Elric_ The Stealer of Souls - Michael Moorcock [4]
Alan Moore
Northampton
31 January 2007
INTRODUCTION
The past is a script we are constantly rewriting. Experience changes over the years to suit whatever story we believe we are telling about ourselves and our friends. It’s why the police and the courts are forever questioning accounts offered by honest people.
If proof of this were needed, it is in the stories I have told over the years about how Elric came into being. Nothing crucial hangs on my slightly varying versions of my hero’s conception; and in reprinting those versions I’ve made no attempt to make them coherent, so readers will discover some inconsistencies here which, were I interested in promoting a particular version of events, I would have edited out. They are what I believed to be truthful accounts when I wrote them or else I was arguing within a specific context, as in a letter I wrote to the fanzine Niekas some short while before the four-part serial published as Stormbringer came out in 1963–1964. In such arguments, where I was defending myself against criticism, I gave more emphasis to certain experience than I would have done ordinarily. Like much of my fiction, which nowadays seems so solidly a part of a genre’s history, when the Elric stories first appeared there were some readers who found them offensive or otherwise infuriating. Then, as now, some readers seemed to be uncomfortable with their ironic tone. They were probably the first “interventions” into the fantasy canon, such as it was. Later, writers like Stephen Donaldson, Steven Erikson, and Scott Bakker would be similarly criticized. The criticism I received in letters or in fanzine reviews at the time made me far more defensive than I would be these days. I’ve always known that fanzine critics prepared you for the worst any mainstream critics could say about you. They weren’t unlike some aspects of the web. It’s interesting to note in these pieces (which I’ve placed so as to avoid spoilers) the evident strength of my feelings when Elric was still, as it were, newborn and in need of his parent’s protection!
I notice, for instance, that I claimed to be the product of a particular form of Christian mysticism. While it is true that for a short time (at around the age of seven) I attended Michael Hall School in Sussex, which was run on the rather attractive mystical Christian principles of Rudolf Steiner (in turn a break-away from Madame Blavatsky’s brand of spiritualism), it is not really true to suggest, as I did in one of the pieces reprinted here, that I was “brought up” according to Steiner’s ideas. In fact, my background was almost wholly secular, much of my immediate circle was Jewish and I was only briefly interested, as a young adult, in Steiner’s ideas, which had influenced my mentor, Ernst Jelinek. These, however, did influence the cosmology of the Elric stories. Poul Anderson’s marvelous fantasies The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions were probably of equal influence, as was my fascination with Norse, Celtic, Hindu, and Zoroastrian mythology.
I had begun my professional career as a contributor to a British weekly juvenile magazine called Tarzan Adventures, which was a mixture of reprinted newspaper strips and original text. My first regular commission was a series of articles on Edgar Rice Burroughs and his characters, but I was soon writing fiction, some, like Sojan, adapted from the stories that first appeared in my fanzine Burroughsania, which I had founded in my last year at school (I left at the age of fifteen). These first stories were fantasy adventures bearing, not surprisingly, a strong ERB influence, and I have reprinted one here to give a flavour