Elric_ The Stealer of Souls - Michael Moorcock [205]
The facts are gathered, related, a picture emerges. The picture, though slightly coloured by the personalities of the fact-relaters, is fairly true. The picture is given to the politician. If the politician is a man of integrity he will not deliberately warp the facts, but he will present them in a simplified version which will be understood by the general public (he thinks). This involves a selection, which can change a picture out of all recognition, though the politician didn’t deliberately intend to warp the facts. The other kind of politician almost automatically selects and warps in order to prove a point he, or his party, is trying to make. So the fantasy begins. Soon the real picture is almost irrevocably lost.
Therefore this reliance on pseudo-knowledge, which seems to prove something we wish were true, is a dangerous thing to do.
This is one of the main messages of the Elric series, though there are several others on different levels.
Don’t think I’m asking you to go back over the stories looking for these allegories and symbols. The reason I abandoned The Golden Barge was because among other things it wasn’t entertaining. The Elric stories are meant to entertain as much as anything else, but if anyone cares to look for substance beyond the entertainment level, they might find it.
One of the main reasons, though, for taking this angle when Alan [Dodd] asked me to write a piece on Elric, was because I have been a little disappointed at the first book being dismissed by some professional critics (who evidently didn’t bother to read it closely, if at all) as an imitation of Conan. When you put thought and feeling into a story—thought and feeling which is yours—you don’t much care for being called an imitator or a plagiarist however good or bad the story. Probably the millionth novel about a young advertising executive in love with a deb and involved with a married woman has just been published, yet the author won’t be accused of imitating anyone or plagiarizing anyone. It is the use to which one puts one’s chosen material, not that material, which matters.
This is the first lengthy review of Stormbringer published, as it happened, in New Worlds. Perhaps I should not have let it be reviewed in my own magazine, but Alan Forrest the writer was at the time literary editor of a national newspaper and I thought the book might best be reviewed by someone who had no intimate knowledge of SF and fantasy. Also I didn’t want the book reviewed by someone who might be hoping to sell me a story. Forrest does give a flavour, I think, of how strange and sui generis such fiction seemed to readers in 1965.
FINAL JUDGEMENT
by Alan Forrest (1965)
STORMBRINGER IS A magic sword, a great, evil blade with a life of its own. It sucks souls like a vampire sucks his victims’ blood. It is the real hero-villain of Michael Moorcock’s strange new novel set in a blood-soaked and bewitched world, anti-time and anti-history, in which nightmare armies battle, statues scream and heroines can be turned into big white worms at the drop of a warlock’s hat.
Mr. Moorcock stirs up this hell-brew with an inventiveness that leaves one gasping. His is the territory that has always been dear to a certain kind of English writer, the genuine exotic, who exists to remind us that we’re really a most exotic race.
I’m thinking of people like Mervyn Peake and, in the last few years, Jane Gaskell. Stormbringer (Herbert