Long London, Magic, comics and dystopias

Art by Carlos Dearmas

Excerpt from an interview published on the Observer the 1st of May. 

You can read the complete piece HERE. 

What is the idea behind Long London?
Alan Moore: I had an urge to investigate shadowy London, the horse tipsters, gangsters, record producers and other lowlife characters. I’ve created a narrative that could include them, which collides happily with the idea of another London hidden behind our own. There’s a wonderful short story called N by Arthur Machen that suggested our London was a flimsy curtain hung before a blazing, eternal paradisal London.

A sort of Platonic shadow of London?
Exactly. It starts in 1949, when London had been physically and psychologically reduced to rubble. I was born in 1953, and it took me decades to realise that the adults I was growing up among were suffering from PTSD. [...]

You are ‘divorced’ from your earlier works like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, but they are powerfully predictive, rather than histories.
They were never meant to be predictive. Friends want me to write something nice. Why do I have to keep doing these terrible dystopian stories that then actually happen? [...]

You have become a magician, and not the rabbit-out-of-a-hat kind. Do some ideas have magical properties?

When I became a magician at the age of 40, I took it very seriously, and it has transformed my life. There’s no difference between magic and creativity. One part of magic is changing the consciousness of other people. Writing has always been the best way of doing that. [...] I think a lot of us have forgotten what art is for. It’s an engine of human progress. Art and culture stay with us. It’s the wars we’re ashamed of.

The complete interview is available HERE.

Un Nuovo Mondo (bis)

Fanucci will publish the Italian edition of I Hear a New World at the end of May, basically at the same time as the English-language edition. 

The Italian edition had previously been announced for March, as a sort of... world premiere! 

Non ci si può più fidare. You can't trust anyone any more (maybe March/May... that was a typo! Maybe...)

But that's not all. 

To my great disappointment, the Italian edition won't feature Nico Delort's stunning cover illustration (which was in their March announcement), but a "variation", certainly a bland one, imho (to use a mild adjective), attributed (I quote the internal credits) to "© Darren Hendley - stock.adobe.com (elaborazione)".
I suspect it's a matter of economic optimization dynamics. Nuff said!

Male molto male. 

 

You can find all the info: here. 

Magic, Comics and... Long London upcoming books

Art by Nicola Testoni

Excerpts from an interview posted yesterday on RetroFuturista.com. A great one! 

Highly recommended! 

Alan Moore: [...] My understanding of magic has evolved massively over the thirty-three years since I commenced my study and practice. For one thing, I have come to understand that magic and the arts, particularly writing, are to all intents and purposes synonymous. Thus, while magic is the way in which I see the world and therefore affects every area of my life, nowhere is this more true than in my writing. Indeed, these days, writing is pretty much my only form of magical expression. My guess is that this, writing being the most powerful instrument of magic, has been true for most self-identified magicians – and what other kind is there? – since the dawn of human consciousness. [...]

Nothing against middle-class people, of course. It’s simply that the comic strip form was originally conceived as by, for and about the working classes, who were its audience and, for my money, its very best creators. That is the comics field I’d like to see, brimming with new ideas and available to everyone, but, realistically, I don’t imagine that is ever going to happen, so I’ve chosen to put my remaining energies elsewhere. [...]

If you like, I see myself as a piece of language that is somehow generating other pieces of language. [...]

To be honest, I’ve never really thought about the audience’s reaction too much, as it’s something I have no say in or control over. The only audience I’ve ever been attempting to please is, perhaps selfishly, myself. [...]

I’m currently nearing the end of the third book in my Long London quintet, this being titled Blow Away, Dandelion and set in the late 1960s, whereas the next book, In England’s Dreaming, will set in the late 1970s. The final book, And No River of Fire, will be set in 1999, on the eve of the current millennium. I have genuinely no idea what I’ll be doing after that point, so we’ll all just have to wait and see.  

Read the complete interview HERE! 

Un Nuovo Mondo

On their Instagram page, Fanucci has announced that they will publish the Italian edition of I hear a new world... in March 2026!!!  

The sequel to The Great When, a dark and haunting journey through the streets of London – real or imagined – from a legend of modern fantasy.

It seems the Italian book will be available before the original English language version scheduled for... May 2026! 

Weird word! 

I hear a new world: cover art!

Above, the cover for I hear a new world, the second book of Long London quintet, has been revealed!!! Art, of course, by Nicolas Delort!

The book is scheduled for May 2026 release.

I hear... Long London Vol. 2 calling me

The second book of Long London quintet seems to be scheduled for May 2026 release.

We already know that the title is a reference to English record producer and songwriter Joe Meek (picture above). And now, we have a synopsis too. 

It's 1958 and Dennis Knuckleyard has decided to leave his adventures in the Great When in the past where they belong. For nine years, he's avoided so much as thinking about the magical version of London, until he rediscovers an unpleasant reminder of his last adventure-a key that he'd secretly brought into his own world from the other for safekeeping.

