Elric_ The Stealer of Souls - Michael Moorcock [202]
Elric’s disregard for danger is of the nature of panic rather than courage, maybe. The Mouser, on the other hand, seems not to disregard danger—he evaluates it and then acts. Conan—well…
The cosmology of the Elric stories probably owes its original inspiration to two things—Zoroastrianism (which I admire) and Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions. It was developed from there, of course. This set-up simply is:
I have a more complex chart. The sixth story is the one where the cosmology becomes clearer and the reader should realize the rest as he reads the last stories.
I have probably helped anyone who wants to assess the Elric stories on a slightly different level. Who wants to?
THE SECRET LIFE OF ELRIC OF MELNIBONÉ
(1964)
SOME YEARS AGO, when I was about eighteen, I wrote a novel called The Golden Barge. This was an allegorical fantasy about a little man, completely without self-knowledge and with little of any other kind, going down a seemingly endless river, following a great Golden Barge which, he felt, if he caught it would contain all truth, all secrets, all the solutions to his problems. On the journey he met various groups of people, had a love affair, and so on. Yet every action he took in order to reach the Golden Barge seemed to keep him farther away from it. The river represented Time, the barge was what mankind is always seeking outside itself, when it can be found inside itself, etc., etc. The novel had a sad ending, as such novels do. Also, as was clear when I’d finished it, my handling of many of the scenes was clumsy and immature. So I scrapped it and decided that in future my allegories would be intrinsic within a conventional narrative—that the best symbols were the symbols found in familiar objects. Like swords for instance.
Up until I was twenty or so, I had a keen interest in fantasy fiction, particularly sword-and-sorcery stories of the kind written by Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and the like, but this interest began to wane as I became more interested in less directly sensational forms of literature, just as earlier my interest in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s tales had waned. I could still enjoy one or two sword-and-sorcery tales, particularly Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword and Fritz Leiber’s Gray Mouser stories. A bit before this casting off of old loyalties, I had been in touch with Sprague de Camp and Hans Santesson of Fantastic Universe about doing a new series of Conan tales.
I think it was in the autumn of 1960, when I was working for Sexton Blake Library and reading SF for Suspense (the short-lived companion to Argosy) that I bumped into a colleague at Fleetway Publications, Andy Vincent, who was an old friend of Harry Harrison’s (who had also free-lanced for Fleetway for some time). Andy told me he was meeting Harry and Ted Carnell in the Fleetway foyer and suggested I come along. As I remember, that was where I first met Harry. Previously, I’d sold a couple of stories to Ted, one in collaboration with Barry Bayley, and had had more bounced than bought. Later on in a pub, Ted and I were talking about Robert E. Howard and Ted said he’d been thinking of running some Conan-type stuff in Science Fantasy. I told him of the Fantastic Universe idea which had fallen through when Fantastic Universe folded, and said I still had the stuff I’d done and would he like to see it. He said he would. A couple of days later I sent him the first chapter and outline of a Conan story. To tell you the truth, writing in Howard’s style had its limitations, as did his hero as far as I was concerned, and I wasn’t looking forward to producing another 10,000 words of the story if Ted liked it.
Ted liked it—or at least he liked the writing, but there had been a misunderstanding. He hadn’t wanted Conan—he had wanted something on the same lines.
This suited me much better. I decided that I would