of the Dawn' (1968) and 'The Runestaff' (1969). He was also the lead character in the The Chronicles of Castle Brass series, 'Count Brass' (1973), 'The Champion of Garathorm' (1973) and 'The Quest for Tanelorn' (1975). Another swords and sorcery series was that of Corum Jhaelen in 'The Knight of the Swords' (1971), 'The Queen of the Swords' (1971), 'The King of the Swords' (1971), 'The Bull and the Spear' (1973), 'The Oak and the Ram' (1973) and 'The Sword and the Stallion' (1974) which draw heavily on Celtic myths. One thing about Moorcock's work is that whilst his stories are epic, they are often covered in short novels. This contrasts with the 'doorstop' sized books that seem to characterise so many fantasy series seeking to ape 'The Lord of the Rings'.
Less typical of standard fantasy were Moorcock's, 'Dancers at the End of Time' series: 'An Alien Heat' (1971), 'The Hollow Lands' (1974), 'The End of All Songs' (1976), 'Legends from the End of Time' (1976), 'The Transformation of Miss. Mavis Ming' (1977) and 'Elric at the End of Time' (1981), more cross-series connections from Moorcock. The novels and short stories present a very hedonistic society in which a few individuals are left on what is Earth close to the end of its life. They are nearly ominpotent due to the powers imbued by rings they wear connected to self-running cities that they never enter nor have much understanding of. However, the powers allow them to create or adjust anything even themselves. They pass their time indulging in arts and parties and petty rivalries. In some ways it is like 'The Tale of Genji', set in the imperial court of early medieval Japan, cut off from any real concerns, the protagonists make a great deal of minor things whilst always being luxuriously elegant and hedonistic. Strangely the cast of eccentric characters in this fantastical setting always reminds me also of the children's series 'The Magic Roundabout'. Being at the end of time, time travellers from history (though not necessarily from our version of Earth, in a time travelling character's single reference to 'Waterloo Circus' you are shown that). These arrivals stir up the situation and in one case even trigger a hunt for the Holy Grail, though something else is found instead. The tone of these novels, though working with many of the themes featured across Moorcock's work, is lighter and these are easy to access stories, though no less thought provoking.
Moorcock's 'Behold the Man' (1966 in magazine/1969 as novel) deserves particular mention. It won the Nebula Award in 1969. On wikipedia for the entry on Moorcock it says 'some of Moorcock's work has criticized Christianity, most notably, "Behold the Man".' I suppose for any reader who finds any variation from the gospels, criticism, the books is a criticism. However, that is a very superficial reading of the book. In the story a Jewish time traveller, Karl, from 1970 ends up in 28 CE. He finds that Jesus of Nazareth is a low intelligence son of a carpenter. Karl is mistaken for the messiah and ends up living out the life of Jesus, ultimately being betrayed and crucified. This is certainly a heretical view if you believe Jesus was in fact the son of God. However, it is less of a challenge for someone like me who sees Jesus as an ordinary man, reminding us all that we are sons and daughters of God, and showing us we do not need to be divine in order to live a good life.
As well as issues around paradoxes, the novel clearly asks questions about predestination and personal choice, issues that have divided denominations of Christianity through the centuries. I would bracket it with 'Life of Brian' (1979), though in tone the two are very different, but both ask us the extent to which as ordinary people, how do we engage with living morally and also the challenges of expectations thrust upon us. I guess this novel probably would not get published now, but I believe it deserves all the acclaim it received if not just for Moorcock being bold enough to take on the story.
Some view Moorcock's fantasy novels as not really sitting properly in the fantasy genre. Partly this is because of Moorcock's concept of the Eternal Champion, in that many of his characters are in fact incarnations of characters featured in other series of his. In one story the characters travel to a kind of arena where all the different versions of this champion and his companions are shown. I find this concept pretty tiresome and, in fact, unnecessary. I feel that Moorcock gives more value to his characters if he treated them as distinct identities. Certainly having characters from different series appearing in other series feels at time very laboured and has led Moorcock to re-write some stories, not to refresh them but simply to make such connections even more apparent, for example introducing his Bishop Beesley character into 'The Land Leviathan' through a re-write.
