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By Root 422 0

magazines. I forgot about it. Many years later, after Ted had died tragically early, his successor found the story and sent it to me. In 1978 a young man called Armand Eising, who with Thomas Durwood planned to publish Ariel, an ambitious fantasy magazine in large size with full colour, asked me for an Elric story and since I had recently received “The Last Enchantment” back, I gave it to him to be illustrated by Frank Frazetta, one of the many great graphic artists who have over the years embellished my work. (Frazetta’s cover for The Silver Warriors, aka Phoenix in Obsidian, the second Eternal Champion tale, became pretty iconographic, being turned into a snow globe and then imitated in this century by the poster designer for the first Narnia film!)

By 1964 Cele Goldsmith, the brilliant editor of Amazing and Fantastic magazines, was publishing epic fantasy stories and, because Carnell was overinventoried with my work, I submitted “Earl Aubec and the Golem” to her. It appeared as “Master of Chaos.” To my astonished pleasure, it was illustrated by the great Virgil Finlay, whose work had embellished so many of the magazines I had admired as a boy, including Weird Tales and Famous Fantastic Mysteries. This story developed the idea of Chaos being acted upon by the human imagination, a recurring theme in my fantastic fiction. “To Rescue Tanelorn…” was written in a slightly different manner for me, echoing Dunsany more than my work usually did, and introducing Rackhir, the Red Archer, who, as well as enjoying his own adventures, became a stalwart friend of Elric.

The concepts which have been the backbone of most of my science fantasies appeared pretty rapidly, one after the other. “The Eternal Champion” offered the notion of a hero constantly reincarnated to fight for the Balance, no matter what other loyalties he might possess, and The Sundered Worlds, which will not be published in this series since it was pretty much pure science fiction, first offered the idea of “the multiverse,” a quasi-infinite number of universes, any one of which is only marginally different from the next.

Both ideas seemed to inspire other writers (and physicists!) almost immediately. What was original to them also captured the imagination of games creators and graphic novelists until within only a few years my own work was somewhat lost amongst all the material it had inspired. Even the symbol representing Chaos, which I had created in a doodle meant to represent the opposite of Law (a single arrow), became universal to the degree that people now regard it as an ancient sign. I suppose it is ancient to many younger readers born after 1963. I myself, of course, had been similarly inspired by what had gone before me—for instance, the “alternate world” tales of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, whose Harold Shea stories graced the pages of Unknown Worlds and remain some of the best examples of their kind, in turn inspiring writers like Poul Anderson to write his magnificent Three Hearts and Three Lions.

Both de Camp and Anderson were, at least as fantasy writers, fellow spirits. Sprague and I became good friends and it was he, of course, who first encouraged me to write epic fantasy, when the magazine Fantastic Universe, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson, a much-loved anthologist, wanted to bring such fiction back to the ordinary newsstands. Hans commissioned me to write, with de Camp’s blessing, a new Conan story which, in the end, never materialized, as I have explained elsewhere. While I now have to agree with the purists who have rejected the Conan tales by other hands, we were working in a somewhat different context in which we were a handful of enthusiasts attempting to present Howard’s enduring character to a wider audience.

Pretty much all the ideas which formed the backbone of my fantastic fiction (and indeed were later developed for my literary fiction) came out in a year or two. I was developing very rapidly as a writer, expanding in many directions at once, rather like Chaos itself. I wrote all kinds of journalism and, in researching