Alan Moore on life, nuclear war and the coming AI apocalypse

Alan Moore still fears the human race has what it takes to destroy itself.

The British author came to prominence in the 1980s with works like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, unusually dark – for the times – comic books and graphic novels that tackled subjects like nuclear annihilation, the Cold War and fascism.

Time has not mellowed the New York Times best-selling writer, whose latest book The Great When takes place in a sinister parallel England post-World War II.

“I don’t think that the nuclear issue has ever gone away – it’s just receded in public awareness,” Moore told RNZ’s Sunday Morning.

“We still have all of these things all around the world, and at the moment, we do have the particular issue of which country is going to be the first to put an artificial intelligence in charge of their missile defence system. Because once somebody does that, then everybody else will have to.”

Over the past two years, large language models like ChatGPT have accelerated the artificial intelligence race. But as good as they have gotten, they are still prone to ‘hallucinations’ and making terrible mistakes.

Google’s Gemini chatbot last week, completely out of the blue, told a user they were a “waste of time and resources”, “a stain on the universe” and should “please die”.

“If these things that are capable of responding in microseconds, were suddenly in charge of all of the world’s nuclear arsenals, then no, I don’t think that the nuclear threat has receded,” Moore told RNZ host Jim Mora.

“It’s just that… it’s faded into the background of our consciousness because we’re told the Cold War is over… There’s a general war going on, and I don’t think that’s ever over. It changes in its nature, but… internet interference in the present day and sort of hacking attacks, that sounds pretty much like a Cold War to me.

“So I think that yes, the dangers of nuclear annihilation are probably as strong now as they’ve ever been. It’s just that we’ve come up with all of these other threats of annihilation in the meantime that seem a bit more pressing to us.”

In The Great When, young orphan Dennis Knuckleyard works in a bookshop, and is dispatched by his horrible boss to go across town and bring back a bundle of books – and one of them he is “very, very keen to get rid of”.

“One of them is a book called A London Walk by the Reverend Thomas Hampole. And it looks really dreary from its title onwards, and it’s in really bad condition, but it’s there amongst all of these beautiful illustrated Arthur Machen, first editions.

“This isn’t a real book. This is a book that Arthur Machen made up in a novel and a short story. And this book doesn’t exist in our world, and his situation gets more desperate from there. It turns out that the king of the London underworld Jack Spot is also keen to get his hands upon this book.

“And Dennis Knuckleyard’s situation just really goes downhill from there. It gets worse and worse and worse. I’m just within about five pages of the end of the second book, and I have to tell you, it’s not getting a lot better. He’s been put through some terrible times, and I feel kind of guilty about it.

“But you know, what can he expect with a name like that?”

The Great When is the first book of what is planned to be a series of five.

Moore has pivoted from his earlier graphic novel writing to prose books such as Voice Of The Fire and Jerusalem in recent years, as well as the new hefty tome The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book Of Magic which is a hybrid of prose and comics art and delves into Moore’s long-standing fascination with magic.

Though he has made a successful career of it, Moore almost didn’t become a writer at all.

He became a pioneering writer in comic books in the 1980s with work on characters like Batman, Superman, Swamp Thing and many more, including Watchmen, which many cite as one of the greatest graphic novels of all time.

“I was working in an office job… and I was thinking I’d wanted to do something with my life, hadn’t I? I then found out that my then-wife was pregnant with our first daughter, which I had to give it a bit of a rethink because I thought, well, is this the wisest thing to be doing with a baby on the way?

“But after thinking about it, I thought, yes, it is, because when you’ve got those big, adoring hungry eyes staring up at you, you are never going to quit your job. And also that I wanted my daughters to not be aware of the same ceiling to working class life that I had been aware of when I was growing up. I didn’t want them to think that there were limits. I didn’t want them to grow up with a father who looked like he was just you know, trying to get through it, was shouldering his burden, not enjoying his life. I wanted to show them that there were more possibilities with the human life.

“And these were things that drove me. And then I think at one point I can remember a particular afternoon when – this was some way into having quit my job and having very little to show for it – and I realised that I’d staked my entire plan upon coming up with a potentially endless science fiction saga that I would draw and write myself, despite having no previous experience of writing or drawing comics. But I would sell this incredible saga that I’ve got worked out in my head to say the British comic 2000 AD – they would immediately see its genius and would hire me. And this was how my career was going to work.

“And then, at some point, luckily, I suddenly thought, Why are you doing this? In the past several months, you have got 1.5 pages done, one page is inked, another page is half-inked with some very ropey pencils. The third page, it’s just scribble, isn’t it? So why are you doing this?

“And I suddenly realised I was doing it because I knew that I would never finish it, which meant that I would never have to send it in, which meant that it would never be rejected, which meant that I would at least be able to preserve the dream that I could have been a great writer or a great artist…

“It does sound quite stupid, doesn’t it? So at that moment, I thought, ‘Well, it’s all up to you, isn’t it? There’s nobody particularly trying to stop you doing what you want to do. There’s nobody particularly trying to help you. This is all down to you. Do you want this or not?’

“And I thought, ‘Yes, I do want it.’ So what’s the best thing to do? And I had a bit of a quick rethink. I went out and found that there was an apparent vacancy in the comic strip section of a music paper, Sounds, that I was buying every week. I did a couple of sample episodes. I sent them in, and within two weeks, I’d got a telegram back. It wasn’t rejection. But by that point, I’d thought if it is rejection, you just learn from the experience, do something else.

“But it wasn’t – it was acceptance… I’d realised that taking responsibility for my own life seemed to me to be a big key to actually taking control of my own life.

“I’m not going to start a self-help movement about this, because I’m not sure it would work for everybody else. But that was my experience. That was what got me through.”

But whether the world as we know it gets through the next few years, he is not so sure.

“I think that our world at the moment is going through one of its periodic huge changes. We could talk about the agricultural period and the industrial period, but we can’t really talk about this as much more than the post-industrial period. And we don’t really know what that means, because it’s still happening. It’s changing so quickly, but we’re obviously becoming something else.

“And it is my belief that a lot of the institutions that govern us have perhaps looked at that future and realised that there may not be a place for them in it. It seems to be easier for people to imagine the end of the world than it does for them to be able to imagine the end of capitalism.

“I suspect that the world of the future that is coming up is going to be radically different, as different as the world of industry was to the world of agriculture – probably more different – and I think that it’s coming whether we like it or not, and I think that as the world changes I think people who have got the most entrenched interests are digging their heels in.”

Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.