Elric_ The Stealer of Souls - Michael Moorcock [198]
Elric of Melniboné, last of the Bright Emperors, cried out, and then his body collapsed, a sprawled husk beside its comrade, and he lay beneath the mighty balance that still hung in the sky.
Then Stormbringer’s shape began to change, writhing and curling above the body of the albino, finally to stand astraddle it.
The entity that was Stormbringer, last manifestation of Chaos which would remain with this new world as it grew, looked down on the corpse of Elric of Melniboné and smiled.
“Farewell, friend. I was a thousand times more evil than thou!”
And then it leapt from the Earth and went spearing upwards, its wild voice laughing mockery at the Cosmic Balance; filling the universe with its unholy joy.
LETTERS AND MISCELLANY
ELRIC
(1963)
VERY NICE OF you to devote so much time to Elric—though he doesn’t altogether merit it! I’d disagree with the writer when he says, “I expect the ‘sword and sorcery’ stories are by far the most popular type…etc.” I think those who like them receive them enthusiastically, but it’s a fairly small minority compared with those who like, for instance, “science fantasy” of The Dragon Masters variety and the stuff Kuttner, Brackett and others used to turn out for Startling, Super Science, etc. These days people seem to want information of some kind with their escapism—and sword and sorcery doesn’t strictly supply information of the type required. (The appeal of James Bond appears to be based primarily on the lumps of pseudo-data inserted every so often in the narrative.) The only sword-and-sorcery stuff I personally enjoy reading is Leiber’s. Don’t go much for Tolkien, Dunsany, Smith, Howard—or Edgar Rice Burroughs in spite of what some critics have said of my books recently.
Though I didn’t know Science Fantasy was due to fold when I wrote it, I wound up the Elric series just in time to catch the last issue quite by coincidence. I had intended to kill off Elric (as is probably plain from the second story in the currently appearing quartet, “Black Sword’s Brothers”) and his world, so it is just as well. A story set in a world which so closely borders Elric’s that some of the place names are the same will be appearing in Fantastic some time this year. This was originally called “Earl Aubec and the Golem” but the title has been changed to “Master of Chaos” (the cosmology is identical with the Elric stories’ cosmology) and will be, if Cele Goldsmith likes the next one I’m planning, the first of a series showing the development of the Earth from a rather unusual start. It is vaguely possible that Elric will appear in future stories and some of his background not filled in in the concluding stories (“Sad Giant’s Shield” in Science Fantasy No. 63 and “Doomed Lord’s Passing” in Science Fantasy 64) will be filled in there. But this depends on how the series develops and what Cele Goldsmith thinks of the stories. “Master of Chaos” is, I think, in many ways my best S&S tale.
It is a great disappointment, however, that Science Fantasy has folded. Not simply because stories sold to it paid my rent, but because for me and many other writers in this country (particularly, like me, the younger ones) it was an outlet for the kind of story that is very difficult to sell in America—even to Cele Goldsmith who appears to be the most open-minded of the U.S. editors. Particularly this went for the short novel of the “Earth Is but a Star” length and the recent 37,000-word “Skeleton Crew” by Aldiss. The slow-developing, borderline-mainstream story of the kind Ballard does so well will find more difficulty selling in the States too, though Ballard’s “Question of Reentry” was of this kind and published in Fantastic. It seems a pity that English SF has reached, in people like Ballard and Aldiss, an exceptionally high standard and a strongly English flavour, and now it has no markets here.
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