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of these, “The Singing Citadel,” was done for L. Sprague de Camp’s The Fantastic Swordsmen anthology, and when my good friend Kenneth Bulmer, himself a fine writer of fantasy and science fiction, was asked to edit a new magazine called Sword and Sorcery the first thing he thought to do was phone me and ask if I could write a new Elric series. I sketched out an idea for three long linked novellas that would take place between early events in the series. He liked the idea, and I had completed the first and begun work on the second when the publisher, who had second thoughts about backing a fantasy magazine, canceled on him, leaving Ken with an inventory and no magazine.

To be honest, since I had publishers very keen to get new Elric stories from me, I was not especially put out by the news, but I felt very sorry for Ken, who had high hopes of producing a magazine in the literary tradition of the U.S. Weird Tales or U.K. Science Fantasy, where the Elric stories had first appeared. I think he would have done a first-class job, given the authors and illustrators he had lined up. His time had been wasted, and I completed the project as a novel, filling in some of the events between the stories.

Elric of Melniboné followed very shortly afterward. In writing The Sleeping Sorceress I had begun to think about Elric’s early life and what old Melniboné might have been like, so I was ready to do this book. This was the first time I had written directly for book publication and

had not been commissioned by a magazine editor. I wrote it for a publisher that had no previous policy of doing heroic fantasy, Hutchinson, but that had had some success with a series by Jane Gaskell and approached me for a novel.

Thus Elric of Melniboné came out only a year after The Sleeping Sorceress. I think this was the closest together any of the Elric books were published. I sent it to my old paperback publisher in the U.S., Lancer Books, since I felt I owed them a certain loyalty (they had published all the Elric and Hawkmoon books up to that time), but it was with some hesitation, since by then I was already being offered much larger advances elsewhere. I rather regretted it when they altered the early chapters and changed the title from Elric of Melniboné to, of all things, The Dreaming City. This seemed to show a singular stupidity, since, of course, the first published story in The Stealer of Souls had appeared under that title.

As soon as I could I got the rights back from Lancer (who in the meantime had gone bankrupt, taking most of my early titles with them), and when eventually Don Wollheim of DAW Books suggested reprinting the whole series with some brilliant new covers, I was at last able to publish the book as was originally intended. These are the books that most of my early readers from the 1970s remember best, with the matching Michael Whelan covers and matching type designs. I wrote a novella for my friend Bill Butler’s Unicorn Books (The Jade Man’s Eyes), which became part of a further addition to the series for DAW, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate. The Sleeping Sorceress was also at that time retitled as The Vanishing Tower.

These books went through many editions, establishing the chronology of the series, until Berkley Books made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, together with the chance to use the work of Robert Gould on the covers, which is how those books and their later sequels appeared through the 1980s, again going into many editions. I wrote two new novels for Berkley. In the 1990s I again rearranged the sequence for the uniform omnibus editions of the Eternal Champion stories I published with Orion in the U.K. and White Wolf in the U.S., once more with some outstanding new covers. With the collapse of White Wolf’s publishing program, I decided to “rest” my Eternal Champion books, including Elric, in the U.S. for a while and made no attempt to republish the books until Del Rey’s publication of the Robert E. Howard titles inspired the present editions, published in the order the stories were originally done. As stated before, these,