Another reason why some commentators set Moorcock's works apart from other fantasy is that his heroes have 'issues'. I have mentioned the amorality of Jerry Cornelius and Elric, but many leading characters of Moorcock's fantasies are haunted by a sense of doom or of being manipulated. They make mistakes and can even put friends in jeopardy as a result. They all tend to be flawed heroes if not anti-heroes. To a great extent this reflects the period in which Moorcock was really establishing himself, in the late 1960s and 1970s when science fiction was reflecting more on the psychological than the physical and the opportunities and challenges from hallucinogenic drugs.
As was seen in my review of that 1952 anthology of science fiction stories, the concern with the psychological had been developing in science fiction since the 1940s but across fiction both in print and in movies in the 1960s looking to the inside of people's thoughts and motivations was a widespread trend. By the 1980s, however, with Reaganite demand for simple heroics and politicians using phrases like 'empire of evil' and 'star wars' as (supposedly) serious political statements, fantasy was pushed back more to the Robert E. Howard style of muscular heroes who can do no wrong.
Moorcock has noted how misogynistic so much of such writing was and particularly has spoken out against the Gor series of novels by John Norman (29 novels 1966-2011) which feature a society in which not only are women predominantly enslaved to dominant men, but are also shown to enjoy or at least come to accept as 'right' male physical dominance of women, including physical punishment. Moorcock's heroes are not simplistic, they are complex and at times unlikeable but that adds credibility to them when he is dealing with at times very fantastical worlds.
Though it is not expressed in such terms, Moorcock seems to be a representative of the trends of the late 1960s into the 1970s, in seeking a degree of libertarianism especially in terms of sex, sexuality and use of narcotics, but also tempered with attitudes which counter racism, sexism and authoritarianism. The converse side of this as shown by authors like Norman and Howard, aiming very much at the same kind of audience, young men, is a longer running attitude that might is right and that men should be dominant over women. Such attitudes were the norm in previous centuries and have endured, given new life especially in the era of the hard-right Republican presidencies of Reagan and the two Bushes. Each side sees the other as being 'wrong' and many of the attitudes of the 'promiscuous Sixties' are blamed for contemporary problems in the ways that liberal thinkers have attacked the attitudes of the partriachical, militarised society for today's problems too. The politics is never overt, but it is a relief that at least one voice of some of the values many of us hold to but seem rare in the 2010s remains in Moorcock's work.
Moorcock kept writing through the 1980s a period less fertile for his work. In this period you see the Von Bek triology set in a mythical town, Mirenburg in the state of Waldenstein, almost an archetype of Central Europe cities and states. In 'The War Hound and the World's Pain' (1981), 'The Brothel in Rosenstrasse' (1982) and 'The City in the Autumn Stars' (1986), Moorcock draws on a mixture of characteristics of 18th century/early 19th century German science, literature and fantasy, especially Faustian pacts and references to medieval myths and the kind of Weimar Republic styling of 'Cabaret' (1972). Moorcock, as always brings themes such as the Holy Grail into a new context.
The Von Beks become a sprawling trans-era/trans-dimensional family as much as the Corneliuses were and Oona Von Bek appears in three novels along with Elric: 'The Dreamthief's Daughter' (2001), 'The Skrayling Tree' (2003) and 'The White Wolf's Son' (2005) often delving into the dangerous fantasies of the Nazis. This 'untidiness' of Moorcock's work with characters straddling so many times and places, running into other characters often frustrates readers of Moorcock's novels. Personally I think he tries too hard to connect everything up and personally I try to take each novel as a distinct entity, judging characters featuring in it for their own sake in that story rather than what else they might be elsewhere. This may be the opposite of what Moorcock may intend.
