{"id":986483,"date":"2026-05-26T19:27:25","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T19:27:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/986483\/"},"modified":"2026-05-26T19:27:25","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T19:27:25","slug":"i-hear-a-new-world-alan-moore-long-london-series-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/986483\/","title":{"rendered":"I Hear a New World: Alan Moore Long London Series Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alan Moore<\/a>, the legendary writer behind\u00a0Watchmen<\/a>, V for Vendetta, <\/a>From Hell,\u00a0The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Providence\u00a0is renowned for being vehemently against adaptations of his work.<\/p>\n

But in the case of Dennis Knuckleyard, he’s willing to make an exception.<\/p>\n

It feels downright ironic, considering Mr. Knuckleyard, the hapless hero of Moore’s\u00a0Long London\u00a0urban fantasy novels<\/a>,\u00a0finds himself thrust into the heart of a symbolic and unsettlingly kaleidoscopic version of London whose only constant is eternal change.<\/p>\n

Known as “the Great When” by mere mortals, this ever-evolving plane of existence located just on the outskirts of our reality (if you know where to look) is Alice’s Wonderland on the most intense acid trip you’ve ever seen; an ethereal realm that can either rob a person of their sanity or eat them alive. Should you be wondering, the latter ain’t figurative. The place so greatly defies concrete explanation, that one might start to wonder whether Moore wrote in such a way as to make his books literally unfilmable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

SYFY Wire<\/strong> had a chance to test the veracity of such a hypothesis on the man himself, who kindly spoke with us over email in celebration of I Hear a New World, the\u00a0second novel in a planned pentalogy spanning half a century between 1947 and 1999.<\/p>\n

While Moore, who marries audacious world-building with the fickle and obscure tides of history better than anyone else, will be skipping the ’80s (“for reasons that will be explained,” he teased), the five books are meant “to present a big picture, and it required a canvas that was fifty years from side-to-side.”<\/p>\n

Head below for the complete interview!<\/p>\n

Watchmen\u00a0creator Alan Moore dives deep into his Long London fantasy novels<\/p>\n

Take us back to the start. Where did the idea for the Long London series come from?<\/b><\/p>\n

Alan Moore: <\/strong>I spend a fair amount of my time vivisecting ideas to see how they work, while ignoring their screams, and my conclusion is that viable ideas almost never arise from a single source, while really good ideas are usually unlikely hybrids or outrageous-looking chimeras. I experience my own creative processes as being something like a particle collider, where thousands of half-baked, half-finished or entirely forgotten concepts whiz around invisibly at unsafe speeds until, inevitably, one unworkable idea will smash into another, quite by chance, and in the often-beautiful ensuing mess of particle decay trajectories is sometimes to be found a stage performance, poem, film, or series of peculiar urban fantasies.<\/p>\n

With the Long London books, the basic notion\u2019s origins are equally diverse: back in my early twenties, I recall considering a grandiose and thoroughly impractical rock-opera that concerned a huge hidden society inhabiting the same physical streets and buildings as ourselves, but only in the small hours when nobody else was there, a major plot-point being the discovery of a map, a street-plan of a recognizable terrestrial city but where all the avenues and places had been given different names. Then there was my long-simmering desire to use some of the marginal and frankly unbelievable historic London figures that I\u2019d become fascinated by\u2014Joe Meek<\/a>, Prince Monolulu<\/a>, Ironfoot Jack<\/a>, Austin Spare<\/a>, David Litvinoff<\/a>\u2014as characters in some unlikely fiction.<\/p>\n

There was also my urge to make some sort of a statement on our current incoherent century through an examination of the century that led us here, and my re-reading of what was possibly Arthur Machen\u2019s most extraordinary short story, “N,”<\/a> with its proposal that our earthly London is only a shabby, tattered curtain behind which a truer, blazing and more sacred city is concealed. And, of course, there is being woken by my own amusement at the dream-name Dennis Knuckleyard. My feeling is that I\u2019ve crammed all these elements, along with dozens more that I\u2019ve forgotten, into my conceptual atom-smasher, and the Long London novels are the bonfire display of quarks and neutrinos, possibly radioactive, that came out the other end.<\/p>\n

