Elric: The Stealer of Souls

ELRIC (1963)

VERY NICE OF you to devote so much time to Elric-though he doesn't altogether merit it! I'd disagree with the writer when he says, "I expect the 'sword and sorcery' stories are by far the most popular type… etc." I think those who like them receive them enthusiasti-cally, but it's a fairly small minority compared with those who like, for instance, "science fantasy" of The Dragon Masters variety and the stuff Kuttner, Brackett and others used to turn out for Startling, Super Science, etc. These days people seem to want information of some kind with their escapism-and sword and sorcery doesn't strictly supply information of the type required. (The appeal of James Bond appears to be based primarily on the lumps of pseudo-data inserted every so often in the narrative.) The only sword-and-sorcery stuff I personally enjoy reading is Leiber's. Don't go much for Tolkien, Dunsany, Smith, Howard-or Edgar Rice Burroughs in spite of what some critics have said of my books recently.

Though I didn't know Science Fantasy was due to fold when I wrote it, I wound up the Elric series just in time to catch the last issue quite by coincidence. I had intended to kill off Elric (as is probably plain from the second story in the currently appearing quartet, "Black Sword's Brothers") and his world, so it is just as well. A story set in a world which so closely borders Elric's that some of the place names are the same will be appearing in Fantastic some time this year. This was originally called "Earl Aubec and the Golem" but the title has been changed to "Master of Chaos" (the cosmology is identical with the Elric stories' cosmology) and will be, if Cele Goldsmith likes the next one I'm planning, the first of a series showing the development of the Earth from a rather unusual start. It is vaguely possible that Elric will appear in future stories and some of his background not filled in in the concluding stories ("Sad Giant's Shield" in Science Fantasy No. 63 and "Doomed Lord's Passing" in Science Fantasy 64) will be filled in there.

But this depends on how the series develops and what Cele Goldsmith thinks of the stories. "Master of Chaos" is, I think, in many ways my best S amp;S tale.

It is a great disappointment, however, that Science Fantasy has folded. Not simply because stories sold to it paid my rent, but because for me and many other writers in this country (particularly, like me, the younger ones) it was an outlet for the kind of story that is very difficult to sell in America-even to Cele Goldsmith who appears to be the most open-minded of the U.S. editors. Particularly this went for the short novel of the "Earth Is but a Star" length and the recent 37,000-word "Skeleton Crew" by Aldiss. The slow-developing, borderline-mainstream story of the kind Ballard does so well will find more difficulty selling in the States too, though Ballard's "Question of Re-entry" was of this kind and published in Fantastic. It seems a pity that English SF has reached, in people like Ballard and Aldiss, an excep-tionally high standard and a strongly English flavour, and now it has no markets here.

The landscapes of my stories are metaphysical, not physical. As a faltering atheist with a deep irradicable religious sense (I was brought up on an offbeat brand of Christian mysticism) I tended, particularly in early stories like "While the Gods Laugh," to work out my own problems through Elric's adventures. Needless to say, I never reached any conclusions, merely brought these problems closer to the surface. I was writing not particularly well, but from the "soul." I wasn't just telling a story, I was telling my story. I don't think of myself as a fantasy writer in the strict sense-but the possibilities of fantasy attract me. For some sort of guide to what I see as worth exploiting in the fantasy form, I'd suggest you bear this in mind when you read "The Deep Fix" which will appear in the last issue of Science Fantasy along with

"Doomed Lord's Passing," the last Elric story… which might also provide a clue. "The Deep Fix" will be under a pseudonym [the late James Colvin, ed.].

I am not a logical thinker. I am, if anything, an intuitive thinker.

Most facts bore me. Some inspire me. Nuclear physics, for instance, though I know scarcely anything about the field, excites me, particularly when watching a nuclear physicist explaining his theories on TV. My only interest in any field of knowledge is literary. This is probably a narrow interest, but I'm a writer and want to be a good one. I have only written two fantasy stories in my life which were deliberately commercial (sorry, three-one hasn't been published). These were "Going Home" in Science Fiction Adventures and "Kings in Darkness" in Science Fantasy. The rest, for better or worse, were written from inside. Briefly, physics doesn't interest me-metaphysics does. The only writer of SF I enjoy is J. G. Ballard. The only writer of fantasy currently working in the magazines I like is Leiber. The three works of fantasy I can still re-read and enjoy, apart from those, are Anderson's The Broken Sword, Peake's Titus Groan trilogy, and Cabell's Jurgen. Anderson has done nothing better than The Broken Sword, in my opinion, and I sometimes feel that his talent has since been diverted, even lessened. I feel that writing SF can ruin and bleed dry a writer's talent. The best he can do in this field is improve his technique-at the expense of his art. I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas-or ideas that have gone bad. I tend to think of the SF magazine field as a field in which it is possible to experiment-and sell one's mistakes; but the impulse to sell tends to dominate the impulse to experiment the longer one stays in the field.

