Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [2]
But everyone else has said pretty much the same thing in their introductions. So what’s left for me? I wondered.
Well, besides all those other things, Michael Moorcock is the prophet of my own personal religion. Yes, now I’m explaining.
First off, you have to understand that I’m one of those folks who grew up in the sixties and seventies, the years in which Moorcock was fizzing up into grand prominence in the fields of SF and fantasy. I read everything you would imagine—Tolkien, Bradbury, Leiber, Howard, Lovecraft and too many others to relate—but Michael Moorcock’s books were the first things in the genre that seemed to be truly of my era, even though his fantasy heroes like Elric and Corum lived in timeless fantasy worlds. Something about the melancholy and absurdity of Moorcock’s worlds, even during his greenest and most melodramatic beginnings as a writer, struck a note of familiarity that thrilled me. And in his other work, I soon began to discover, the implicit became explicit: the Jerry Cornelius books and The Dancers at the End of Time were surreal but nevertheless revealing and accurate mirrors of our shared era, an age when everything fell apart but also when even the ruins themselves seemed to contain the excitement of new possibility.
Years later, long after I’d become a writer myself (and begun to realize to my chagrin that many of my best and most creative ideas were actually fuzzy memories of things I’d read in a well-thumbed Moorcock paperback twenty years earlier), I moved to England. My wife, Deborah, was, for a while, Mr. M.’s British publisher, and because of that I had the great good fortune to meet him and even get to know him. The first social get-together was especially exciting, of course, even when we had a mild argument about Tolkien. (Mike, although admiring The Lord of the Rings, seemed to be irritated about the little Englandness of Tolkien’s Shire and what Mike felt was the romanticization of the peasant-landowner relationship. Or something like that.) But of course mainly I was just thrilled to be talking to him.
During the time I lived in the UK, we spent a few evenings with Mike and his wife, Linda. It was always great, but after a while it wasn’t like going backstage to meet the Beatles anymore. It was almost … normal.
Then one night Mike called and invited us over for dinner. He and Linda were moving to the United States in a couple of weeks, he reminded us, and he thought we should get together before they left. Of course we said yes.
Comes the appointed night. I was having a crappy day for some reason—small irritations, perhaps a squabble with my publishers, maybe I was just being a jerk for no reason (God knows, it happens). In any case, I was not in a good mood. Deborah came home a little late from work and I was worried about being late. (I don’t like being late.) We got a cab and headed across London to the Moorcocks’.
I can still remember that night far better than I remember most of the other important moments of my life. It was raining, not enough to be interesting but too much to ignore, and crosstown traffic was jerky and slow. The taxi windows were striped with an orange sodium glow from the streetlights and I was feeling really tense and grumpy. Deb had sensibly stopped talking to me and was looking out the window. I was probably reviewing some silent list of my grievances against Fate at that moment, when suddenly the sky opened, the trumpets blared, the angels sang!
Well, no. The windshield wipers kept thumping and the sodium light kept strobing in slow motion over the windows (which was frankly a bit migrainous and probably why Deb wasn’t talking). But at the