I Hear a New World takes place in the late 1950s, a decade after the events of The Great When. What appealed to you about a time jump in the narrative?<\/b><\/p>\n

For some decades I\u2019ve been interested in the idea of a serial narrative with long stretches of time between the episodes, so that we can see the characters and their world changing as they age, and thus get a more rounded and complete conception of them and their “shape in time,” if you will. Also, with this specific series, one of my intentions, as I\u2019ve said, was to investigate the last half of the previous century as a way of understanding how the hell we ended up in this one.<\/p>\n

The Second World War seemed pivotal in many ways, and the flattened, devastated streets of post-war 1940s London seemed the perfect blank, tabula rasa canvas on which to commence my work, where the city was still on its knees and trying to build some sort of future out of bomb site rubble, and nobody had the first clue what that future would contain.\u00a0By the 1950s and I Hear a New World, we can see London, and to a degree the world, attempting to update itself by dressing up in noisy, flashy, hard-edged Brutalist modernity, with genuine innovators like Joe Meek attempting to invoke the new world by imagining its music and, in doing so, making the technical advances which that new world would depend on.<\/p>\n

We love the way you\u00a0switch to present tense and italics in the Great When because it disorients the reader as much as it does the characters. And when they’ve returned to the “real” world, you switch back to past tense and non-italics, making it necessary for the reader to reorient themselves. How did you land on such a unique storytelling device?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One thing I think is lacking in a lot of the fantasy fiction that I\u2019ve seen is what I think of as the shock of the fantastic. I put it to you that if any normal human being were to unmistakably encounter something that reason insisted could not possibly be real, it would be a traumatic, shattering event which would haunt and obsess that individual for the remainder of their lives. A real-life Dorothy would probably be sectioned after her first glimpse of the straw man. It was in an attempt to recreate or possibly instill this shocking sense of the unearthly in the reader that I came up with the present-tense italicized approach you mention.<\/p>\n

I find that the past tense can convey a sense of comfortable familiarity which is ideally suited to the series\u2019 real-world stretches, while the present tense has an involving happening-right-this-second urgency that I think lifts the reader neurologically into a slightly different state that is beyond the ordinary and the normal. As for the italics, to my mind, italics always have an air of tension to them, like a fierce, insistent whisper. By combining these two effects with the somewhat heightened and poetic prose that I\u2019m attempting to deploy in the Great When sequences, I hope to make the experience of entering another world both as spectacular and as stressful for the reader as it is for my protagonists. Also, that happens to be what the Great When feels like, and it would be doing a disservice to present it any other way.<\/p>\n

We know you\u2019re not a fan (and understandably so) of your work being adapted into film and television. The ethereal, and basically indescribable, nature of the Great When feels like a clever and surefire way to prevent anyone from ever trying to visualize it in a\u00a0medium beyond prose. Was that the goal?<\/b><\/p>\n

Perhaps surprisingly, no, writing the books the way I have wasn\u2019t a tactic to make the Long London series unfilmable. In fact, it\u2019s turned out to be pretty much the opposite. I have long harbored numerous objections to film adaptations of my work, a big objection being that the properties concerned were either stolen from me by notoriously amoral corporations, or were co-opted by a mix of movie company venality and my own business-world naivety. Beyond that, there was my conviction, still unshaken, that the movie world would not be able to adapt those works written especially for the comics medium, where the main purpose of my since-disowned book Watchmen was to show off the spectacular new ways of storytelling that could only be achieved in comics or, specifically, my comics.<\/p>\n

