’s Adult Fantasy series of reprints for Ballantine Books reintroduced readers to the origins of the genre. My articles, together with Carter’s selections and mass-market reprints of Edgar Rice Burroughs, J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard, were, it emerged, early signs of a great renaissance of the fantastic that succeeded in allowing the fantasy genre regularly to dominate popular bestseller lists today and helped introduce certain conventions (often as magic realism) into our literature. Sophisticated writers like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Iain Sinclair, Michael Chabon, Walter Mosley and Thomas Pynchon have all produced wonderful work over the past decade or two and demonstrate how a good writer, frustrated by the old traditions of modernist realism, believing them to be constricting and clichéd, can approach contemporary life with a richer, more complex set of literary tools to produce work that discovers sympathetic recognition in today’s general reader. To have been part of the lives of such writers fills me with humility as well as pride. It gives me enormous delight and optimism to read their work, admire their sophistication and celebrate their part in securing that future for literature which a few of us had anticipated over the years. They have reunited popular and complex literary fiction. I love non-generic absurdists like Zoran Živković or Sebastien Doubinsky. I love the work of the best young adult writers, such as Holly Black or my old friend Terry Pratchett, whose work I published when he was far younger than I had been when I began selling to the same magazines. Terry’s considerable success, making him the modern equivalent of P. G. Wodehouse, is perhaps the most honorable of all. I think of Thomas M. Disch, Jonathan Carroll, M. John Harrison, Howard Waldrop and Paul Di Filippo, who raised the general level of urban fantasy in particular. Talented writers such as China Miéville, Jeffrey Ford or Jeff Van-derMeer still find splendid possibilities in generic forms, equal the best we have, and produce work that is immediately identifiable as theirs. That they prefer to be published in genre does not make their work any less sophisticated than that of P. D. James or Margaret Atwood, who vehemently deny that work of theirs, oozing familiar generic traits at every punctilious pore, is fantasy or its child, science fiction. Indeed, the writers I most admire recognize that they are using methods identified with genre and, by showing respect for their predecessors, gain a keener sense of what they are doing when they use generic materials. Today, we frequently find superior talent working with genre-inspired ideas. These are signs of lively times and the plethora of talent they have thrown up. Does anyone remember when critics were wondering if the novel was dead?
Earl Aubec is a character I had always intended to do more with, and for a while I was considering writing a sequence dealing with his adventures. All I have now, thanks to David Hill of Cornwall, who hung on to a copy and was able to let me have it back for this edition, is a proposal I must have written but never submitted. I later considered doing the synopsis as an RPG game, but somehow I never did produce it, even though I have a healthy admiration for games writers. I have included it since so much of the work here has something to do with origins and because my fantasy work has always had an intimate relationship with games, since D&D days. I felt that The Fortress of the Pearl also might have functioned fairly readily as a game, since it is probably the most formulaic of the books. I’m not sure if anyone else noticed this, but I found it strange to be working within a genre whose conventions I had helped form; and, while many readers have said this book is their favorite Elric story, I felt I had relearned enough in writing it to try to do something a little bit different in the next one.
Although I have had other work published in the People’s Republic of China, Elric has never appeared there, but I was especially delighted when Taiwan began