Moorcock Interview : including hints on second novel in the trilogy See full transcript at SF Signal
LK: Early in THE WHISPERING SWARM, the Abbot takes young you/Michael to see his mini version of the ‘Cosmolabe’…and as he is putting you under its spell, he is chanting, not only about concepts that make up space, time and the multiverse, but also about the tarot and numerology. How do these concepts fit with the multiverse? Did you get an early education on these topics as a youngster by your mother as you reference in the book?
MM: I was taught Tarot reading as a teen. I gave it up in my early twenties after I’d made two horribly accurate predictions and freaked myself and the person I was reading for out. I gave up reading after that. I’d never meant it as anything but a party trick. I actually WAS ‘raised by gypsies’ in that settled gypsies looked after me when my mother worked. The 2nd novel (probably) will contain a wholly different ‘my early life’, much closer to the truth of my actual background and will probably talk about some of this. The gypsies taught me a few bits of Romany, how to ride their ponies, and so on. They fit with the multiverse only because they appear to me to describe it better than other terms.