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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator, and I'm very pleased to be joined this week by the legendary

science fiction and fantasy writer Michael Morkock, who's not producing a new book,

but we're celebrating the 60th anniversary of his transformative editorship

of the science fiction magazine New Worlds,

which is being commemorated with a special commemorative edition.

My nostalgia, as your old friend and collaborator,

Alan Moore, tend to think, is a kind of, is an emotion to be treated with suspicion?

Is nostalgia something that actuated this, or what were you looking to do?

I don't know. I've always agreed on that. I hate nostalgia. I'm no interest in it. But like

how I tend to use images and popular stuff from the past, partly to, I don't know, illustrate a form of

autobiography. So it does have a place, but it's not, we're not looking

back and saying, God, those were great days or, you know, oh, I wish I had another copy of Tiger Tim or,

you know, or the Mickey Mouse Weekly or whatever it is we're using. It's used more in the way that the pop artists, I think, were using it in the 60s, people

like Pau Lutzi and Richard Hamilton, in that they were signifiers, really, more than they

had anything to do with feelings of, they certainly didn't have any romantic feelings or that sort of, well,

the nostalgia of any kind, whether it's ruins or, or all perfectly good old buildings,

or perfectly good old magazines or whatever. That was just it. That was our stance. And we certainly

were anti-nistalgia if we were anything.

...