Elric to Rescue Tanelorn - Michael Moorcock [4]
A few years later, around the summer of 1973, my enthusiasm for the fin de siècle, Art Nouveau, the aesthetes and so on began to form the ideas which would eventually go into my sequence generally known as The Dancers at the End of Time. I eventually finished this sequence in the middle seventies and by then was working regularly with the artist Rodney Matthews producing a vast series of posters, cards, notelets and calendars. Our publisher, Peter Ledeboer of Big O Graphics, asked me if I could write a story for Rodney to illustrate. This eventually became the rather strange blend of Elric and the Dancers called, obviously enough, Elric at the End of Time.
This magnificently illustrated book, with picture after picture in gorgeous colour, was eventually published by Paper Tiger. It shows Our Hero, of course, in an entirely different situation from his usual ones! The idea was inspired by M. John Harrison’s suggestion that the denizens of the End of Time would be seen very much as the Gods of Chaos by the likes of Elric and his kind. Some readers weren’t too happy about my writing what was, after all, primarily a humorous story, but it seemed to me that there was a chance to offer an aspect of Elric which was not one of unrelieved gloom! There’s always a danger, as one’s work grows in popularity, of taking oneself too seriously. That’s why from time to time it’s worth writing a bit of self-parody like “The Stone Thing,” which I originally wrote for a friend of mine Eric Bentcliffe, who put out some very funny fanzines a few years ago.
The Jade Man’s Eyes was done for my friend Bill Butler, a bookseller and poet who also published a number of offbeat books from his shop in Brighton. Most of the books he published were typically done for love rather than profit and, since he was an Elric fan, this was one of several projects I did with him in the hope of making him a little money! Sadly, he died in 1977, and I wrote a rock song about him (since he had always wanted me to write a rock song about him) called “The Great Sun Jester,” which was recorded a year or two after his death by Blue Öyster Cult (who also did a version of an Elric song, “Black Blade”).
In the early 1990s Ed Kramer proposed an anthology of Elric stories written by other hands, such as Neil Gaiman, Tad Williams and Karl Edward Wagner. I wrote “The Black Blade’s Song,” published as “The White Wolf’s Song,” for this, linking it into my stories of the moonbeam roads and the Second Ether, while the story I did for the anthology’s sequel, “Sir Milk-and-Blood,” takes Elric into the sequence of modern-dress stories I wrote which links him back to Monsieur Zenith, who originally inspired him. I wrote “Crimson Eyes,” for instance, for the New Statesman’s special Christmas issue, and Elric/Zenith’s other adventures in conflict with The Metatemporal Detective have recently been published in the volume of that name. I wanted to bring my hero back to his origins in homage to the stories which originally excited me as a boy.
There is one further homage here. Because Rackhir was in this volume, it seemed reasonable to include a fairly recent story concerning him. I wrote it as a firm nod to Robert E. Howard for an anthology, Cross Plains Universe, done in 2006 for the World Fantasy Convention held in Austin, the nearest large town to where I live in Texas. The book was intended to celebrate and commemorate Howard, and I was flattered to be asked to join in. Readers of Howard, as well as myself, will see a few nods to Conan as well as my own cosmology and its heroes.
I have written almost all my Elric stories because I was asked to do so, either by commissioning editors or by readers. My affection for the crimson-eyed albino has never waned. Since I began writing I have always maintained a close relationship with my readers and have