But while Dennis may believe he's done with the Great When, it's far from done with him. When Dennis gives the key to a friend, its magical properties reawaken, bringing creatures from the other world into Dennis's and sparking riots in Notting Hill. Even worse, Dennis's old crush Grace Shilling has been forced into the Great When to investigate strange happenings in both cities.

Desperate to keep Grace safe, Dennis follows her into Long London. But once inside the other city, it will not let him go away again so easily, and Dennis and Grace must fight to set things right in the Great When and their own world, or forever lose their lives-and each other.

Full of Moore's characteristically stunning world building and rollicking prose, I Hear a New World is the extraordinary second adventure in the Long London series.

Source: Amazon - Google Books

3 novels and The Great When

Transcript of a video posted yesterday on YouTube. You can watch it HERE. 

Moore visited his local Waterstones in Northampton to reveal more about The Great When, and three novels that played into his writing of it.  

The Great When has just been released in paperback format. 

Alan Moore: [...] The Great When is the first of five books in the Long London series which is an excavation of some of the more marginal and little known points of London's history that is all stirred up into a very very  baroque fantasy. And there's been a lot of books that have actually very much played into the writing of The Great When. 

 

I mean one of them is Pariah/Genius by my very good friend Ian Sinclair; for my money one of the best writers in the English language. And in Pariah/Genius he's  following the story of John Deakin, who was the photographer that Francis Bacon actually got all  of those images from. And not a very likable man, but a very, very interesting man. And Ian has done this wonderful story about John Deakin. He's already dead when the book opens and the rest of the book is the thought going through the mind of this extraordinary dying man. 

 

Other books that have played into The Great When would include Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman, probably  one of my favourite novels ever. The main thing about Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is it's very, very strange and quite frightening in places but it's very, very funny. And that was something that I was trying to keep in mind while writing my book that there's no reason why  everything has to be straight-faced. There's no problem with having a laugh once in a while. 

 

And the third book that certainly was a huge inspiration was Brian Catling's The Vorrh. This is the first book of a trilogy. But having read this, I realised that Brian had really raised the bar  for fantasy writing because fantasy, as I see it, really shouldn't be about things that you already  know about. I mean, I've got a lot of room for magicians and dragons and all the rest of the fantasy paraphernalia, but I would prefer a fantasy that gives you things that you've never even imagined before. And certainly in the Vorrh trilogy, Brian does that in spades. 

 

So while I  was writing my books, I was thinking of all of these authors and trying to make sure that my book  was at least in the same ballpark as these greats. 

Watch the video HERE.   

Made of Writing

Excerpt from a 2-part interview published on Flaming Hydra site, under paywall (Part I - Part II). 

Zach Rabiroff: All your novels to date have been concerned to a great extent with a sense of place—with Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem, it was Northampton, which allowed you to draw on personal experience. And now in The Great When you’re dealing with London. 

Alan Moore: I like to think that wherever I’m writing about, and in whatever form, I have always tried to pay attention to place, whether in my comic work or other work. I was quite pleased to get a lot of letters from American readers asking how long I’d lived in Louisiana [after using it as a setting in Swamp Thing]. That was touching. But no, actually it was just all research, and then imagining myself into the place. And of course with things like From Hell, it was immersing myself in London. 

[...] The majority of comics—when I started working in them—were set in America. So it felt quite radical to set some stories in London. When I did Voice of the Fire, that seemed to me to be quite audacious in that it was setting a whole novel in Northampton, which is largely a place that nobody cares about, and that doesn’t even get a mention on the local weather maps. And the same with Jerusalem, where I did it much more intensely. But that doesn’t mean that I exhausted London. The nature of a place like that means that you probably never could exhaust it. It’s infinitely deep with stories. [...]

I was actually going to ask whether you consider writing— artistic creation—itself an act of magic.

It is. I believe that all art and creation is an act of magic, consciously or unconsciously. But I believe that writing, specifically, is the closest to actual magic. If you look at the magic gods of most cultures, they are also gods of language. Hermes is the god of magic, but he's also the god of communication. The Egyptian magic god is also the scribe god, which tends to suggest that there is something, a rather intimate connection, between writing and magic. 

[...] with writing, just writing straight prose, which is all I'm doing now, I think that that has got to be the most elegant form of art. You can do so much with so little. All you've got are 26 characters peppered with punctuation.

You’re summoning reality into being with an incantation, so to speak.

You can create the whole universe from those 26 letters, any conceivable universe. And that is the immense power of writing. In writing Long London, I'm actually building that space. This is something that I learned that you can do. I probably learned it from Mervyn Peake, when I first read the Gormenghast books, and I thought, this is incredible—actually creating an architectural space in my mind. Even at this late age, I remember Gormenghast a lot better than I remember places that I've actually been. Better than places in the real world. 

