The 20th Century

20th Century Fox (Alien 3)

Alan Moore talks to John Higgs about the 20th Century

John Higgs - author of Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century - talks to Alan Moore about how The 20th Century has been portrayed in his work - in particular From Hell, Providence and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century.

Alan Moore has described 

Stranger Than We Can Imagine as, 

"An illuminating work of massive insight... 

I cannot recommend this 

magnificent work too highly."

Huge thanks to Chris Atkins and all 

at the Lodge Studios, Northampton

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Higgs : .....There's a lot of your work, uh that says quite a lot of interesting things about The 20th Century.

I've certainly 

Higgs : The first thing that sprung to mind was was From Hell, was an idea in From Hell, which was a big inspiration of my KLF book; but the idea was, that The Act of Jack The Rippe was what gave birth to The 20th Century -- I was just curious where that idea came from?

Well that was my conceit um that resolved a lot of the material that had uh emerged during my research into prell okay um when I was just looking into the 1880s I noticed all of these things that had happened that I think in 1882 uh mitchelson and moley actually performed the experiments which were meant to iron a couple of last wrinkles in the theory of The Ether but ended up completely disproving that ether existed um which was a kind of result but not the one that they were looking for you'd got France going into Indochina um you had got uh the beginnings of the um the modern art movement uh with Walter siket You' got uh some of the first kind of modern realist writings with people like Emil Zola uh you'd got um a surprising amount of focusing upon prostitutes in literature in the Arts um and all of these things which had gone on to really color and shape the 20th century and then in 1888 these senseless violent murders um it just seemed to me that symbolically uh I could kind of um position the Jack the Ripper murders as the birth throws uh of the 20th century with Jack the Ripper as a kind of really ghastly Midwife yeah yeah and there's the the Reading Providence whole tabloid sort of thing growing up around it in that sort of violent sort of Stew so it sort of yeah does what what struck me about reading Providence even though it's it's not so overtly about the 20th century is the the lovecraftian worldview probably sums up uh that time better even than you know my book or anything deliberately about the about the the 20th century is it do you do you see it as a well yeah I mean I see uh researching Providence um was quite an eye opener uh and it changed my opinion of Lovecraft not of his stature as a writer in fact I think that only continues to increase the more I think about him um but more of an understanding of him in relation to his times um the thing is Lovecraft is generally positioned as an outsider probably because that was the name of one of his most famous stories so it's it's not much of a reach but you have look at Lovecraft he was um he was homophobic uh this at a time when um gay men principally gay men some gay women as well but that was different uh were starting to emerge um quite vocally and very visibly onto the streets of New York um there was a huge guy subculture um in the early 20th century New York it wasn't just something that started after the second world war um and these were becoming more visible you'd got women I mean Lovecraft was certainly not a misogynist but uh he was perhaps somewhat awkward or conflicted in his relationships with women this was at a time when women were just about to get the vote um there had been 20 years of the biggest influx of immigrants that America had ever seen up until 1910 1920 um and that had led to conservative fears that uh American identity was going to be lost beneath the tital wave of misation in breeding sort of uh that um all of these fears were exactly those of the war middle class Common Man I mean the Russian Revolution had just happened in 1917 um and in America there were all of these strikes which at the time looked like oh it's going to happen over here uh in fact most people when you talk about the Red Scare they think oh that's the 1950s that's McCarthyism the Red Scare was 1919 and in some ways Lovecraft became a perfect barometer because he was so sensitive so unbearably sensitive then all of the fears of the early 20th century including the fears [Music] of man's relegation in importance given what we were starting to understand about the cosmos Lovecraft was unlike other people of his day he actually understood that stuff he was very quick he didn't like Einstein but he was very quick to assimilate Einstein's ideas he didn't like quantum theory but he almost understood it um yeah this was it he in some ways his stories represented the kind of landscape of fear the the territory of fear um for the 20th century as a whole m he he didn't like the modernists at all in terms of writing and things like that but he was conflicted he was a closet modernist himself I mean yeah he he hated Gertrude St TS Elliott James Joyce um he wrote a brilliantly funny and