Elric to Rescue Tanelorn - Michael Moorcock [3]
“The Eternal Champion” was an idea I had originally begun to write as a serial for a fanzine I produced when I was seventeen called Avilion which scarcely made it into reality, since I only had a chance to run off a few copies before my arrangement with the firm that allowed me to print my fanzines for free came to an end. Both the magazine and the serial were set aside as my work with Amalgamated Press took up most of my time, and I had to devote myself to the detective adventures of Sexton Blake (whose battle with the albino Zenith had been one of my boyhood enthusiasms) and the graphic tales of Robin Hood, Kit Carson, Dick Turpin, Buck Jones or Dogfight Dixon RFC that we turned out monthly. Most of my taste for red-blooded pseudo-historical fiction went into producing scripts for the great Don Lawrence, with whom I collaborated on many stories for Olac the Gladiator and Karl the Viking, some of which had the fantasy elements I would later begin to incorporate into the stories I wrote for Carnell’s magazines. With Lawrence, I produced features on Alexander the Great and Constantine the Great for magazines like Look and Learn and its companion Bible Story, for which I also wrote features on the great cathedrals of England, as well as the exploits of various colourful biblical figures. All this taught me, I believe, how to present a fast-paced fantasy adventure and also helped me research the story for which I won an early Nebula Award, “Behold the Man.” For a liberal humanist I read the Bible more thoroughly, as I’ve since discovered, than many professed Christians!
A year or two before I published “Behold the Man” in the Easter number of New Worlds, which by then I was editing, I had, in the winter of 1964, begun to wonder how it would be possible to turn my talent for writing mythic stories of eternal heroes to address more immediately the issues of the modern world which were increasingly beginning to concern me. I believed that what modernist fiction had become was no longer capable of addressing these issues and I was frustrated because, for me, most science fiction seemed to dodge the implications also. I wanted to find a form which confronted those issues as squarely as possible.
I felt I could do this somehow by using what I had learned while writing Elric, and in the end I came up with Jerry Cornelius, whose original I had seen in Notting Hill while I ate at my local café. This beautiful young man, with his ascetic features, elegant clothes and floating long hair, had suddenly appeared as I looked up. Behind him was the name of one of our local greengrocer’s shops, Cornelius of London. And so I had, in one moment, both the image of my modern-day hero and his name. That, unlikely as it seems, is exactly how Jerry Cornelius was conceived. All I had to do then was try to develop a technique which did the same thing I had been doing with the Elric stories.
Rather than produce a thinned-down version of Elric, I realized I could create something out of the Elric mythos but make it relate thoroughly to modern times. The answer was simple. I took the first Elric short stories back to what had first inspired them (including my sojourn in Lapland climbing mountains) and adapted the plots to the story which was to become the first Cornelius novel, The Final Programme. Parts of this novel were cut up and appeared in New Worlds, and “Phase 1,” harking back to “The Dreaming City,” the first Elric story, was intended to be one of these fragments but is actually published here in this form for the first time, to show how that transition came about. I was, of course, to return to both Elric and Jerry when the occasion demanded or the mood was on me, and when Sprague de Camp asked for an Elric story for his sword-and-sorcery anthology The Fantastic Swordsmen,