Magic has got to be the art of causing changes in people's consciousness, including that of the practitioner. And anything that you can do with magic, you can do with writing. [...] You can be anything as a writer. [...]

We can never know another human being; that is the sorry fact of our existence. We can never know anything outside of our own skulls. And so, to a degree, everybody around us, the people that we love the most, are fictions that we have made up. We are fictions that we have made up. I can almost remember making me up when I was about 13 or 14. I can almost remember thinking that this childhood personality I have is going to be no use at all; if I want to have a girlfriend, I better write a new one. [...]

I wish I was made of writing, because then I wouldn't be in such a stage of physical collapse, and I would still be as gorgeous looking as I was 40 years ago instead of just almost as gorgeous looking as I was 40 years ago. If I was made of writing, I would be in perfect condition forever. And also, our fictional characters are going to meet and interact with a lot more people than we are, and for a lot longer time. Our fictions have a great deal of importance, I believe, not just as entertainment, but because they provide part of the infrastructure and armature of our world. 

On Machen and Long London

Excerpt from The View from Canons Park: Arthur Machen and the Writing of Long London, a text written by Moore and published in Faunus n. 51 (pp. 13-25).

Alan Moore: [...] Machen’s narratives, especially those courting ecstasy and terror, do not offer anything as simpleminded as escapism, but rather would seem to promote a more perceptive and involved engagement with the mysteries of our mortal condition. Given that, politically, Machen’s position and my own would almost certainly be very different, it is not political but overarching human relevance that I find in his fantasies and, for that matter, in all of the fantasies from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress through to Brian Catling’s Vorrh that I consider to be relevant to their historic moments; that I feel successfully perform fantasy’s one real job, which is to cast light on reality from a projected point outside it. For the genre to achieve this apex would seem to require a burning passion in the fantasist concerned, to demand the conviction and commitment that we find in William Blake, or Rabelais, or in the major works of Arthur Machen.

[...] it must be a fantasy that had some kind of relevance to the contemporary world where, with luck, it is being read. I had decided by then that the story taking shape would need five volumes to tell properly, and that these would be set successively at the ends of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and, after a narrative gap of some twenty years, the 1990s. The sequences, both those set in historic London and its underlying, glorious symbolic counterpart, enable me, I realised, to obliquely speak about our present century by offering an alternate history of the last one; a poetic, metaphorical account of how we got here, making Machen’s secret capital into a place outside of history that lends us a fresh angle from which to observe that history, a view from Canons Park. This, at least, is the hare-brained theory that I’m hoping will sustain both me and this unprecedented venture over these next few slapstick dystopian years. I’m just starting book three as I write this and, at least so far, my bizarre hypothesis seems to be holding up. [...] 

Faunus n.51: Alan Moore on Machen

Alan Moore contributed essay about his Long London series and... Arthur Machen to Faunus n. 51.

 

Faunus is the literary journal of The Friends of Arthur Machen and has appeared twice yearly since the inauguration. Contents regularly include both articles of interest to admirers of Machen and examples of his work, often articles and pieces not easily available elsewhere.

 

If you want to read Moore's piece you need to join The Friends: check it HERE!

 

*********** 

Alan Moore contributes essay to Faunus
June 22, 2025

We are thrilled to announce that fellow Friend Alan Moore has written an article for the latest edition of Faunus (No.51). In The View From Canons Park, Alan candidly reveals the origins of his Long London series, and why an often overlooked Arthur Machen story sits at the heart of it's first book, The Great When - (reviewed by R.B Russell, also in this edition). [...]

Faunus No.51 is already making its way to members worldwide and is limited to just 350 numbered editions. New or renewed members will receive a physical copy while stocks last, however all members will be able to download the digital version, available now in the Friends' Area. 

[...]

Faunus No.51 - Second Edition (Unlimited)
July 02, 2025

Last month, we announced that Alan Moore had contributed an article for the latest edition of Faunus. This news triggered a surge in memberships and renewals, although regrettably our limited run of 350 copies was not enough to meet the demand. Not wishing to disappoint any of our new joiners, we have ordered a re-print. These Second Editions will be unlimted and issued to everyone who missed out on the hand-numbered version. This is the first time in our journal's 27-year history where we've required a second run and we hope that this way, we don't leave anyone empty-handed whilst staying true to our founding aim; promoting the work of Arthur Machen!

Das Grosse Wenn

Above, cover for the German edition of The Great When to be published by Carcosa this fall.

I confess I find the image quite... mesmerizing. Gut gemacht! 

Long London, Magic & the future of Humanity

Detail from a portrait by Francesca Ciregia. 

Omar, Francesco & I are really, really excited & honoured to present an exclusive interview with ALAN MOORE about his most recent works and... much more! 

