INTRODUCTION

Strictly speaking, not all these stories are being presented here in the order in which they were published. While the main body of the Elric novels are appearing as I first wrote them, the short stories and novellas are a bit of an exception. I wrote most of them, of course, during that prolific period of the early 1960s when I was publishing a lead story virtually every month in one of the Nova magazines, all edited by E. J. “Ted” Carnell.

“The Last Enchantment” was actually written after the story “The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams,” published as “The Flame Bringers.” It was, as the story implies, supposed to be the last Elric story. After I had submitted it, Carnell asked me to write the sequence which became the serial published in book form as Stormbringer. He was also an agent, so he suggested he send the story to one of the American magazines. I forgot about it. Many years later, after Ted had died tragically early, his successor found the story and sent it to me. In 1978 a young man called Armand Eising, who with Thomas Durwood planned to publish Ariel, an ambitious fantasy magazine in large size with full colour, asked me for an Elric story and since I had recently received “The Last Enchantment” back, I gave it to him to be illustrated by Frank Frazetta, one of the many great graphic artists who have over the years embellished my work. (Frazetta’s cover for The Silver Warriors, aka Phoenix in Obsidian, the second Eternal Champion tale, became pretty iconographic, being turned into a snow globe and then imitated in this century by the poster designer for the first Narnia film!)

By 1964 Cele Goldsmith, the brilliant editor of Amazing and Fantastic magazines, was publishing epic fantasy stories and, because Carnell was overinventoried with my work, I submitted “Earl Aubec and the Golem” to her. It appeared as “Master of Chaos.” To my astonished pleasure, it was illustrated by the great Virgil Finlay, whose work had embellished so many of the magazines I had admired as a boy, including Weird Tales and Famous Fantastic Mysteries. This story developed the idea of Chaos being acted upon by the human imagination, a recurring theme in my fantastic fiction. “To Rescue Tanelorn…” was written in a slightly different manner for me, echoing Dunsany more than my work usually did, and introducing Rackhir, the Red Archer, who, as well as enjoying his own adventures, became a stalwart friend of Elric.

The concepts which have been the backbone of most of my science fantasies appeared pretty rapidly, one after the other. “The Eternal Champion” offered the notion of a hero constantly reincarnated to fight for the Balance, no matter what other loyalties he might possess, and The Sundered Worlds, which will not be published in this series since it was pretty much pure science fiction, first offered the idea of “the multiverse,” a quasi-infinite number of universes, any one of which is only marginally different from the next.

Both ideas seemed to inspire other writers (and physicists!) almost immediately. What was original to them also captured the imagination of games creators and graphic novelists until within only a few years my own work was somewhat lost amongst all the material it had inspired. Even the symbol representing Chaos, which I had created in a doodle meant to represent the opposite of Law (a single arrow), became universal to the degree that people now regard it as an ancient sign. I suppose it is ancient to many younger readers born after 1963. I myself, of course, had been similarly inspired by what had gone before me—for instance, the “alternate world” tales of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, whose Harold Shea stories graced the pages of Unknown Worlds and remain some of the best examples of their kind, in turn inspiring writers like Poul Anderson to write his magnificent Three Hearts and Three Lions.

Both de Camp and Anderson were, at least as fantasy writers, fellow spirits. Sprague and I became good friends and it was he, of course, who first encouraged me to write epic fantasy, when the magazine Fantastic Universe, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson, a much-loved anthologist, wanted to bring such fiction back to the ordinary newsstands. Hans commissioned me to write, with de Camp’s blessing, a new Conan story which, in the end, never materialized, as I have explained elsewhere. While I now have to agree with the purists who have rejected the Conan tales by other hands, we were working in a somewhat different context in which we were a handful of enthusiasts attempting to present Howard’s enduring character to a wider audience.