In the 1980s Moorcock also began producing the Between the Wars series: 'Byzantium Endures' (1981), 'The Laughter of Carthage' (1984), 'Jerusalem Commands' (1992) and 'The Vengeance of Rome' (2006) which, despite the titles, are really a crystallisation of all those bitty counter-factuals that peppered the Cornelius books. These stories, perhaps reflecting the times, despite having a cocaine and sex addict as their protagonist do not have the glorious romping nature of the Cornelius stories and are instead downbeat, low key. They follow Russian, half-Jewish, Colonel Pyat from 1900 onwards being wrapped up in various aspects of 20th century history.
To some degree, this marked Moorcock's progression to more realistic or at least partial magic realism in his novels 'Mother London' (1988) and 'King of the City' (2000) very much about London, though not precisely as we know it (escalators at Mile End underground station!?). Showing that he never adheres to one genre, he was also producing the very fantastical Second Ether stories about pirates in some alternative version of space: 'Blood: A Southern Fantasy' (1994), 'Fabulous Harbours' (1995) and 'The War Amongst The Angels' (1996), for me too 'rich' in terms of their fantastical nature to be that enjoyable.
Michael Moorcock's work will not appeal to everyone even among young men. However, if you are seeking something different in your reading that may be based in one genre but is liable to jump over the boundaries from time to time, then Moorcock's work is well worth looking at. There is such an assortment that many people will find something of interest among it. Expect to be challenged and expect for the ideas that are raised, even in a seemingly adventurous fantasy story, to nag at you long after you have finished the book. I am glad Moorcock is still writing, his latest book, a Doctor Who one, 'The Coming of the Terraphiles' (2010) possibly indicates that whilst he may not be mainstream, mainstream science fiction audiences are once again ready to delve into his ideas. This book is apparently jammed full of Moorcockian references including the Captain Cornelius and the multiverse.
Saturday, 5 March 2011
How Inflexible The System Is When You Get Temporary Work
As I have often noted on this blog, I have now been out of work for nine months. I have had a little work, adding up to a total of 7 weeks and 3 days, which I suppose means that I have only been unemployed for six months and twenty-seven days. However, that ephemeral work hardly felt like a proper job and certainly my career is no less derailed than when I was made redundant last June. I have been signing on at the Job Centre Plus and fulfilling all their requirements very carefully. After six months, the contribution-based Jobseeker's Allowance ran out, but I could not get the Income-based Jobseeker's Allowance, because I happened to live in a house with a woman who ran her own business that meant she worke more than 24 hours per week. It did not matter that in a good year she earnt £12,000 (€14,280; US$18,120) per year and due to the recession was making a loss, so she was not in much position to contribute to the household income. The fact that she worked more than 24 hours meant I got no unemployment benefit or mortgage interest benefit; I did get National Insurance credits, but of course never see them, they just go to another part of the civil service. Hence the rush to dispose of the house before it was repossessed. This is one reason why there is a difference between the number of people who are unemployed and the number of people receiving benefit for being unemployed. David Cameron notes very proudly when the latter figure goes down as if it was a benefit to the entire country rather than just the Treasury. In fact, all it marks is that another set of people have fallen foul of the tricksy regulations around such benefits. They do nothing to encourage people to try even harder to find work, they simply cut off even the meagre benefits they are receiving.
The requirements of signing on, even if you are not actually receiving benefits, mean that you have to be 'actively looking for work', this entails carrying out three activities (e.g. going to the Job Centre, reading a newspaper, calling an employment agency) each week. I was also compelled to apply for two jobs each week and after six months to apply for any job that I was deemed to be suitable for. This latter condition was quite laughable, because even in my own industry I got such negative (even hostile at times) feedback from some interviews that it seemed that even trying to get back into work I had done before, I was no longer seen as 'suitable'.