Thank you Alan for such a gift and... for your words! Grazie mille!

 

THE MAGUS IS IN!

A chat with Alan Moore

by smoky man in collaboration with Omar Martini & Francesco Pelosi

 

Interview conducted in February 2025. 

Special thanks to Joe Brown for his valuable assistance. 

 

Let's start with the historical aspect of 'Long London' and The Great When. What reasons led you to choose those specific years in which each book is set? Additionally, will each volume have a main theme, featuring a different author and genre (for example, in The Great When it was literature and Arthur Machen, in the future I Hear a New World we might guess it could possibly be music and Joe Meek, considering its title and the reference in the epilogue to the music producer)?

Alan Moore: What I want to do with this five-book series, overall, is to talk obliquely about our current century and where we are now, by ostensibly discussing the last half of the previous century and where we were then; to offer, if you like, a psycho-historical route-map of how we got here. The ends of decades seemed to provide a good vantage point from which to talk about decades themselves, and so I decided that the first volume would take place at the end of the 1940s – which seemed a useful place to start, with London and England a pulverised tabula rasa after WWII – with the second at the end of the 50s, the third at the end of the 60s, the fourth at the end of the 70s, and then a to-be-explained twenty-year gap before the quintet’s concluding volume, set on the eve of the millennium at the end of the 1990s. 

    As for your proposed schematic of each book centring upon a different author and a different genre (medium?), I’m afraid that isn’t it at all. Arthur Machen is to some degree the presiding spirit hanging over all five books, simply because of my Other London being an elaborate outgrowth of the hidden metropolis in Machen’s short story ‘N’. And literature will also feature throughout the series, but not as a one-book ‘theme’. The theme of each specific book is simply the era that they happen to be set in, although I’m trying to present those eras by showing the development of the different factors from which each era was composed. For example, in the first book the literature that is perhaps most prominently referred to is George Orwell’s then-just-published 1984. The closest things to popular music and the technology to play it on were ‘The Harry Lime Theme’ and a pub piano. In cinema, The Third Man was probably the film of the year. The state of black culture was best indicated by the new West Indian population of areas like Brixworth and Notting Hill following the recent arrival of the Windrush, or by flamboyant outliers like Ras Prince Monolulu. Gay culture, then illegal, was best referred to by the inclusion of Labour MP Tom Driberg, the state of English art in the late 40s was perhaps best exemplified by Austin Spare, and London crime was dominated by the declining partnership of Jack Spot and Billy Hill. The positions of women and the poor are also addressed. Throughout all five books, of course, we have literal fashion-butterfly Maurice Calendar to keep us abreast of the shifts in youth culture and counterculture.

  By the second book, set in 1958-59, although Dennis is reading Fleming’s Casino Royale, the book he’s really looking forward to is Mervyn Peake’s concluding Gormenghast book, Titus Alone. Pop music and pop technology have come on quite a bit, being in the thrall of the Rock ’n’ Roll era, as represented chiefly by Joe Meek. As far as cinema goes, Room at the Top and I’m Alright Jack seem emblematic films of the era and are briefly discussed, as are a couple of then-available television shows. Black culture is now expressed via characters like criminal enforcer Michael de Freitas, later 60s radical Michael X, and the race riots in Notting Hill during the August of 1958, Britain’s first. Queer or gay culture, still illegal, is looked at through the lens of Joe Meek or mercurial twilight-world figure David Litvinoff, London art is now chiefly the province of Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud, and London crime is now dominated by Notting Hill property baron Peter Rachman, with the Kray twins coming up fast on the inside. The situation of women or the poor has barely changed.

    And so we follow these different strands through the five volumes, sometimes prominently, sometimes as just telling details in the background. On top of this, of course, we have the relevant background news details of the decade in question, to provide a historical context. All this is part of my strategy for examining the late 20th century as a way of talking about the early 21st.

It seems that 1949 in The Great When can be compared, in some ways, to 1888 in From Hell, a year that would influence the decades to follow. In light of your considerations, mainly voiced by Dennis' friends, it seems that 1949 showed the trauma and the effects that World War II had on the British people's psyche. Could this be a possible interpretation?

Alan Moore: In From Hell we suggested the late Victorian period, 1888, and specifically the Whitechapel murders as, metaphorically, the birth-cries of the 20th century. Meanwhile, in Lost Girls, Melinda and I posited the late Edwardian era, 1913/1914 and the outbreak of the First World War, I think just as legitimately, as the beginning of the modern world. I suppose the ultimate truth is that every decade, every year, potentially every sunrise is the end of one world and the start of a new one, although over the course of the Long London quintet I want to see what happens when that truism comes up against the currently popular adage that the old world refuses to die and so the new world cannot be born.