Pretty much all the ideas which formed the backbone of my fantastic fiction (and indeed were later developed for my literary fiction) came out in a year or two. I was developing very rapidly as a writer, expanding in many directions at once, rather like Chaos itself. I wrote all kinds of journalism and, in researching many of my features, added material to my fiction (for instance, a feature on Alexander the Great led to my writing “The Greater Conqueror” for a painting by Gerard Quinn, the star artist of Science Fantasy, intended for the cover but ironically used on another issue).

“The Eternal Champion” was an idea I had originally begun to write as a serial for a fanzine I produced when I was seventeen called Avilion which scarcely made it into reality, since I only had a chance to run off a few copies before my arrangement with the firm that allowed me to print my fanzines for free came to an end. Both the magazine and the serial were set aside as my work with Amalgamated Press took up most of my time, and I had to devote myself to the detective adventures of Sexton Blake (whose battle with the albino Zenith had been one of my boyhood enthusiasms) and the graphic tales of Robin Hood, Kit Carson, Dick Turpin, Buck Jones or Dogfight Dixon RFC that we turned out monthly. Most of my taste for red-blooded pseudo-historical fiction went into producing scripts for the great Don Lawrence, with whom I collaborated on many stories for Olac the Gladiator and Karl the Viking, some of which had the fantasy elements I would later begin to incorporate into the stories I wrote for Carnell’s magazines. With Lawrence, I produced features on Alexander the Great and Constantine the Great for magazines like Look and Learn and its companion Bible Story, for which I also wrote features on the great cathedrals of England, as well as the exploits of various colourful biblical figures. All this taught me, I believe, how to present a fast-paced fantasy adventure and also helped me research the story for which I won an early Nebula Award, “Behold the Man.” For a liberal humanist I read the Bible more thoroughly, as I’ve since discovered, than many professed Christians!

A year or two before I published “Behold the Man” in the Easter number of New Worlds, which by then I was editing, I had, in the winter of 1964, begun to wonder how it would be possible to turn my talent for writing mythic stories of eternal heroes to address more immediately the issues of the modern world which were increasingly beginning to concern me. I believed that what modernist fiction had become was no longer capable of addressing these issues and I was frustrated because, for me, most science fiction seemed to dodge the implications also. I wanted to find a form which confronted those issues as squarely as possible.

I felt I could do this somehow by using what I had learned while writing Elric, and in the end I came up with Jerry Cornelius, whose original I had seen in Notting Hill while I ate at my local café. This beautiful young man, with his ascetic features, elegant clothes and floating long hair, had suddenly appeared as I looked up. Behind him was the name of one of our local greengrocer’s shops, Cornelius of London. And so I had, in one moment, both the image of my modern-day hero and his name. That, unlikely as it seems, is exactly how Jerry Cornelius was conceived. All I had to do then was try to develop a technique which did the same thing I had been doing with the Elric stories.

Rather than produce a thinned-down version of Elric, I realized I could create something out of the Elric mythos but make it relate thoroughly to modern times. The answer was simple. I took the first Elric short stories back to what had first inspired them (including my sojourn in Lapland climbing mountains) and adapted the plots to the story which was to become the first Cornelius novel, The Final Programme. Parts of this novel were cut up and appeared in New Worlds, and “Phase 1,” harking back to “The Dreaming City,” the first Elric story, was intended to be one of these fragments but is actually published here in this form for the first time, to show how that transition came about. I was, of course, to return to both Elric and Jerry when the occasion demanded or the mood was on me, and when Sprague de Camp asked for an Elric story for his sword-and-sorcery anthology The Fantastic Swordsmen, I obliged with “The Singing Citadel.” A later anthology would include “The Sleeping Sorceress,” which I would develop eventually into a full-blown novel. I seemed to have been inspired to develop a certain sibilance in my titles by 1967!