actually very well written parody of the Weiss land called Weiss paper uh but you actually look at lovecraft's writing and much as he's decro all of the modernists and much as he's bigging up his favorite 18th century authors people like Pope um actually Lovecraft is a modernist he's using stream of Consciousness techniques he is using um glossolalia more impenetrable than anything INF finigan white um he is using techniques of deliberately alienating the reader or confusing the reader um his descriptions tend to be along the lines of here three things that cthul who doesn't look like uh or he'll describe the color out of space as only a color by analogy so what is it a sound is it a rough texture or a smell what um these are deliberate kind of techniques they're not flaws they are techniques that alien it the reader of putting the reader into an uncanny space where language is no longer capable of describing the experience yeah and it Lovecraft that sort of for horror it was it was all the the gothic horror had sort of gone it was just a sort of modern horror that's yeah well that that's important because all horror or most horror up to Lovecraft uh at all been predicated upon uh the gothic tradition which is a tradition where you have an enormous vertical white in time that is bearing down upon a fragile present uh a history of dark things in the past that are leading up to some terrifying Den Numa in the present day um with Lovecraft yes there is uh an awful lot of talking about remote Antiquity and the past but with Lovecraft I think that it's a much more more present horror of the future uh he's talking about that time when man will be able to organize all of his knowledge and um when that time comes the only question is whether we will Embrace this new Illuminating Light or whether we will flee from it into the reassuring Shadows of a new Dark Age yeah which is very preent um given say current to fundamentalism um which is a direct a response to um too much knowledge too much information let's take it all back to something that we're sure of that God created the world in six dies um yeah in that way Lovecraft was sort of uh yeah he was really exploring all of the he was a very is still a very contemporary writer I think that if you wanted to do as Mel morco did in the 60s Mel morco was mainly interested in modernism uh in he noticed that the science fiction genre was laying around with its wheels off and that nobody was doing much with it apart from kind of cowboys in space so he thought why don't we hijack this and make science fiction a vehicle for modernism M um and then yeah JG balard all the rest uh I think you could do the same thing with Lovecraft alone amongst horror riters yeah I think that lovecraft's preoccupations were so forward-looking that uh and his writing techniques were so unusual that yet you could use Lovecraft as the starting point for a new kind of modern horror if you will Century cuz that sense of linking the 20th century to this sort of impending horror um reminds me a bit of of uh Century your League of Extraordinary Gentlemen uh volume three the century one that which for my mind is is probably the bleakest uh of all the league sort of thing if you think that's fair it's got that sense that the the uh creative imagination Withers away during the 20th century is is is that what you're aiming for yes it was um I got quite a bit of criticism for that I know that people were saying after reading the the third book they said that it was my equivalent of saying it were all fields around here once um which it wasn't that wasn't what I was saying uh but what I was saying was um that I don't think it was unfair to choose the Beggars Opera as represent presenting a um a big important cultural event of 1910 mhm I don't think it was unfair choosing Donald camel's performance as representing a big important cultural event in 1969 and I don't think it was unfair choosing JK rowlings Harry Potter as representing a big cultural event from the early 21st century mhm um I would say that if you were to plot those things upon a graph the line isn't going up yes um I think that it's a fair comment yeah that our approach to culture has um in the mainstream has degenerated the the values that people used to put into a work of art those have been eroded uh and yeah I was trying [Music] to express that in the league of of Extraordinary Gentlemen because the whole of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen it's about this massive planet of fiction MH that has been a kind of a counterpart to our own world for as long as we've had fiction M um that we've made up this world that um it's the world we want the the exciting world where exciting things happen and meaningful things happen yeah um and if you look at those two worlds there's interesting points of comparison that they had similar events that shaped them but uh slightly different and they worked out slightly differently and so yeah in Century it was using the league to look at the 20th century from the point of view of 20th century culture and to draw what conclusions seemed uh accurate --

Um,  I wasn't saying that all Culture in the late 20th century was rubbish; I wasn't saying that Culture was doomed; 