    As mentioned above, 1949 seemed like a good place to start my book-for-each-decade plan, both in terms of the length of the proposed series – I figured five volumes should be my absolute limit – and in terms of London being to some degree a blank canvas after the war, a place that was shattered physically and psychologically, where, after the science-fiction of the V-bombs, anything might happen. A place where people’s everyday life had just been blown up and set on fire, and where reality must have seemed up for grabs. Certainly, with the bombsite scars not gone till 1998, the 1940s cast a long shadow over England in the decades that followed, making it perhaps the ideal place to commence my fifty-year narrative. 

In many of your works, Imagination or the Elsewhere often invades Reality. We see this, obviously, in Long London, Providence, Promethea, the League, the story about Thunderman in Illuminations, and so on. Often the world of Imagination influences or interferes, when it does not directly override, the Real one. Could you elaborate on the interconnected relationship between Reality and Imagination, and how your concept of Idea-Space and Magic is linked to it?

Alan Moore: I have to start by carefully defining what is meant by the term ‘reality’. It seems to me that what you most probably mean is material reality. My own position is that while we are indeed apparently part of and surrounded by a material reality (I say apparently because we all compose material reality moment by moment on the loom of our perceptions and are unable to prove that it is actually there, this being the hard problem of consciousness), we are just as evidently part of and immersed in the immaterial reality of our own thought processes. Since material science, which rightly requires empirical testing and repeatable experiments, cannot measure or meaningfully investigate human consciousness, it has tended to argue away consciousness as a ‘ghost in the machine’, and to insist that the only true reality is the material reality for which it has metrics and theories. This has percolated down into the ordinary person on the street’s default worldview, where to say that something is only happening in someone’s mind is to say that it isn’t happening, and by extension that our thoughts and inner workings are not real. Now, thanks to the hard problem of consciousness referred to earlier, while I cannot conclusively state that everybody else’s thoughts and inner workings are real, I can assure you that mine definitely are. In fact, again thanks to the hard problem of consciousness, my thoughts and inner workings are the only things in all existence that I know to be real. The imagination is the sole phenomenon that we know not to be imaginary.

    In fact, if we look at material reality more closely, we can see that the greater part of the physical world around us – our buildings, our clothing, our technology, the rooms we’re currently sitting in, the languages with which we think and communicate, the social groups and institutions we belong to – has its origins in the human imagination; in the immaterial inner world of somebody, somewhere, sometime. Thought of in this way, it appears that tangible physical reality is almost entirely founded on the ghostly world of thoughts, concepts and ideas; that this ungraspable phantom territory is the bedrock that our hard and heavy solid world is standing on. This notional world is also, in its own way, more enduring and thus perhaps more substantial that our material realm: the concept of empire has long outlived empires, and if all of the physical chairs in the world were to vanish tomorrow, as long as we retained the concept of chairs, we would not be greatly inconvenienced. It’s only when we lose our ideas and thoughts, as with the library at Alexandria, that we are plunged into a catastrophic dark age for getting on a thousand years.
    Thus, it is my conclusion that human beings and perhaps all sentient life-forms are in a sense amphibious, in that they live in two worlds at once, these being the material world of the body and the immaterial world of the mind. I further believe that it might be useful to consider these two worlds as two spaces that we simultaneously inhabit, this being the thinking that my hypothetical concept of idea space emerges from. I have held this view for some decades now, have modified my creative processes around it and, as yet, have never encountered any troublesome fact or incisive counter-argument which disproved it. On rereading Machen’s sublime ‘N’, I understood that while his visionary Other London very probably had different intentions and different inflections to my own ideas of conceptual space, in a certain light they could be seen as aspects of the same archetypal realm, a world somehow more timeless, more true and more significant than our own familiar avenues and backstreets. And while I know that this is all an outrageous and hopefully fluorescent fantasy that I’m making up, I feel that, on at least a metaphorical level, every word of it is true.

The Bumper Book is a contemporary grimoire guiding us into the world of Magic, in terms of historical, practical and narrative references. Always with a certain amount of irony.
For us, inhabitants of the 21st century with supposedly rational and scientific minds - but this could be easily rebutted, considering all the fake news people seem to believe in, conspiracy theorists, flat-earthers, etc... - the concept of Magic seems elusive, often trivialized and relegated to the field of superstition or David Copperfield-style entertainment.
For Steve Moore & you Magic is everywhere and a practical fact. Magic can be identified with (the source of) Creativity, perhaps - I would venture - with one of the founding aspects of Humanity. Obviously, there is an entire book to read and absorb, but... in a nutshell, what is Magic?