I was also encouraged to find temporary and part-time work. I am not averse to that, as proven by my two periods of temporary work. I am signed up with three employment agencies, but they seem unable to find anything for me. In a depression as we are currently experiencing, unemployment figures are kept lower by people who previously had full-time jobs taking part-time and temporary work. This is why female unemployment tends to rise slower and fall quicker, because a lot of such jobs, for example, in caring and retail, tend to appoint women rather than men. In the UK we consider someone going even on to say 18 hours per week, to no longer be unemployed, even though previously they had always worked 37.5 hours per week.
So, as in the 1980s, with a weak economy, temporary work is back in flavour. Do the government and local authorities then make it easy for someone to go in and out of temporary work so as to encourage people to take it up? Of course not. If the work is anything over a week you have to sign off from the Job Centre. Even if you just do 6 days' part-time work you have to start all over again with the application form and having the interviews and stating what you will do to find work. The cost of doing this for people who have found one or two weeks' work must be phenomenal. I turned up after my week's work and had to write and say everything that had precisely been on my file less than a fortnight earlier. Of course, having a new claim means there is a delay in getting benefits. If you have worked for a week or a fortnight, you are unlikely to be paid until the end of that month, in my case and many others, not until the end of the following month, so taking on work, in the short term, leaves you short of funds whilst the benefits are processed once again. This is hardly an incentive to take on temporary work, especially when your housing benefit is dependent on you receiving Jobseeker's Allowance.
There is a further complication which does nothing to reduce unemployment in the longer term. After six months of signing on for Jobseeker's Allowance you begin to become eligible for training courses. These can vary between a short course on a particular package to the Department of Work & Pensions allowing you to attend a college a certain number of days per week to entirely retrain without them stopping your benefits. The trouble is, even if you take a week's temporary work, your 'clock' is reset to zero. So after my one week's work in November I returned to sign on as if I had not been unemployed for the preceding five months. Once I finish my current work I will again start as if I had not been unemployed for half of last year and part of this year. I have been in work for only 7 weeks out of 30 but when I sign on again the 23 weeks of unemployment are disregarded and I have to start again being unemployed for six months before I can go on training.
It seems apparent after applying for seventy positions and attending 22 interviews that my sector is in trouble. Many sectors are, but I might widen my chances by retraining. However, nine fragmented months of unemployment does not count, it has to be six months unbroken. I have been encouraged to take temporary work and certainly welcome the little bits of money it has brought in. However, in terms of getting me into a permanent job or even one that lasts six months rather than just six weeks, I have done myself, and thus the state, a disfavour. Again, very short-sighted policies make it harder not easier to get off benefits for the long term.
Dealing with the Department of Work & Pensions, time after time, saying the same thing again and again just because you have got bits of work. Dealing with the local authorities is far harder. In the UK local councils pay out the benefits to help with your council tax payments (effectively giving you a discount on that) and housing benefit (which is currently being constrained far more by central government). Now every council has different rules and procedures for applying for such benefit. The town I am currently in, sends print outs covering four sheets of A4 paper every time there is even a minimal change to your circumstances.
When our student lodger left one week earlier than planned we had four pages of calculations to tell us we would receive £3.95 (€4.70; US$5.96) more in council tax benefit than previously advised. When I first signed on they sent me a council tax refund which I felt was short-sighted of them, and it has proven to be the case. Taking my first week's temporary work before Christmas led them to send me a form to complete again, this covered 16 pages, though fortunately most of it was irrelevant.
The woman in my house was again sent an even longer form which requested all details of her business. It contained patronising advice about how she should run her business and wanted all the details of her private and business accounts and three months' worth of income, though of course, they had had this data just a few weeks before. She was angry at this request, because as she pointed out, it was me, not her who was claiming the benefit.
Now, I have had six weeks' work and my Jobseeker's Allowance stopped when I started the work. Within days of me doing that, I receive a demand from the council for the outstanding council tax, which is £280 (€333; US$422), which is just £27 more than the refund they gave me last summer. Of course, again I was not paid until the end of February, but the demand was to be paid on 6th February. How is it that the council assumes that the moment you start work, you suddenly have money? I wish it was the case, but in fact, again I had to wait until 28th February to get any pay for the work I did in January and will have to wait to the very end of this month for the work I did in February.
