Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [176]
For all some critics have said to the contrary, I am not a great sword-and-sorcery fan and find Howard and E.R. Burroughs, in particular, virtually unreadable. One of my criticisms of all but Leiber is that the stuff is, like far too much SF and fantasy, emotionally unconvincing.
Fantasy writers are often called writers of “adult fairy stories.” Most of them are not—they are writers of fairy stories for adults who still want to read fairy stories. There is nothing wrong in writing or reading fairy stories. There is something retarded, however, in the man who devotes himself wholly either to reading or to writing the stuff. The writer who merely recaptures the dream-worlds of childhood without adding to this what his adult mind has learned is an inadequate artist, if nothing else.
He may be an inadequate artist and a good stylist, like Dunsany or Bradbury or Tolkien, but if, as in the case of these, he cannot do more than recapture the wonders and terrors of infancy, he deserves to be regarded as we regard an infant prodigy—with admiration but not too much serious attention.
The label of emotional immaturity is an easy one to attach and is often applied these days, but I think it will stick in this case. This may be the reason why the appeal of sword-and-sorcery is on the whole to younger readers whose emotions are, understandably, not yet fully matured. What good it achieves, if any, is that it forms a useful bridge between childhood sense of wonder and adult sense of surrealism. However, that bridge seems to be infrequently crossed. People, to prolong the metaphor, sit down halfway over and stay there for the rest of their lives. This is bad for them.
The good sword-and-sorcery story should have something of the function of a moving-belt, perhaps, carrying the reader with it. The dream-worlds of these stories are worlds to which writer and reader initially escape. They leave everything behind. The dream landscapes and structures the less limited writer discovers as he creates a story will soon be utilized for his own artistic purposes, if he has any. He will cease to be merely an escapist entertainer—he will apply his skill and understanding to making these worlds relevant to our own situation.
Few fantasy writers manage it. Peake has managed it in his Titus Groan trilogy and, I am pleased to say, so has Leiber in a slighter way with his ironic and delightful Grey Mouser stories. It is what I have tried to do in the Elric tales—evidently without much success since the less escapist themes I tried to carry on the sword-and-sorcery vehicle have escaped a great many readers. I shall have to try again with a fresh or altered vehicle.
If I had to list what I consider to be the best current developments of fantasy’s various streams, they would be:
(a) Titus Groan trilogy by Peake (representing the “haunted palace”).
(b) Two Sought Adventure by Leiber (representing sword-and-sorcery).
(c) The Drowned World by Ballard (representing SF).
(d) The Naked Lunch trilogy by William Burroughs (representing how the elements of fantasy can be developed to push forward the progress of the novel).
The fantasy form has been progressing and refining itself for centuries. It has gone through various stages of borrowing from or influencing mainstream fiction, and is currently starting a phase where it will once again both borrow and influence until at length it is absorbed, for a while, back into the mainstream. Fantasy (and in this I include science fiction) that does not do this—and most of it, of course,