Alan Moore: Well, I’ll try my best, but it will have to be a fairly roomy nutshell. If I understand the subject correctly, magic begins hundreds of thousands of years ago with some clumsiness involving a potato. This hypothetical tuber, accidentally kicked closer to the campfire, was the invention of cookery. This massive leap meant that we no longer needed to waste ninety per cent of our food’s energy value in the act chewing it. This, in turn, meant that we no longer needed the big, wide, grinding jaws that had made room for our necessarily powerful dentition. Across subsequent millennia, we therefore gradually lost a bone that had been increasing the width of our jaws and, as it turned out, limiting the growth of our upper skull. With this bone gone, the tops of our heads could expand, allowing us to develop larger and more complex brains which could do a lot of new and unfamiliar things that our old brains couldn’t do – perhaps the difference was like that between owning an abacus and having a full internet connection. It’s my contention that development of modern human consciousness followed something like the following trajectory: our first breakthrough was in the crucial concept of representation, which is to say art. This allowed us to say that these marks on a cave wall or these phonetic sounds somehow stand for or represent that enormous bison over there. This vital concept permitted the development of spoken and, perhaps more importantly, pictographic written language. Language, modern linguistic theory assures us, precedes consciousness, and so this is the point at which modern human consciousness originates.

    Magic, I contend, is humanity’s perfectly natural reaction to this extraordinary new thing that it seemed to have inside its head. Having no theory of mind, where could all these internal voices, images, memories, dreams, thoughts and world-changing ideas be coming from, if not from gods or spirits? Thus, shamanic magic was contrived as an all-in-one technology meant to further understand and mediate with an extraordinary new universe of thoughts and perceptions that was entirely without precedent. And, for those who would point out at these primitive people were not communing with supernatural entities at all, but ‘merely’ with parts of their own newly-forged consciousness that they had not previously been able to access, I would point out that their approach to these new mental phenomena was evidently successful, having gifted us with our contemporary world and most of the things in it, whichever of these two explanations is the truth. Whatever its provenance, their magic clearly worked. It was a magic of existence that included everyone, and at its core was the raw ecstasy of Being itself. Most importantly, with the shaman or shamanka dispensing their visions amongst the whole tribe, it meant that people’s experience of this nominal godhead was direct and not mediated through religion’s endless supply of clerical third parties. This was the origin of all our spirituality and all our culture, two things that were then seen as indivisible.
    With its trans-generational observations of the skies and the seasons and the cycles of living things, shamanism was probably what allowed the emergence of agriculture, which led to settlements, which led to the early city-states, which, ironically, led to the slow and implacable dismantling of magic. Essentially, the magical worldview was cannibalised and used for parts in the construction of civilisation. With people no longer required to grow their own food, specialisation became possible. Priests emerged to take over magic’s spiritual role, now divided into numerous often-conflicting religions. Professional artists and scribes hived off the shaman’s role as dispenser of visions, and the rise of viziers to replace shamans as advisors to tribal leaders meant that magic no longer had a political or social dimension. Admittedly, magic still had very important aspects, such as its access to an inner world and its progressive understanding of what would come to be science and medicine under the rubric of ‘natural philosophy’. 

However, by the Renaissance, science and medicine emerged as disciplines in their own right, disavowing the crucial magical traditions that had birthed them. This still left magic’s access to an inner world, but in the very early 20th century, Sigmund Freud popularised psychiatry, utilising concepts familiar in occult lodges for the previous couple of hundred years – the term ‘unconscious’ was first coined and used by 16th century occultist Paracelsus – and then, all magic seemed to have left was the hollow ritual and the attendant posturing. Given that all modern culture, including dance, literature, music, art and theatre, has its origins in the shamanic repertoire of trance-inducing performance, it would seem that much of the society surrounding us is in fact composed of the dismembered body-parts of magic.
    Magic in the present day, perhaps lacking for any apparent utility or purpose, has, seemingly, largely degenerated to an escapist and materialist fantasy, most of which’s exponents appear to view it as a sort of special effect or superpower that will immediately force reality into delivering up anything you require of it, a supernatural extension of Amazon, if you will, less expensive but far less reliable. If that was how magic had ever worked, I suggest we would now be in either a perfect utopia or an Hieronymus Bosch hell-scape. The only thing that magic dependably works on is the party performing it. It does not work directly on the world, but rather can transform the individual into someone who can work directly on the world. And all of his or her magical workings, successful or not, will require a tremendous amount of dedicated work, as one might expect. People looking for an easy life-fix through magic are looking in the wrong place. Magic is not something to materially assist you in your life. Rather, it is something to dedicate that life to, without lust of material result.
    In The Bumper Book, Steve and I attempted a definition of magic that seemed much more inclusive of the creative arts and sciences, and less focussed upon the (possibly arrogant) will of the magician: ‘Magic is any purposeful engagement with the phenomena and possibilities of consciousness’. And that, without taking as long as we did in The Bumper Book, is the best in-a-capacious-nutshell answer that I can offer you at the moment.

Thinking back to your works and personal journey, we could identify three "pillars": Anarchy in politics, interest in Science and its theories (Eternalism, quantum physics, the evolution of the Universe, AI...) and pervasive Magic. How are they related to each other? Is there a balance? Or a complicated dialectic?