When you have been out of work as long as me, you do not have a slush fund to suddenly pay off new demands. In addition after this later, six weeks of employment, we have to start all over again, as if the council never knew anything about me. There is a good chance that they will have to refund some of the money I paid out at the start of February (having had to borrow more to cover it until I got paid). Is this efficient? No. I have a file full of paper about this, with money going back and forth between me and the council on the basis of some very complex formula which must be using up council funds to administer, if this is how much work, just my single case generates.
Temporary work is by definition a temporary solution, it is not a permanent job. Even so-called permanent jobs these days are only 1 or 2-year contracts, not really enough time to become established. We are in a context in which in a desire to see the unemployment figures fall even a little, civil servants will encourage you to take short-term temporary work. However, given that mass unemployment is going to be a characteristic of the next few years, probably the rest of this decade, we need to move to a benefit system that actually encourages you not only to take temporary work, but to be honest about it when you do. Making you jump through tiresome administrative hoops due to a few weeks' or even just days' work is wasteful and encourages people simply to conceal their temporary work. The attitude of my local council, which I accept is probably not universal, but is likely to be occurring in quite a few towns, is ridiculous, with no appreciation of how people are paid in the 21st century or how just because you have a job does not mean suddenly you have lots of money. In fact, for the initial days and weeks, you are liable to be worse off, having to pay for transport costs, clean clothes, food for lunches, etc.
My suggestion is that claims should simply be suspended for 4 weeks (perhaps 8 weeks would be better) when you get temporary work. Your 'clock' for eligibility for free training should be frozen, not reset. If you go back unemployed within that time you should not be compelled to make a new claim, simply pick up where you left off. Councils should levy no charges on people until they have been at work for at least a month if not six weeks. In this way you will encourage people to take temporary work knowing they are not suddenly going to get demands for money the day they start it.
A little realism will make life a great deal easier for people, and in fact, save the central and local governments money by reducing all this duplicated paperwork they insist you do.When I got the one week's work, even before I had done the job I had a demand from the council that I provide two consecutive pay slips (which was never going to happen for a job lasting a week). I pointed out that I had not actually received any pay for the job yet and would not do so until the end of the following month. They did not seem to understand that these days most people are paid a month in arrears. They seem to think all temporary work is cash in hand. However, then, why do they think you would get two pay slips? In most jobs you get one per month. Ultimately I was compelled to send a certificate of earnings to be completed by my employer. The council demanded that this was completed before the month I had worked in was up, even though I did not actually receive any pay for a further four weeks. When I pointed this out, I was told I had to apply for a delay on the demand, generating yet more paper. Why cannot the council simply come into the 21st century and see how people work and are paid these days?
Since the 1980s, many employers in the public, as well as the private, sector have liked having part-time and temporary workers because they have fewer rights. This gap has been narrowed a great deal, but a relative of mine was laid off after 12 months in her job with the employer explicitly saying that it was so that she did not qualify for the rights that come after a year in employment, such as being able to take an employer to a tribunal (this is being extended to 2 years at the moment). There is an assumption by employers and the current government, that if you give people rights at work, somehow they will instantly use them and burden the company 'unnecessarily'. This shows the enduring arrogance of too many employers and their supporters in government. There is apparently no recognition that the constant 'churn' of workers on this basis actually costs companies money, not least in regular training of new staff and the inefficiency of people who have no experience in the company. However, flexibility is king and these benefits are dismissed.
The requirements of signing on, even if you are not actually receiving benefits, mean that you have to be 'actively looking for work', this entails carrying out three activities (e.g. going to the Job Centre, reading a newspaper, calling an employment agency) each week. I was also compelled to apply for two jobs each week and after six months to apply for any job that I was deemed to be suitable for. This latter condition was quite laughable, because even in my own industry I got such negative (even hostile at times) feedback from some interviews that it seemed that even trying to get back into work I had done before, I was no longer seen as 'suitable'.
