Elric in the Dream Realms - Michael Moorcock [3]
War Hound was the first of the von Bek novels. The overall sequence was intended to take place at key times in European history from the emerging modern age in the seventeenth century to the coming of the Age of Enlightenment and the moving of the French Revolution from Enlightenment to Terror (and which introduced my vulpine Encyclopaedist Lord Renyard) to the final clash of systems represented by the Nazis and Communists in the twentieth century. That we are back to sectarian warfare between the People of the Book is a sad fact that Jerry Cornelius was revived to encounter in the stories collected in The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius. The second von Bek novel, The City in the Autumn Stars, also dealt with our transition from alchemy and magic to modern physics, and the third was incorporated into the first of the most recent Elric/Eternal Champion stories beginning with The Dreamthief’s Daughter in which I was at last able to give Elric a contemporary persona.
With all this going on, I thought I had put Elric behind me for good. But, in fact, by the 1980s, when most of the planned work was done, I still had not lost my fascination for the crimson-eyed albino. I wrote my novel Mother London as a celebration of my home city and remained unready to tackle the third Pyat novel. While researching those previous books I had ideas I thought would suit an Elric story. And so it slowly dawned on me that I might restore my literary wellsprings with a couple of Elric books. The first of these would incorporate images that had come to me in my travels through Europe and the Middle East. While I had not yet learned how Elric might confront modern times without turning into Jerry Cornelius, I wondered if there was anything new I could bring to the fantasy genre. I am now reconciled to knowing I will never leave it behind and will continue to enjoy writing it, at least in shorter forms, as in the Elric story I did in 2005 for an anthology using the U.S. National Spelling Bee as its base. The editor asked contributors to pick a word, and when I saw “insouciant,” a word I might have overused to describe the albino prince, I knew I was fated to complete “A Portrait in Ivory.”
I had already brought Elric back in the nineties on his first recorded dream quest in graphic form, “Duke Elric,” published in Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse. There, Elric traveled from Ethelred’s Dane-plagued England to Moorish Spain and on to discover a kind of dragon’s graveyard deep in the Sahara. Working with Walter Simonson had become a pleasant habit, and we embarked on a four-part graphic novel, Elric: The Making of a Sorcerer, also for DC. I wanted to show the history of the Melnibonéans from the time they arrived at their island home and also develop relationships between Cymoril, Yyrkoon and especially Elric’s father, Sadric, showing how Melnibonéans achieved their vast knowledge of sorcery via their long dreams. Walter, as usual, rose to the occasion, and readers might find it interesting to see a script addressed to an artist who is also a friend. As with everything in this series, the intention is to offer readers insights they might not find elsewhere, so the only editing is for clarity.
Commissioned by Ted Carnell, “Aspects of Fantasy” was my first attempt at introducing readers of Science Fantasy magazine to the roots of modern fantasy fiction and suggesting where I thought the forms might go. Of course, I didn’t know then what I know now, and it should be remembered that this was how a critic might talk about such books and ideas before, say, Lin Carter