Alan Moore: While I agree with your basic outline, and while my political position is indeed an anarchist one, it might be more helpful to substitute ‘politics’ for ‘anarchism’ in your suggested three pillars. Also, I think you should probably add a fourth pillar to stand for my interest in the medium through which I express the other three pillars, which is to say art. All of these things share a common origin in Palaeolithic shamanism, as explained above, but the relationship between them is perhaps best explained by the ideal relationship we suggest in The Bumper Book. A revitalised and reconfigured conception of magic stands at the start of our proposed arrangement. The next step is to connect magic with art – this could potentially enrich both fields, providing magic with a visible result and purpose as in the art of Austin Osman Spare or the writings of William Blake, while potentially infusing the arts with genuine vision rather than their current trend towards largely empty conceptualism. With this accomplished, we next suggest connecting art and science – a linkage which again might benefit both disciplines and a process to some degree already underway, with artists taking inspiration from the breath-taking imagery or concepts of contemporary science, and scientists coming to realise that, say, modernist writers like Woolf or Proust were intuiting things that neuroscience is only now confirming. The final connection in our arrangement is also the most contentious and one least likely to be adopted. We should ultimately connect science with politics, which would allow us the possibility of evidence-based government, and perhaps an end to our surely-deliberate culture of falsehood, disinformation and conspiracy theory. This Magic-Art-Science-Politics arrangement, roughly analogous to the occult notion of Fire-Water-Air-Earth, or Wands-Cups-Swords-Discs, or Spirit-Emotion-Intellect-Materiality, is the way that I feel most things, including myself, work best, and don’t see why this shouldn’t be extended to our social structure.

What do you think of the current political situation in the world? Can we reasonably have hope, or is the scenario inevitably gloomy for Humanity?

Alan Moore: My answer is both. Hope is always the only rational position, in that to give up hope of success is to guarantee failure and, in the event that the worst happens, it is surely better to go out knowing that you resisted it and struggled your very best to prevent it from happening. So, yes, there is always hope. But, yes, I fear that the world is inevitably in for a gloomy period, and the hope is that we can survive it and build something better from it.
    If we wish to have an inhabitable future for us and our children and their children, then might I quietly suggest we stop electing and tolerating obvious fascist buffoons because we think they’re entertaining characters, as if they were housemates on Big Brother. This isn’t reality TV. This is reality, or what’s left of it. Let us instead protest and rail at these dribbling Nazi idiots to our last breath, rather than beam stupidly as Elon Musk ‘sends his heart out to us’ Nuremberg style. Let us point out that they are suicidal cretins when they insist that climate change is a Chinese hoax. Let us not give these witless fuckers an inch.
    And, more important than condemning the forces driving this multi-faceted disaster, let us take responsibility for ourselves and our communities. Let us for God’s sake stop relying on these leaders and their self-serving social structures that lead us nowhere save into the abyss. If we want things to exist – things like proper education, health and welfare services – then let us give our energies, our time, our money, our art, to the numerous community projects that are springing up of necessity and attempting to counteract these privations of the state or the toxic world it has created. Support environmental movements and protests, stand up for the rights of minorities and women at a moment when those rights are being clawed away from them by the horror story/laughing stock currently in the White House, form Arts Labs or start fanzines in recognition of the fact that we should probably think about providing our own art and entertainment too, and do something, some little or big thing to make the world around you more like the world you want to live in. Good luck.

If you like, you can read it in Italian on Quasi magazine, HERE!

The Great When paperback edition

On Bloomsbury's site they are offering for pre-order The Great When in paperback edition, scheduled for October 2025 release. Check it HERE!

 

Above, you can see the new cover which is a cool, more graphic variation of the original one by Nicolas Delort. I also like the font they used for Moore's name.

The Great When: TV adaptation

Excepts from an article published on Deadline.com the 3rd of December. 

The complete piece is available HERE.

“For the first time in my career, I’m genuinely excited and enthusiastic about a work of mine…one that I own, and believe could work marvelously in a different medium…being adapted for the screen,” Watchmen author Alan Moore says in a rare quote about his new fantasy novel, The Great When, getting a TV adaptation. In a competitive bidding situation, Colin Callender‘s production company Playground has landed the rights to the book by the famous graphic novelist [...]

“In Playground, I feel that I’ve connected with people who respect both me and the narrative and are receptive to such input as I can offer,” he said. “And, given Playground’s track record, I have little doubt that this will be anything short of spectacular. It’s taken me some time, but I think at last I’m ready for my closeup.”

Playground landed the rights to The Great When competing against a slew of other suitors. “We did take a big swing with this, really, we wrote a big check to get this,” Callender said.

Talks are already underway with writers for the adaptation. While only the first book has been published, “the roadmap is completely laid out,” with Moore working on the rest of the novels [...]

