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By Root 497 0

stories about Elric. During the forty years or so in which I have depicted his adventures I have seen my hero’s influence grow, as he has appeared in almost every media, including radio, games and comics, but I resisted, until very recently, allowing him to appear in a movie, largely because I had already seen other work of mine translated to the screen and had been unhappy with the translation. Recently, however, Universal purchased the film rights on behalf of the Weitz brothers, whom I believe could probably do justice to the character, and as I write a movie is in production. In some ways my ambiguous albino has already appeared on the screen because he has influenced many similar characters (for instance in Japanese animé) but I have no reason to complain of that “borrowing,” since Elric himself was an homage to a character who helped me while away my boyhood with such pleasure. That character appeared in a long-running series of Sexton Blake detective stories which were published before the Second World War and whose name was Zenith the Albino, a villain who plagued the existence of Sexton Blake from 1918 until 1940. I found them late, needless to say, and bought second-hand all the copies I could find. I have not only given credit to Zenith’s influence, I have in later Elric stories, and my series of Metatemporal Detective tales, done my best to show that they are actually one and the same character!

Zenith, of course, did not have either the power nor the heritage of Elric but I am glad that I have kept him alive, at least in some form, being instrumental in republishing his only adventure in novel form in a recent edition by Savoy Books, who are a firm dedicated to publishing only work about which they feel enthusiastic, irrespective of cost. So strong has Elric’s influence been, some readers believed that I had invented Zenith as well as Elric! Many authors have been good enough to tell me how their own wish to write was encouraged by the Elric stories, so it feels good to pass on a torch which Anthony Skene (Zenith’s creator) first passed to me.

Of course, when I began writing Elric, there was no defined genre of “fantasy” and publishers did not know really what to call the kind of stories I was writing. Even Tolkien was seen by critics as creating some sort of post-nuclear disaster world because they were used to “serious” science fiction by the mid-1950s but could not conceive of a world set in a mythical alternative place like “Middle-earth.” Indeed, none of us could imagine the popularity of what became known as epic fantasy (my choice of term) or “sword and sorcery” (Fritz Leiber’s choice) which was why I happily allowed games companies and others to use my characters and world, to the point when two companies (Dungeons & Dragons being one) used them in their gaming scenarios. Later those companies would go to law over who owned rights to material which I had freely given away and only then did I begin to realize that, from being the enthusiasm of a few, fantasy fiction was growing into “big business.” As a result I was forced to formalize by own work and institute trademarks and copyrights which, in those early days, had seemed both unnecessary and against the spirit of what I was trying to create. For many years Tolkien and myself were, in the public mind, the only writers of our kind and it would not be until the 1970s, with a new generation of authors, that we began to see the creation of what is, in most respects, a fresh genre. I had originally been attracted to writing supernatural fantasy fiction because it was, like certain kinds of science fiction, a “clean canvas” on which I could create work that was unlike anything I had previously read. I did the same with my Jerry Cornelius stories.

Cornelius, initially, was an attempt to produce a kind of myth-hero for modern times and his first novel, The Final Programme (sometimes known by its strange film title of The Last Days of Man on Earth!) actually paralleled Elric’s first adventures. Again, the stories were an attempt to write a new kind of fiction,