And fear of death, incidentally, is probably another source of inspiration in the Elric stories. I don't believe in life after death and I don't want to die. I hope I shan't. Maybe I'll be the exception that proves the rule…

Now for some specific remarks about the Elric material in Niekas.

Firstly, a few carping points on the spelling. As you'll see from the book Stealer of Souls, which I had an opportunity to get at before it was printed, there is an accented e in the spelling of Melnibone. Mel-nibonay-this accent was, of course, left out of all but the first story.

Imrryr is spelled thus. Count Smiorgan Baldhead-not of Baldhead (his head was hairless).

A point about the end of "The Dreaming City": Elric used the wind to save himself, abandoning his comrades to the dragons. This, and Cymoril's death, is on his conscience.

I don't know whether the Imrryrians would have despised Elric (second story synopsis, line 1). I think of them as accepting his treachery fairly calmly, and yet bound to do something about it if they caught up with him.

When I wrote this story I was thinking of Stormbringer as a symbol-partly, anyway-of Man's reliance on mental and physical crutches he'd be better off without. It seems a bit pretentious, now. I suppose you could call the Dharzi zombie men, but really I didn't think of them as men at all, in the strict sense. The sea is, of course, an underground sea-and also not "natural" as Elric discovered. The hill, castle, etc.-all the bits and pieces in this episode-are all underground.

There was the intention here to give the whole episode the aspect of taking place within a womb. The Book is a similar symbol to the Sword in this story. Again, in the end of this story, he leaves Shaarilla to her fate-abandoning her. At this period of my writing women either got killed or had some other dirty trick played on them. The only female character who survived was my own La Belle Dame sans Merci-

Yishana. I won't explain that here-too personal…

"The exact nature of the feud is a mystery" ("Theleb K'aarna," line 6): Maybe I wasn't clear enough here-but I have the idea that I explained somewhere how Theleb K'aarna had devised a means of sending Elric on a wild goose chase by loosing some supernatural force or other against him. This was why Elric wanted blood. That story by the way was the most popular of the first three. I guess a Freudian psychol-ogist would know why…

"Kings in Darkness" I'd rather not deal with, since it was the worst of the series and, as I mentioned, written commercially. Therefore there is little of it which fits in with what I like to think of as the real content of the Elric series.

No comments, either, on "The Flame Bringers"-although I enjoyed writing the Meerclar bit and the last sequence with Elric on the back of the dragon. This, I think, is nothing much more than an adventure story, though it serves to show up Elric's weakness in that the moment things get tough he's seeking his sword again. Also the last bit where the sword returns is a hint of the sword's "true" nature.

In the book version of the last quartet (of which "Black Sword's Brothers" is the first part) I've revised the opening a bit. It was-and C. R. Kearns pointed this out and I agreed with him-what you might call a confused start. In the final revision of the short story version I changed it fairly considerably from the original and one or two inconsistencies crept through-I was working hard at the time and was very tired.

I would rather you had left this story out or waited until all four had been published before synopsizing it since this is the first part of a novel and many issues are not clarified until the end. I'm not happy with any of the magazine stories as they stand and have made, in places, quite heavy revisions. The last story to be written is, I feel, the best though. A final word-the Lords of Chaos hated Tanelorn not because it was a utopia, but because nearly all those in the city had once owed them, the Lords, allegiance and had forsworn it when they came to Tanelorn (or so the story goes). This is probably the most overtly philosophical or mystical of the Young Kingdom tales, as you say, and took much longer to write than the rest. It could be improved, I feel, by more play on the actual characters involved.