Read the whole article HERE.

(Quasi) Leggere Long London

Omar Martini is writing a series of articles exploring and investigating the many references, links and worlds of The Great When, the first book in Moore's Long London pentalogy. 

The articles are published on the Italian magazine (Quasi) on a weekly basis. 

Till now, we had 6 articles, with more to come. 

You can read them all HERE. In Italian, of course. Enjoy!

I Hear A New World

[...] the first of his five Long London novels, The Great When set in 1949 in an alternative London. The subsequent books will be set in 1959, 1969, 1979, and then jumping to 1999. And now, we have learned the name of the second of that novel, I Hear A New World.

The second book is titled after the album by Joe Meek, I Hear A New World, recorded in 1959 but released in 1960, subtitled "an outer space music fantasy". One of the most influential record producers and sound engineers, Joe Meek, was the first to conceive of the recording studio itself as an instrument and one of the first producers to be recognised as an artist in his own right. Working with many artists, he may be best known for the Tornado's track Telstar in 1962, written and produced by Meek, the first record by a British rock group to reach number one in the USA. But he is also famed for taking a shotgun owned by musician Heinz Burt, killing his landlady, Violet Shenton, and then shooting himself in 1967. Those last moments of Joe Meek's life also featured in Alan Moore's spoken word performance art piece The Highbury Working, A Beat Séance, created by The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels collaborative team of Moore, David J, and Tim Perkins and performed on the 20th of November 1997 at the performance club Absorption at The Garage in Highbury, with dancer Paule van Wijngaarden. The words to the track No 1 With A Bullet can be read here. Perkins used samples from I Hear a New World for the soundtrack.

Source: BleedingCool

The outrageous edifice of The Great When

Moore speaks about his new book in a short video shared by Bloomsbury on their FB page.

You can watch it HERE.

Alan Moore: For me, when writing The Great When and the subsequent books in The Long London series, the most enjoyable thing has been taking actual history and then managing to fill the cracks in that history with delirious fantasy. So that I hope that the reader will sometimes find it difficult to tell the difference between the two. 

Starting the series in 1949 seemed like a good move because at that time London was in pieces, shattered by the events of the previous five or six years by the hail of bombs and V bombs. After which I would imagine that the average Londoner’s sense of reality had been drastically overhauled psychologically and socially. The whole of the city, the whole of the country was in pieces, it was in fragments. It was trying to work out what was going on and what its identity was. It was very unstable. We had questions of whether we should adopt nuclear weapons were starting to arise. We had a rise in what we would today call serial murderers after the Second World War. 

All of these things gave the landscape a very uneasy and shifting uncertain feeling. And upon that landscape in 1949 I thought that that would make a wonderful setting on which to erect the outrageous edifice of The Great When.

Dennis Knuckleyard in Dream!

An excerpt from an article posted on BleedingCool the 30th of April 2024. 

[...] the protagonist of The Great When was one Dennis Knuckleyard, and [...] Alan Moore came up with the name from a dream diary of his. "The only promising item that they've thrown up so far is an intriguing sounding name: Dennis Knuckleyard. I may find a place to use this in the future, or I may not." But it seems the name was also used as a pseudonym for Moore in a Northampton fanzine called Dream, with a story titled "My Protocol", listed – and then withdrawn – on eBay for £400, described as being "very rare, approx. 50 copies were made and sold mostly at local poetry reading events." Good luck hunting that!

You can read the complete piece HERE. And... let me know if you find a copy of Dream!

a spell of words

Alan Moore talks to The Bookseller on the occasion of the upcoming release of his new fantasy novel, The Great When, the first book in the Long London quintet. Interview conducted by Katie Fraser and posted on the site the 30th of August.

You can read the complete piece HERE.

Moore is “making more of an effort to conjure this spell of words to involve the readers, to make them feel like they are viscerally there, like these things are actually happening to them in a vicarious sense”. But he expects the same effort in return: “I’m depending upon readers to do at least part of the work, because I think that the more work they do, the more they will enjoy it.”

Read the complete piece HERE.

The Great When Art!

Art by Nicolas Delort

In the past days, Nicolas Delort, the phenomenal cover artist of the upcoming Moore's novel The Great When, posted the original art on his Instagram page. 

Delort: I recently had the high honor of illustrating the cover for 'The Great When', the next book by legendary author Alan Moore.
I would like to thank Alan Moore, the team at @bloomsburypublishing and art director @gregheinimanndesign for trusting me with this daunting job, and allowing me to go a little nuts on the clouds there :D

"The Great When", the first book in the Long London series, will take you on a winding journey through the city's occult underbelly, where an eccentric cast of sorcerers, gangsters and murderers awaits....

The artwork was created on 16x12" @ampersand_art claybord with ink pens and a scratching knife

The novel is slated to release in October '24"

Art by Nicolas Delort