I was saying that mainstream culture um was becoming repetitive um was not having original ideas would no longer be capable of coming up with a performance let alone a Thro the Opera yeah it's I mean what struck me Science Fiction when I was I was doing my 20th century book was uh especially all the guys who took us into space took us into the moon so guy cor of w v braa uh the importance of um Jules Vern to them to of you know and in that culture of book Rogers and and and Flash Gordon and things like that and I was thinking about that when I was watching do you know have you seen um Prometheus the it's really it's really Grim it's uh basically they realize Humanity's being um built by aliens so they go off to find these aliens and they finally find an alienist to say oh oh Godlike thing why did you create us and the alien um goes oh what are these things do being still around it just starts like punching them in the face to sort of kill them and it's about as o Bleak an idea as you can imagine and I just kind of wonder if W Von Brawn and and those guys were growing up with that level of Science Fiction whether they've been quite so Keen to sort of go to the moon and sort of push us forward well I mean I think that uh I mean Science Fiction it's interesting what the way that science fiction was handled in the 20th century um I mean science fiction all right there's a lot of precursors for it but um a a non-controversial starting point would probably be Mary shell Frankenstein yeah um and then you'd move on to people like Wells and ver um about a century later uh now all of those are um actually kind of grim warning visions of the potential future they are potentially alarmist about the nature of technology and what it will mean um with Mary shell she was reacting to the Industrial Revolution which was actually starting up around her while she was writing Frankenstein in 1814 or whatever it was um Wells he is um all of his science f books are for the most part dystopias um the time machine with its view of the class system of wells's day even more stratified literally so that you've got workingclass cannibals living underground and feeding upon these Dopey drippy middle class sort of um food animals basically it's the austerity Jules Verne story sort of exactly it's so and jores Vern now obviously jores Vern is getting much more of a kick out of his big machines but he always says and imagine if these machines were to fall into the hands of a mad man like Captain Nemo who I secretly admire but at least it is a warning uh 1910 1915 America discovers science fiction in the form of Tom Swift um and it is a different thing alog together it is not about giving doal warnings for the future it is about saying look how great America's going to be in the future it's almost I suspect like um the tendency in older Nations when we want to Big ourselves up is to reach back to the past to something imaginary in the past like King Arthur or something like that America hasn't got that amount of History to deal with so in some ways what America needs is science fiction when we're trying to say look at what we were then America more or less has to say look at what we will be um and so their science fiction from the 1920s with the boom of the pul magazines it was all of this bright optimistic New Frontier stuff where it was going to be cowboy and Indians all over again only it was going to be earthmen and neptunians but you could just go through the whole of the the the tropes of the western genre and Pioneer fiction but in space and it became this uh in my opinion that was probably one of the worst things that ever happened to science fiction it took until the late 1940s after Hiroshima for these new voices that had got a radical sense of Doubt uh to start to creep back into science fiction and that gave a brilliant era probably the best ERA of Science Fiction um from say like 40s to the mid '70s when George Lucas brought out Star Wars a piece of fundamentalist science fiction if ever there was one and turned the clocks back mhm to to the science fiction ideas of 50 years before cuz now Black Mirror with the Pig we're in in the position that whole idea between science fiction and the real world interacting with each other now we get things like black mirror with the pig and then on Monday that's no longer science fiction that's the uh whether this whether this is the sort of level of uh of of of uh leeway between fiction and non-fiction that we wanted at the end of this period Well I mean like I have said in the past that I believe that the membrane between fiction and fact is porous and semi-permeable and I have become used to my most ridiculous ideas um whether that be coming up with v Vendetta and then suddenly seeing a load of go Forks M anarchists invading the world stage um which is a good thing uh or the having come up with the idea related to my film Project Jimmy's end of having a Sinister clown manifesting in various locations around Northampton and returning from holiday and finding that a Sinister clown had manifested in Northampton at the end of my street about 100 yards from my front door you start to get the impression that um yes sometimes things can kind of percolate through from the realm of ideas into the realm of actuality I would say to Charlie Brooker um that it's his own fault that sort of he shouldn't have written about British prime ministers in an Unholy relationship with a pig if he didn't want this to happen you know so happy now this is assuming of course uh Conclusion that it's not true which I just I like to think it probably isn't true and that Lord Ashcroft is enough of a [ __ ] to have done that but part part of me it just sort of it fits a bit too well it just feels a bit too much like a real occult initiation sort of ceremony I I remember somebody saying this might have been someone like Mark mothers B from dvo saying about the the idea of Donnie and Marie Osmond um being married and he was saying yeah I know that that's not really true but in my heart it's true and I think that that is the way that I feel about the revelations about David Cameron that sort of uh we all know that in his secret Soul David Cameron is exactly the man who would do something like that if he has not done it literally he has certainly done it metaphorically uh so uh yeah I say that sort of without a shred of evidence that I am going to believe that for the rest of my life lovely thanks very much Alan we will go forward to the 21st century with that as the start of our Dr of imagination thank you