Another factor in the mix was that my major comic works tended to be quite lengthy and packed full of salient detail, taking some few hours to read and absorb properly, certainly much longer than what was then\u2014and still is\u2014considered a maximum running time for films, which suggests that many, most, or indeed all of one\u2019s ideas are likely to be trimmed, ignored or edited into oblivion. But the world changes. Over this last couple of decades, the emergence of the long form, high quality television series has made lots of things seem suddenly more possible, and when asked if I might consider making the Long London books available as possible film properties, my answer was a cautious yes.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d seen some very impressive adaptations, like the wonderful TV version of Susanna Clarke\u2019s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which, while not entirely faithful to the book\u2019s text, still seemed faithful to its spirit. And with the Long London books, despite their strangeness, we do have a relatively pacey and eventful linear narrative that I thought, with whatever alterations were deemed necessary, might translate successfully to screen. I\u2019ve been approached regarding film rights on my other prose works like Jerusalem but have declined, simply because the totally non-linear structure of a book like that could not conceivably work as a film, a TV series or as any other manner of sequential narrative.<\/p>\n

With the Long London books however, though I\u2019m sure they\u2019d test the mettle of the SFX department, I thought that streamed or box-set television might afford some viable new possibilities. To this end, when I was approached by Playground, the production company behind the marvelous adaptation of Hilary Mantel\u2019s Wolf Hall,\u00a0 I gladly acquiesced. I know enough about the world of television and its uncertainties to manage my expectations, but I\u2019m optimistic and, whatever its eventual fate, confident that my work is in the very best of hands. So, fingers crossed.<\/p>\n

What can readers expect from the continued adventures of Dennis Knuckleyard in the next three books?<\/b><\/p>\n

Well, no spoilers, but Dennis keeps getting older, and doesn\u2019t seem any more comfortable about his intermittent relationship with this physically and psychologically destructive paranormal twin of London. In fact, I\u2019m getting the impression that he really, really doesn\u2019t want to be the hero of a fast-paced five book fantasy adventure.<\/p>\n

Grace, meanwhile, is brave to the point of foolhardiness, and thus barges brassily to the forefront in the ’60s-set book three, Blow Away, Dandelion, while Dennis does his level best to help and at least manages not to get killed, which is something, given that the major thrust of that volume is a noir murder thriller, acted out between supposedly immortal entities in the Great When, against the tumultuous backdrop of the crashing, burning 1960s.<\/p>\n

In book four, In England\u2019s Dreaming, set at the end of the 1970s, Dennis is in his forties and, as is not uncommon at that age, is seeing elements of his earlier life disappearing or falling away, and I can promise that the opening of this fourth volume will initially bewilder and possibly alienate my readership, but just trust me and stick with it.<\/p>\n

Then, in book five, No River of Fire, on the brink of the millennium, Dennis is now a relatively frail old man of sixty-eight who lives in mortal fear that one day the eternal city might decide it isn\u2019t through with him, a justifiable fear that propels the series to what I think should be an appropriately jaw-dropping and cataclysmic finish. I\u2019m thinking that it will be pretty ruinous, but I can promise readers that my reluctant protagonist, despite his clear lack of enthusiasm for my plotting abilities, will be allowed a happy ending. He probably doesn\u2019t deserve it, given his rather lackluster and timorous performance, but he\u2019ll get it because that\u2019s the kind of generous-spirited author and employer of imaginary people that I am.<\/p>\n

I Hear a New World<\/strong> is now on sale from Bloomsbury<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alan Moore, the legendary writer behind\u00a0Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell,\u00a0The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen\u00a0and\u00a0Providence\u00a0is renowned for being…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":986484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7757],"tags":[274285,3444,748,393,2699,4884,16971,257,16,15],"class_list":["post-986483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-london","tag-alan-moore","tag-books","tag-britain","tag-england","tag-fantasy","tag-great-britain","tag-interview-or-reporting","tag-london","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116642529216754056","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/986483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=986483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/986483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/986484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=986483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=986483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=986483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}