The writer feels that "Black Sword's Brothers" was the dullest Elric story. It was certainly, as explained above, one of the most patchy from the point of view of construction. It's true, in one sense, that I was losing interest in the Elric series-or rather that I had reached a point before it was written where I had run out of inspiration. But the interest picked up as I began to write and, by the time I'd got into the second part, I was enjoying the writing again. I think it's possible to look at the Elric stories as a sort of presentation of the crude materials which I hope to fashion into better stories later. Being non-logical, I have to produce a great deal of stuff in order to find the bits of it I really want.

My ideas about Law and Chaos and the rest became clearer as I wrote.

Of the four, "Black Sword's Brothers" and "Sad Giant's Shield" (the most recently published) are the weakest in my opinion. Both were revised (something I do not usually do with the Elric stories) and both suffered from this revision, I think. My mind was at its clearest (not very clear by normal standards) when I wrote "Doomed Lord's Passing." I've found that I can only really learn from my mistakes after they've been published, which is hard on the reader.

Ted Carnell, who handles my other work as well, said that he felt

"Earl Aubec and the Golem" (or "Master of Chaos") was a sort of crystallization of everything I'd been working on in the Elric series. Maybe not everything, but I think he's right. "Earl Aubec" is more a kind of sword-and-philosophy tale than an outright sword-and-sorcery. Elric tales-or the best of them-were conceived similarly.

The writer thinks that John Rackham's fantasies (or properly "Occult-thrillers") will outlast my stories. I don't think either will last for long, but I might as well admit that I was slightly hurt by this remark, for Rackham's stories that I have read struck me as being rather barren, stereotyped tales with no "true" sense of the occult at all (whatever a true sense of the occult is). Moreover I know John doesn't believe in his stuff for a second (at least not in any supernatural sense), whereas I believe whole-heartedly in mine, as I've pointed out. It's silly to take up someone's remark like this, especially since it is fair criticism and just a statement of someone's individual taste, but I suppose I'm still young enough to feel defensive about my stories-especially my Elric stories for which I have an odd mixture of love and hate. They are so closely linked to my own obsessions and problems that I find it hard to ignore any criticisms of them and tend momentarily to leap to their defense.

As I said earlier, and Cele Goldsmith said in a supplement to AMRA, sword and sorcery seems to appeal to an enthusiastic minority and may receive a large volume of praise from a fairly small section of readers.

When Carnell asked me to think up a sword-and-sorcery series, I tried to make it as different as possible from any other I'd read. I'd hesitate to agree that the two best known magic swords are Excalibur and Prince Valiant's Singing Blade-Excalibur, certainly, and probably Roland's Durandana. The idea of the magic sword came, of course, from legend, but I willingly admit to Anderson's influence, too. The idea of an albino hero had a more obscure source. As a boy I collected a pre-War magazine called Union Jack. This was Sexton Blake's Own Paper-Blake was the British version of your Nick Carter, I should imagine, and Union Jack was the equivalent of your dime novels. One of Blake's most memorable opponents was a character named M. Zenith- or Zenith the Albino, a Byronic hero-villain who aroused more sympathy in the reader than did the intrepid detective. Anyway, the Byronic h-v had always appealed; I liked the idea of an albino, which suited my purpose, and so Elric was born-an albino. Influences include various Gothic novels, also. Elric is not a new hero to fantasy-although he's new, I suppose, to S amp;S.

I cannot altogether agree that Elric remains an essentially simple character. I think of him as complex but inarticulate when he tries to explain his predicament. His taste for revenge seems to be a sort of extension of his search for peace and purpose-he finds, to coin a phrase, forgetfulness in action. Elric's guilt over the slaying of Nikorn was guilt for the slaying itself, not because he'd killed a particular man.

I don't know whether I could have left Moonglum out and still kept the stories the same. Moonglum is, apart from everything else, to some extent a close, valued friend of mine who has been a lot of help in various ways over the last few years. If Elric is my fantasy self, then Moonglum is this friend's fantasy self (as I see him at any rate). I am not particularly gloomy by nature. I put Moonglum in to make remarks about Elric when he gets too self-absorbed or too absorbed in self-pity, etc.

A little more of Elric's background and some clue as to why he is what he is will be found in "Doomed Lord's Passing." I've been aware of this absence and have tried to rectify it a bit here.

I was pleased that you have used the Gray Mouser as a comparison since, as must now be evident, I'm a great fan of the Mouser's. Perhaps Moonglum also owes a little to the Mouser. As for Elric being an idealist rather than a materialist, this is probably because I'm often told I'm a materialist rather than an idealist. I don't like to be told this, but it could be true.