A few years later, around the summer of 1973, my enthusiasm for the fin de siècle, Art Nouveau, the aesthetes and so on began to form the ideas which would eventually go into my sequence generally known as The Dancers at the End of Time. I eventually finished this sequence in the middle seventies and by then was working regularly with the artist Rodney Matthews producing a vast series of posters, cards, notelets and calendars. Our publisher, Peter Ledeboer of Big O Graphics, asked me if I could write a story for Rodney to illustrate. This eventually became the rather strange blend of Elric and the Dancers called, obviously enough, Elric at the End of Time.

This magnificently illustrated book, with picture after picture in gorgeous colour, was eventually published by Paper Tiger. It shows Our Hero, of course, in an entirely different situation from his usual ones! The idea was inspired by M. John Harrison’s suggestion that the denizens of the End of Time would be seen very much as the Gods of Chaos by the likes of Elric and his kind. Some readers weren’t too happy about my writing what was, after all, primarily a humorous story, but it seemed to me that there was a chance to offer an aspect of Elric which was not one of unrelieved gloom! There’s always a danger, as one’s work grows in popularity, of taking oneself too seriously. That’s why from time to time it’s worth writing a bit of self-parody like “The Stone Thing,” which I originally wrote for a friend of mine Eric Bentcliffe, who put out some very funny fanzines a few years ago.

The Jade Man’s Eyes was done for my friend Bill Butler, a bookseller and poet who also published a number of offbeat books from his shop in Brighton. Most of the books he published were typically done for love rather than profit and, since he was an Elric fan, this was one of several projects I did with him in the hope of making him a little money! Sadly, he died in 1977, and I wrote a rock song about him (since he had always wanted me to write a rock song about him) called “The Great Sun Jester,” which was recorded a year or two after his death by Blue Öyster Cult (who also did a version of an Elric song, “Black Blade”).

In the early 1990s Ed Kramer proposed an anthology of Elric stories written by other hands, such as Neil Gaiman, Tad Williams and Karl Edward Wagner. I wrote “The Black Blade’s Song,” published as “The White Wolf’s Song,” for this, linking it into my stories of the moonbeam roads and the Second Ether, while the story I did for the anthology’s sequel, “Sir Milk-and-Blood,” takes Elric into the sequence of modern-dress stories I wrote which links him back to Monsieur Zenith, who originally inspired him. I wrote “Crimson Eyes,” for instance, for the New Statesman’s special Christmas issue, and Elric/Zenith’s other adventures in conflict with The Metatemporal Detective have recently been published in the volume of that name. I wanted to bring my hero back to his origins in homage to the stories which originally excited me as a boy.

There is one further homage here. Because Rackhir was in this volume, it seemed reasonable to include a fairly recent story concerning him. I wrote it as a firm nod to Robert E. Howard for an anthology, Cross Plains Universe, done in 2006 for the World Fantasy Convention held in Austin, the nearest large town to where I live in Texas. The book was intended to celebrate and commemorate Howard, and I was flattered to be asked to join in. Readers of Howard, as well as myself, will see a few nods to Conan as well as my own cosmology and its heroes.

I have written almost all my Elric stories because I was asked to do so, either by commissioning editors or by readers. My affection for the crimson-eyed albino has never waned. Since I began writing I have always maintained a close relationship with my readers and have done my best, whenever possible, to accommodate them when they have asked for a certain kind of story. While I retired from writing long epic fantasy stories or, for that matter, science fantasy novels with the most recent sequence involving Elric and others of my own heroic pantheon, ending with “The White Wolf’s Son,” I still take great pleasure in producing the occasional shorter story or graphic tale, and I suspect I shall continue to write these until my career comes at last to an end. Meanwhile, we have these, so wonderfully, gloriously, handsomely illustrated by Michael Kaluta. I hope you enjoy them.

Michael Moorcock,
Lost Pines, Texas,
May 2007

NB: In addition to the appearance of “Phase 1” as an independent story, three other stories appear here for the first time in one of my own collections: “The Eternal Champion,” “The Jade Man’s Eyes” and “The Roaming Forest.”