I was also encouraged to find temporary and part-time work. I am not averse to that, as proven by my two periods of temporary work. I am signed up with three employment agencies, but they seem unable to find anything for me. In a depression as we are currently experiencing, unemployment figures are kept lower by people who previously had full-time jobs taking part-time and temporary work. This is why female unemployment tends to rise slower and fall quicker, because a lot of such jobs, for example, in caring and retail, tend to appoint women rather than men. In the UK we consider someone going even on to say 18 hours per week, to no longer be unemployed, even though previously they had always worked 37.5 hours per week.
So, as in the 1980s, with a weak economy, temporary work is back in flavour. Do the government and local authorities then make it easy for someone to go in and out of temporary work so as to encourage people to take it up? Of course not. If the work is anything over a week you have to sign off from the Job Centre. Even if you just do 6 days' part-time work you have to start all over again with the application form and having the interviews and stating what you will do to find work. The cost of doing this for people who have found one or two weeks' work must be phenomenal. I turned up after my week's work and had to write and say everything that had precisely been on my file less than a fortnight earlier. Of course, having a new claim means there is a delay in getting benefits. If you have worked for a week or a fortnight, you are unlikely to be paid until the end of that month, in my case and many others, not until the end of the following month, so taking on work, in the short term, leaves you short of funds whilst the benefits are processed once again. This is hardly an incentive to take on temporary work, especially when your housing benefit is dependent on you receiving Jobseeker's Allowance.
There is a further complication which does nothing to reduce unemployment in the longer term. After six months of signing on for Jobseeker's Allowance you begin to become eligible for training courses. These can vary between a short course on a particular package to the Department of Work & Pensions allowing you to attend a college a certain number of days per week to entirely retrain without them stopping your benefits. The trouble is, even if you take a week's temporary work, your 'clock' is reset to zero. So after my one week's work in November I returned to sign on as if I had not been unemployed for the preceding five months. Once I finish my current work I will again start as if I had not been unemployed for half of last year and part of this year. I have been in work for only 7 weeks out of 30 but when I sign on again the 23 weeks of unemployment are disregarded and I have to start again being unemployed for six months before I can go on training.
It seems apparent after applying for seventy positions and attending 22 interviews that my sector is in trouble. Many sectors are, but I might widen my chances by retraining. However, nine fragmented months of unemployment does not count, it has to be six months unbroken. I have been encouraged to take temporary work and certainly welcome the little bits of money it has brought in. However, in terms of getting me into a permanent job or even one that lasts six months rather than just six weeks, I have done myself, and thus the state, a disfavour. Again, very short-sighted policies make it harder not easier to get off benefits for the long term.
Dealing with the Department of Work & Pensions, time after time, saying the same thing again and again just because you have got bits of work. Dealing with the local authorities is far harder. In the UK local councils pay out the benefits to help with your council tax payments (effectively giving you a discount on that) and housing benefit (which is currently being constrained far more by central government). Now every council has different rules and procedures for applying for such benefit. The town I am currently in, sends print outs covering four sheets of A4 paper every time there is even a minimal change to your circumstances.
When our student lodger left one week earlier than planned we had four pages of calculations to tell us we would receive £3.95 (€4.70; US$5.96) more in council tax benefit than previously advised. When I first signed on they sent me a council tax refund which I felt was short-sighted of them, and it has proven to be the case. Taking my first week's temporary work before Christmas led them to send me a form to complete again, this covered 16 pages, though fortunately most of it was irrelevant.
The woman in my house was again sent an even longer form which requested all details of her business. It contained patronising advice about how she should run her business and wanted all the details of her private and business accounts and three months' worth of income, though of course, they had had this data just a few weeks before. She was angry at this request, because as she pointed out, it was me, not her who was claiming the benefit.
