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By Root 540 0

landscapes of my stories are metaphysical, not physical. As a faltering atheist with a deep irradicable religious sense (I was brought up on an offbeat brand of Christian mysticism) I tended, particularly in early stories like “While the Gods Laugh,” to work out my own problems through Elric’s adventures. Needless to say, I never reached any conclusions, merely brought these problems closer to the surface. I was writing not particularly well, but from the “soul.” I wasn’t just telling a story, I was telling my story. I don’t think of myself as a fantasy writer in the strict sense—but the possibilities of fantasy attract me. For some sort of guide to what I see as worth exploiting in the fantasy form, I’d suggest you bear this in mind when you read “The Deep Fix” which will appear in the last issue of Science Fantasy along with “Doomed Lord’s Passing,” the last Elric story…which might also provide a clue. “The Deep Fix” will be under a pseudonym [the late James Colvin, ed.].

I am not a logical thinker. I am, if anything, an intuitive thinker. Most facts bore me. Some inspire me. Nuclear physics, for instance, though I know scarcely anything about the field, excites me, particularly when watching a nuclear physicist explaining his theories on TV. My only interest in any field of knowledge is literary. This is probably a narrow interest, but I’m a writer and want to be a good one. I have only written two fantasy stories in my life which were deliberately commercial (sorry, three—one hasn’t been published). These were “Going Home” in Science Fiction Adventures and “Kings in Darkness” in Science Fantasy. The rest, for better or worse, were written from inside. Briefly, physics doesn’t interest me—metaphysics does. The only writer of SF I enjoy is J. G. Ballard. The only writer of fantasy currently working in the magazines I like is Leiber. The three works of fantasy I can still reread and enjoy, apart from those, are Anderson’s The Broken Sword, Peake’s Titus Groan trilogy, and Cabell’s Jurgen. Anderson has done nothing better than The Broken Sword, in my opinion, and I sometimes feel that his talent has since been diverted, even lessened. I feel that writing SF can ruin and bleed dry a writer’s talent. The best he can do in this field is improve his technique—at the expense of his art. I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I’d rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas—or ideas that have gone bad. I tend to think of the SF magazine field as a field in which it is possible to experiment—and sell one’s mistakes; but the impulse to sell tends to dominate the impulse to experiment the longer one stays in the field.

And fear of death, incidentally, is probably another source of inspiration in the Elric stories. I don’t believe in life after death and I don’t want to die. I hope I shan’t. Maybe I’ll be the exception that proves the rule…

Now for some specific remarks about the Elric material in Niekas. Firstly, a few carping points on the spelling. As you’ll see from the book Stealer of Souls, which I had an opportunity to get at before it was printed, there is an accented é in the spelling of Melniboné. Melnibonay—this accent was, of course, left out of all but the first story. Imrryr is spelled thus. Count Smiorgan Baldhead—not of Baldhead (his head was hairless).

A point about the end of “The Dreaming City”: Elric used the wind to save himself, abandoning his comrades to the dragons. This, and Cymoril’s death, is on his conscience.

I don’t know whether the Imrryrians would have despised Elric (second story synopsis, line 1). I think of them as accepting his treachery fairly calmly, and yet bound to do something about it if they caught up with him.

When I wrote this story I was thinking of Stormbringer as a symbol—partly, anyway—of Man’s reliance on mental and physical crutches he’d be better off without. It seems a bit pretentious, now. I suppose you could call the Dharzi zombie men, but really I didn’t think of them as men at all, in the strict sense. The sea is, of course, an underground sea—and also