Elric's disregard for danger is of the nature of panic rather than courage, maybe. The Mouser, on the other hand, seems not to disregard danger-he evaluates it and then acts. Conan-well…

The cosmology of the Elric stories probably owes its original inspiration to two things-Zoroastrianism (which I admire) and Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions. It was developed from there, of course. This set-up simply is:

COSMIC HAND

balance

Law Chaos

Grey Lords

Elementals

Men

Law Sorcerers

Chaos Sorcerers

Beasts

Men pledged to Law

Men pledged to Chaos

etc.

etc.

I have a more complex chart. The sixth story is the one where the cosmology becomes clearer and the reader should realize the rest as he reads the last stories.

I have probably helped anyone who wants to assess the Elric stories on a slightly different level. Who wants to?

THE SECRET LIFE OF ELRIC OF MELNIBONE (1964)

SOME YEARS AGO, when I was about eighteen, I wrote a novel called The Golden Barge. This was an allegorical fantasy about a little man, completely without self-knowledge and with little of any other kind, going down a seemingly endless river, following a great Golden Barge which, he felt, if he caught it would contain all truth, all secrets, all the solutions to his problems. On the journey he met various groups of people, had a love affair, and so on. Yet every action he took in order to reach the Golden Barge seemed to keep him farther away from it.

The river represented Time, the barge was what mankind is always seeking outside itself, when it can be found inside itself, etc., etc. The novel had a sad ending, as such novels do. Also, as was clear when I'd finished it, my handling of many of the scenes was clumsy and imma-ture. So I scrapped it and decided that in future my allegories would be intrinsic within a conventional narrative-that the best symbols were the symbols found in familiar objects. Like swords for instance.

Up until I was twenty or so, I had a keen interest in fantasy fiction, particularly sword-and-sorcery stories of the kind written by Robert E.

Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and the like, but this interest began to wane as I became more interested in less directly sensational forms of literature, just as earlier my interest in Edgar Rice Burroughs's tales had waned. I could still enjoy one or two sword-and-sorcery tales, particularly Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword and Fritz Leiber's Gray Mouser stories. A bit before this casting off of old loyalties, I had been in touch with Sprague de Camp and Hans Santesson of Fantastic Universe about doing a new series of Conan tales.

I think it was in the autumn of 1960, when I was working for Sexton Blake Library and reading SF for Suspense (the short-lived companion to Argosy) that I bumped into a colleague at Fleetway Publications, Andy Vincent, who was an old friend of Harry Harri-son's (who had also free-lanced for Fleetway for some time). Andy told me he was meeting Harry and Ted Carnell in the Fleetway foyer and suggested I come along. As I remember, that was where I first met Harry. Previously, I'd sold a couple of stories to Ted, one in col-laboration with Barry Bayley, and had had more bounced than bought. Later on in a pub, Ted and I were talking about Robert E. Howard and Ted said he'd been thinking of running some Conan-type stuff in Science Fantasy. I told him of the Fantastic Universe idea which had fallen through when Fantastic Universe folded, and said I still had the stuff I'd done and would he like to see it. He said he would. A couple of days later I sent him the first chapter and outline of a Conan story. To tell you the truth, writing in Howard's style had its limitations, as did his hero as far as I was concerned, and I wasn't looking forward to producing another 10,000 words of the story if Ted liked it.

Ted liked it-or at least he liked the writing, but there had been a misunderstanding. He hadn't wanted Conan-he had wanted something on the same lines.

This suited me much better. I decided that I would think up a hero as different as possible from the usual run of S amp;S heroes, and use the narrative as a vehicle for my own "serious" ideas. Many of these ideas, I realize now, were somewhat romantic and coloured by a long-drawn-out and, to me at the time, tragic love affair which hadn't quite finished its course and which was confusing and darkening my outlook. I was writing floods of hack work for Fleetway and was getting sometimes

PS70 or PS80 a week which was going on drink, mainly, and, as I remember, involved rather a lot of broken glass of one description or another.

