Elric in the Dream Realms - Michael Moorcock [1]
FOREWORD
by Neil Gaiman
“Rolling … we’re rolling in the ruins,” sings Michael Moorcock on my iPod as I write this, thrown up by coincidence or the magic of the shuffle. Which seems like a good place to start.
When I was nine I read Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock and it changed my life. Elric of Melniboné entered my head and it seemed that he had been there forever.
I was determined to read every tale of the albino prince with the black sword. I was an Elric reader, and only an Elric reader, until I found a copy of The Sleeping Sorceress a year later and discovered that the other aspects of the Eternal Champion—the heroes and the protagonists of the other books by Moorcock—were also Elric. This was permission to read everything Moorcock had written, and over the next two years I enthusiastically discovered Jerry Cornelius and Karl Glogauer, Dorian Hawkmoon, Corum and the rest of them (the rest of him?). I was fortunate that my desire to read Moorcock coincided with the desire of the British publishing industry to bring everything Michael Moorcock had written back into print, and those books, with their hallucinatory covers, was what my pocket money went on. In a tiny bookshop in Brighton I found a small press Elric novella called “The Jade Man’s Eyes” that no one in the world had heard of. I was twelve years old and I wondered if it had been put there just for me.
I internalized the books: they became part of me on a very deep level. I forget to talk about Mike Moorcock, sometimes, when people ask me about my influences, because Mike’s work, gulped and read and reread and absorbed when I was still forming, was less of an influence on what I was and how I thought than it was the foundation of it. For all my adult life it has seemed natural and sensible that fictions should be huge and sprawling, should contain their own cosmologies, cover unimaginable spans of time, encompass every possible genre and medium and, if possible, feature thin and pale princes who had trouble with relationships—family and interpersonal, not to mention sexual. (It is worth noting that all these things were, without any conscious thought on my part, evident in Sandman, my own largest work of fiction.)
My debt to Michael Moorcock is unrepayable. It was from him that I learned—at an early enough age that the information sculpted the way that I thought—that a good writer should be able to do anything: that you could write heroic fantasy and mainstream fiction with the same typewriter, not to mention comics and movies and essays, political screeds and strange punk fantasies. Moorcock was the kind of editor who changed the field of speculative fiction simply by publishing the kind of stories he wanted to read. When I was too young to do anything more than dream that I wanted to be a writer, he was my model for what a writer was and what a real writer did; more than twenty years after I read Stormbringer I wrote a story called “One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock” that was the nearest I’ve come to pure autobiography, trying to explain the part that Moorcock (and Elric) had in making me who I am and who I was.
The Elric stories are quintessential Moorcock, the pure stuff, uncut and straight from the street (as are their fraternal twins and reflections, the Jerry Cornelius sequence, a land bridge to the work of the other Moorcock, the one who wrote Mother London). They span the entirety of Moorcock’s remarkable career to date. They swim with color, delirious and fantastic tales of heartbreak and loss and bittersweet victory, anchored always by the pale prince and his black, soul-eating sword. They are wise and painful and smart and if you read them right, they’ll change you.
I wouldn’t trade them for worlds.
Neil Gaiman
Carharrack, Cornwall
April 9, 2008
INTRODUCTION
In the middle 1970s, with a fair amount of literary success in both generic and non-generic fiction, and having completed the final Corum sequence, I decided to stop writing epic fantasy fiction. One of the reasons