Elric in the Dream Realms - Michael Moorcock [163]
Aubec is sour. He has been cheated of a reconciliation with his son. He has lost the Treasure of Pikarayd. He has been duped and used as a pawn by half a score of different interests. All he has is his cat and the ridiculous bracelet, which he mistrusts.
Micella begs him to join forces with her, telling Aubec that it is in his own interest. But Aubec will have none of her.
Completely unimpressed that he has been the means of stopping a destructive war, Aubec rides off with his cat on his shoulder, still bent on finding his lost son and the means of having his vengeance on his old enemy Aradard.
As he goes, Micella smiles to herself as she sees the sun glint on the collar that the cat still wears.
Rest of the Series
Through three further books—The Chronicle of Earl Aubec—we will trace Aubec’s adventures, his quest for his son and his attempts to avenge Eloarde. Gradually the issues will build until the final book where he is responsible for exiling the Lords of Chaos from Earth and sowing the seeds that will eventually lead to the decline of Melnibonéan power: The formation of the Lormyrian Confederacy which throws off the shackles of the Bright Empire.
This will also leave room for further tales concerning The Age of the Bright Empire, gradually, perhaps, leading up to The Age of the Young Kingdoms and the earlier adventures of Elric of Melniboné.
INTRODUCTION TO THE
TAIWAN EDITION OF ELRIC
INTRODUCTION TO THE
TAIWAN EDITION OF
ELRIC
(2007)
I HAVE TO say that it is a great pleasure for my Elric books to be appearing in Taiwan after so many years. Chinese-language editions of my work have been rare and the only major language in which Elric has not appeared, so I feel honoured that they can at last be read by people whose culture I have always held in considerable esteem.
While Elric was never influenced by the few Chinese stories available to me as a child and young man, I have always felt that they have something in common with many of the legends and folk-tales I have since read and which have appeared, in various forms, on the screen or in graphic novels. My chief influence for the stories were the Norse and Celtic epics which I enjoyed as a child, before I discovered the supernatural adventure fiction of writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber and others. I had begun writing such stories long before I had heard, for instance, of J.R.R. Tolkien who began to publish his great trilogy around the time when I was fourteen and fifteen and editing my fantasy fanzine Burroughsania, originally based on my youthful enthusiasm for the fantasy stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs (most famous as the author of Tarzan), but I am probably one of the few surviving writers of fantasy who was not influenced by The Lord of the Rings. Instead my influences in fantasy were writers like Lord Dunsany, T. H. White and Mervyn Peake, as well as Poul Anderson, whose novel The Broken Sword had the same tragic elements I found in the great Icelandic tales.
By the time I was asked to write a series of fantasy novellas for the magazine Science Fantasy, which prided itself on the literary qualities of its fiction, I was reading very little fantasy fiction at all, but had developed an enthusiasm for modernists like Conrad, Proust, Woolf and contemporaries such as Elizabeth Bowen and Angus Wilson. However, I suspect my exposure to French existentialism coloured much of what I was writing around the age of nineteen, when I first began to develop the Elric character. I was a huge Camus and Sartre fan at twenty when I wrote those early short stories and by the time I was twenty-three I had, I believed, killed my hero off and had no plans to write more stories.
The demand for more stories from editors and readers—as well as a continuing love for my character—meant, of course, that I came to write another ten volumes over the years and though I write mostly non-fantasy fiction, these days, I still find myself moved to write further short