I do remember, with great pride, my main achievement of the winter of 1960 or 1961, which was to smash entirely an unbreakable plate glass door in a well-known restaurant near Piccadilly. And the management apologized…

I mention this, to give a picture of my mood at the time of Elric's creation. If you've read the early Elric stories in particular, you'll see that Elric's outlook was rather similar to mine. My point is that Elric was me (the me of 1960/61 anyway) and the mingled qualities of betrayer and betrayed, the bewilderment about life in general, the search for some solution to it all, the expression of this bewilderment in terms of violence, cynicism and the need for revenge were all characteristic of mine. So when I got the chance to write "The Dreaming City," I was identifying very closely with my hero-villain. I thought myself something of an outcast (another romantic notion largely unsubstantiated now I look back) and emphasized Elric's physical differences accordingly:

His bizarre dress was tasteless and gaudy, and did not match his sensitive face and long-fingered, almost del- icate hands, yet he flaunted it since it emphasized that he did not belong in any company-that he was an outsider and an outcast. But, in reality, he had little need to wear such outlandish gear-for… [he] was a pure albino who drew his power from a secret and terrible source.

(The Stealer of Souls, page 13)

The story was packed with personal symbols (as are all the stories, bar a couple). The "secret and terrible source" was the sword Stormbringer, which symbolized my own and others' tendency to rely on mental and physical crutches rather than cure the weakness at source.

To go further, Elric, for me, symbolized the ambivalence of mankind in general, with its love-hates, its mean-generosity, its confident-bewilderment act. Elric is a thief who believes himself robbed, a lover who hates love. In short, he cannot be sure of the truth of anything, not even of his own emotions or ambitions. This is made much clearer in a story containing even more direct allegory, the second in the series,

"While the Gods Laugh." Unfortunately, Ted left out the verse from which the title was taken:

- Mervyn Peake, "Shapes and Sounds"

This, I think, gave more meaning to both title and story which involved a long quest after the Dead Gods' Book-a mythical work alleged to contain all the knowledge of the universe, in which Elric feels he will at last find the true meaning of life. He expresses this need in a somewhat rhetorical way. When the wingless woman Shaarilla asks him why he wants the book he replies [in the magazine version]:

"I desire, if you like, to know one of [misprinted as or in magazine version] two things. Does an ultimate God

exist-or not. Does Law or Chaos govern our lives?

Men need a God, so the philosophers tell us. Have they

made one-or did one make them?" etc., etc.

Here, as in other passages, the bewilderment is expressed in metaphysical terms, for at that time, due mainly to my education, I was very involved with mysticism. Also, the metaphysical terms suited the description of a sword-and-sorcery hero and his magical, low-technology world.

It may seem odd that I use such phrases as "at that time" and so on, as if I'm referring to the remote past, but in many ways, being a trifle more mature, perhaps, happily married with a better sense of direction, etc., all this does seem to have taken place in the remote past.

The Dead Gods' Book is eventually located in a vast underground world which I had intended as a womb-symbol, and after a philosophical conversation with the book's Keeper, Elric discovers it.

This passage is, to me now, rather overwritten, but, for better or worse:

It was a huge book-the Dead Gods' Book, its covers encrusted with alien gems from which the light sprang. It gleamed, it throbbed with light and brilliant colour.

"At last," Elric breathed. "At last-the Truth!"

He stumbled forward like a man made stupid with drink, his pale hands reaching for the thing he had sought with such savage bitterness. His hands touched the pulsating cover of the Book and, trem- bling, turned it back… With a crash, the cover fell to the floor, sending the bright gems skipping and dancing over the paving stones. Beneath Elric's… hands lay nothing but a pile of yellowish dust.

The Dead Gods' Book and the Golden Barge are one and the same.

They have no real existence, save in the wishful imagination of mankind. There is, the story says, no Holy Grail which will transform a man overnight from bewildered ignorance to complete knowledge - the answer already is within him, if he cares to train himself to find it.

A rather over-emphasized fact, throughout history, but one generally ignored all the same.

"The Stealer of Souls," the third story, continues this theme, but brought in rather different kinds of symbols. Coupled with the Jungian symbols already inherent in any tale using direct mythic material, I used Freudian symbols, too. This was a cynical attempt and a rather vulgar attempt to make the series popular. It appeared to work. "The Stealer of Souls," whatever else it may be, is one of the most pornographic stories I have ever written. In Freudian terms it is the description of, if you like, a night's love-making.