Now, I have had six weeks' work and my Jobseeker's Allowance stopped when I started the work. Within days of me doing that, I receive a demand from the council for the outstanding council tax, which is £280 (€333; US$422), which is just £27 more than the refund they gave me last summer. Of course, again I was not paid until the end of February, but the demand was to be paid on 6th February. How is it that the council assumes that the moment you start work, you suddenly have money? I wish it was the case, but in fact, again I had to wait until 28th February to get any pay for the work I did in January and will have to wait to the very end of this month for the work I did in February.
When you have been out of work as long as me, you do not have a slush fund to suddenly pay off new demands. In addition after this later, six weeks of employment, we have to start all over again, as if the council never knew anything about me. There is a good chance that they will have to refund some of the money I paid out at the start of February (having had to borrow more to cover it until I got paid). Is this efficient? No. I have a file full of paper about this, with money going back and forth between me and the council on the basis of some very complex formula which must be using up council funds to administer, if this is how much work, just my single case generates.
Temporary work is by definition a temporary solution, it is not a permanent job. Even so-called permanent jobs these days are only 1 or 2-year contracts, not really enough time to become established. We are in a context in which in a desire to see the unemployment figures fall even a little, civil servants will encourage you to take short-term temporary work. However, given that mass unemployment is going to be a characteristic of the next few years, probably the rest of this decade, we need to move to a benefit system that actually encourages you not only to take temporary work, but to be honest about it when you do. Making you jump through tiresome administrative hoops due to a few weeks' or even just days' work is wasteful and encourages people simply to conceal their temporary work. The attitude of my local council, which I accept is probably not universal, but is likely to be occurring in quite a few towns, is ridiculous, with no appreciation of how people are paid in the 21st century or how just because you have a job does not mean suddenly you have lots of money. In fact, for the initial days and weeks, you are liable to be worse off, having to pay for transport costs, clean clothes, food for lunches, etc.
My suggestion is that claims should simply be suspended for 4 weeks (perhaps 8 weeks would be better) when you get temporary work. Your 'clock' for eligibility for free training should be frozen, not reset. If you go back unemployed within that time you should not be compelled to make a new claim, simply pick up where you left off. Councils should levy no charges on people until they have been at work for at least a month if not six weeks. In this way you will encourage people to take temporary work knowing they are not suddenly going to get demands for money the day they start it.
A little realism will make life a great deal easier for people, and in fact, save the central and local governments money by reducing all this duplicated paperwork they insist you do.When I got the one week's work, even before I had done the job I had a demand from the council that I provide two consecutive pay slips (which was never going to happen for a job lasting a week). I pointed out that I had not actually received any pay for the job yet and would not do so until the end of the following month. They did not seem to understand that these days most people are paid a month in arrears. They seem to think all temporary work is cash in hand. However, then, why do they think you would get two pay slips? In most jobs you get one per month. Ultimately I was compelled to send a certificate of earnings to be completed by my employer. The council demanded that this was completed before the month I had worked in was up, even though I did not actually receive any pay for a further four weeks. When I pointed this out, I was told I had to apply for a delay on the demand, generating yet more paper. Why cannot the council simply come into the 21st century and see how people work and are paid these days?
Since the 1980s, many employers in the public, as well as the private, sector have liked having part-time and temporary workers because they have fewer rights. This gap has been narrowed a great deal, but a relative of mine was laid off after 12 months in her job with the employer explicitly saying that it was so that she did not qualify for the rights that come after a year in employment, such as being able to take an employer to a tribunal (this is being extended to 2 years at the moment). There is an assumption by employers and the current government, that if you give people rights at work, somehow they will instantly use them and burden the company 'unnecessarily'. This shows the enduring arrogance of too many employers and their supporters in government. There is apparently no recognition that the constant 'churn' of workers on this basis actually costs companies money, not least in regular training of new staff and the inefficiency of people who have no experience in the company. However, flexibility is king and these benefits are dismissed.
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