michael-moorcock-interview-dr-who-the-coming-of-the-terraphiles

The Doctor as a character has a lot in common with some of your characters: he's something of a dandy; he's something of an anarchist while also being a bit of an authority figure… you can stretch it to say he's an exile from a decadent empire…

MM: Yeah, well, also… I mean, it's purely coincidental, but both Jerry Cornelius and Dr Who can regenerate. In Cornelius' case of course he can change sex; he's more like Captain Jack than Dr Who in that sense.

I think it would be good to have a female Dr Who at some point.

MM: Yeah, I thought they might have one this time. I think Karen Gillan, who plays Amy Pond, would've made a good Dr Who, so it's a shame she didn't get the job. It could've been the other way around, you know.

I've not had a chance to read The Coming of the Terraphiles yet, but I know that in your previous books you've used time travel a lot, you've explored the nature of time and identity; have you used the book to explore those ideas further, or have you just had fun with it?

MM: A bit. And I've had fun with it. But in a way it enabled me to reclaim stuff that had filtered into Dr Who from stuff that I'd originally done. That happens when you're my age and working in popular fiction; it spreads through the genre. But some of the stuff, I felt that it was like a tool that I'd invented for a specific purpose, which gets into a genre and then gets, in my view, wasted. Like the whole multiverse thing. It's fine, but when it goes into DC comics and becomes an excuse to explain why Superman is in two places at the same time or whatever, that's when it gets a bit irritating. But I actually did the same thing with DC in that they asked me to do a bible, a sort of cosmology, so I basically did the same thing that I did with Dr Who: I thought okay, you pinched it from me, now I'll take it back, and make it coherent at least - or as far as I can do. It's not something that keeps me awake at night or anything, but it's just a good chance to deal with it.

But Dr Who is a comedy; it's predominantly comedy, but with a big idea, and that's what I like about Dr Who. When it's at its best it seems to have both those angles. So what I wanted to do is... I'm a great PG Wodehouse fan, I was reading PG Wodehouse since I was a kid, and I wanted to do a space opera in the manner of PG Wodehouse. So far, people who've read it seem to have found it funny, and that's all you ask for.

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