Elric_ The Stealer of Souls - Michael Moorcock [3]
Naturally by then Moorcock himself had moved on and was editing New Worlds, the last and the best of traditional science fiction magazines published in England. Under Moorcock’s guidance, the magazine became a vehicle for modernist experiment, gleefully re-imagining the SF genre as a field elastic enough to include the pathological and alienated “condensed novels” of J. G. Ballard, the brilliantly skewed and subverted conventional science fiction tropes of Barrington Bayley and even the black urban comedies dished up by old Sexton Blake mucker Jack Trevor Story. Moorcock’s own main contribution to the magazine—aside from his task as commander of the entire risky, improbable venture—came in the form of his Jerry Cornelius stories.
Cornelius, a multiphasic modern Pierrot with his doings catalogued by most of Moorcock’s New Worlds writing stable at one time or other, rapidly became an edgy mascot for the magazine and also for the entire movement that the magazine was spear-heading, an icon of the fractured moral wasteland England would become after the wild, fluorescent brush-fire of the 1960s had burned out. His debut, starting in the pages of New Worlds in 1965 and culminating in Avon Books’ publication of The Final Programme during 1968 was a spectacular affair—“Michael Moorcock’s savagely satirical breakthrough in speculative fiction, The Final Programme, a breathtaking vivid, rapid-fire novel of tomorrow that says things you may not want to hear today!”—and a mind-bending apparent change of tack for those readers who thought that they knew Moorcock from his Elric or his Dorian Hawkmoon fantasies. Even its dedication, “To Jimmy Ballard, Bill Burroughs, and the Beatles, who are pointing the way through,” seemed dangerously avant-garde within the cosy rocket-robot-ray-gun comfort zone of early sixties science fiction. As disorienting as The Final Programme was, however, its relentless novelty was undercut by a peculiar familiarity: Cornelius’s exploits mirrored those of Elric of Melniboné almost exactly, blow for blow. Even a minor character like the Melnibonéan servant Tanglebones could turn up anagrammatized as the Cornelius family’s retainer John Gnatbeelson. It became clear that, far from abandoning his haunted and anaemic prince of ruins, Moorcock had in some way cleverly refracted that persona through a different glass until it looked and spoke and acted differently, became a different creature fit for different times, while still retaining all the fascinating, cryptic charge of the original.
As Moorcock’s work evolved into progressively more radical and startling forms over the coming decades, this process of refracting light and ideas through a prototypical Melnibonéan gemstone would continue. Even in the soaring majesty of Mother London or the dark symphony of Moorcock’s Pyat quartet, it is still possible to hear the music of Tarkesh, the Boiling Sea, or Old Hrolmar. With these later works and with Moorcock’s ascent to literary landmark, it has become fashionable to assert that only in such offerings as the exquisite Vengeance of Rome are we seeing the real Moorcock; that the staggering sweep of glittering fantasy trilogies that preceded these admitted masterpieces are in some way minor works, safely excluded from the author’s serious canon. This is to misunderstand, I think, the intertextual and organic whole of Moorcock’s writings. All the blood and passion that informs his work has the genetic markers of Melniboné stamped clearly on each paragraph, each line. No matter where the various strands of Moorcock’s sprawling opera ended up, or in what lofty climes, the bloodline started out with Elric. All the narratives have his mysterious, apocalyptic eyes.
The tales included in this current volume are the first rush of that blood, the first pure spurts from what would prove to be a deep and