Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [7]
The Revenge of the Rose was the last book Jim illustrated in a commercial edition and later in its omnibus incarnation. This book caused a certain amount of controversy when published because I felt I needed to bring some innovation and new vitality to the series. I needed to feel as ambitious about that book as I had felt in 1961 when I began the series and was one of very few producing this kind of fantasy, establishing the conventions of a budding genre. My work had possessed vitality for the very reason that I was not entirely sure what I was doing, trying out narrative ideas, establishing dynamics, discovering ways of telling this kind of story for the first time. My decision with The Revenge of the Rose came as a result of arguments I had made in “Aspects of Fantasy” in Science Fantasy magazine, also in the early ’60s. I believe that one doesn’t serve one’s readers by repeating the mixture as before. Whether one is writing popular fiction or literary fiction, one still needs to keep pushing the envelope. I had to continue to find new ways of telling the story, including adding, in this case, elements of comedy and a new kind of character (something I touch upon in the introduction to The Skrayling Tree, second in a later Elric trilogy sequence beginning with The Dreamthief’s Daughter). Some readers were unhappy with me for changing the formula, but others believed the book was the best I had written since Stormbringer. I was sorry to disappoint readers, but many have since come to say they liked the book very much, sometimes on rereading it. I had not forgotten that, when I wrote the first Elric stories, some readers were upset that I had broken with the traditions of Howard and Tolkien! Whatever the response, I feel it is my duty to continue producing innovation in all my fiction, whether generic or literary (or both). Yesterday’s innovation, as we have seen, becomes tomorrow’s convention. However, when I came to write an Elric story for the eightieth-anniversary issue of Weird Tales, edited by Ann VanderMeer, I decided to celebrate with an act, if you like, of nostalgia, and thus “Black Petals,” harking back to the original stories, was done in a style which might have been found in those early issues when Howard, Lovecraft and Seabury Quinn were first seeing print. My only regret was that Jim was not commissioned to illustrate the story. “Black Petals” will also form the basis of some collaborations I am hoping to write with my friend Fabrice Colin, a young fantasy writer who has already made his mark in France. They will be initially published in French. I spend much of my time in Paris, these days, and have seen many different and outstanding versions of the albino published there. Elric has been successful in France at least as long as he has been published in the United States, and I thought it appropriate to publish a recent piece, talking about French publication. After Jim Cawthorn, Philippe Druillet was the next artist to draw Elric for publication.
One other Elric book Jim didn’t illustrate was Ed Kramer’s 1994 Tales of the White Wolf, a collection of Elric stories by other hands, including Neil Gaiman, Karl Edward Wagner and Colin Greenland. One of the very best of these was by Tad Williams, brilliant author of Tailchaser’s Song and Otherland, in which he introduced a character not unrelated to the late Jimi Hendrix and a story I would love to see reprinted. I enjoyed the story so much that I asked Tad if I