Which brings me to another point. Although there is comparatively little direct description of sexual encounters in the stories, and what there are are largely romanticized, the whole Elric saga has, in its choice of situations and symbols, very heavy sexual undertones. This is true of most sword-and-sorcery stories, but I have an idea that I may be the first such author to understand his material to this extent, to know what he's using. If I hadn't been a bit fed-up by the big response received by "The Stealer of Souls" (magazine story, not the book), I could have made even greater use of what I discovered.

Other critics have pointed out the close relationship the horror story (and often the SF story for that matter) has with the pornographic story, so there's no need to go any deeper into it here.

The pornographic content of the Elric saga doesn't interest me much, but I have hinted at the relationship between sex and violence in several stories, and, indeed, there are a dozen syndromes to be found in the stories, particularly if you bear in mind my own involvement with sexual love, expression in violence, etc., at the time the stories were first conceived. Even my own interpretation of what I was doing is open to interpretation, in this case!

The allegory goes through all ten stories (including "To Rescue Tanelorn… " which did not feature Elric) in Science Fantasy, but it tends to change its emphasis as my own ideas take better shape and my emotions mature. When, in the last Elric story of all, the sword, his crutch, Stormbringer turns and slays Elric, it is meant to represent, on one level, how mankind's wish-fantasies can often bring about the destruction of (till now at least) part of mankind. Hitler, for instance, founded his whole so-called political creed on a series of wish-fantasies (this is detailed in that odd book Dawn of Magic, recently published here). Again this is an old question, a bit trite from being asked too often, maybe, but how much of what we believe is true and how much is what we wish were true? Hitler dreamed of his Thousand Year Reich, Chamberlain said There Will Be No War. Both were convinced-both ignored plain fact to a frightening extent, just as many people (not just politicians whose public statements are not always what they really believe) ignore plain facts today. This is no new discovery of mine. It is probably one of the oldest discoveries in the world.

But, in part, this is what nearly all my published work points out.

Working, as I did once, as editor of a party journal (allegedly an information magazine for party candidates) this conviction was strengthened. The build-up of a fantasy is an odd process and sometimes happens, to digress a bit, like this.

The facts are gathered, related, a picture emerges. The picture, though slightly coloured by the personalities of the fact-relaters, is fairly true. The picture is given to the politician. If the politician is a man of integrity he will not deliberately warp the facts, but he will present them in a simplified version which will be understood by the general public (he thinks). This involves a selection, which can change a picture out of all recognition, though the politician didn't deliberately intend to warp the facts. The other kind of politician almost automatically selects and warps in order to prove a point he, or his party, is trying to make. So the fantasy begins. Soon the real picture is almost irrevocably lost.

Therefore this reliance on pseudo-knowledge, which seems to prove something we wish were true, is a dangerous thing to do.

This is one of the main messages of the Elric series, though there are several others on different levels.

Don't think I'm asking you to go back over the stories looking for these allegories and symbols. The reason I abandoned The Golden Barge was because among other things it wasn't entertaining. The Elric stories are meant to entertain as much as anything else, but if anyone cares to look for substance beyond the entertainment level, they might find it.

One of the main reasons, though, for taking this angle when Alan [Dodd] asked me to write a piece on Elric, was because I have been a little disappointed at the first book being dismissed by some professional critics (who evidently didn't bother to read it closely, if at all) as an imitation of Conan. When you put thought and feeling into a story-thought and feeling which is yours-you don't much care for being called an imitator or a plagiarist however good or bad the story.

Probably the millionth novel about a young advertising executive in love with a deb and involved with a married woman has just been published, yet the author won't be accused of imitating anyone or plagia-rizing anyone. It is the use to which one puts one's chosen material, not that material, which matters.

This is the first lengthy review of Stormbringer published, as it happened, in New Worlds. Perhaps I should not have let it be reviewed in my own magazine, but Alan Forrest the writer was at the time literary editor of a national newspaper and I thought the book might best be reviewed by someone who had no intimate knowledge of SF and fantasy. Also I didn't want the book reviewed by someone who might be hoping to sell me a story. Forrest does give a flavour, I think, of how strange and sui generis such fiction seemed to readers in 1965.

FINAL JUDGEMENT by Alan Forrest (1965)

STORMBRINGER IS A magic sword, a great, evil blade with a life of its own. It sucks souls like a vampire sucks his victims' blood. It is the real hero-villain of Michael Moorcock's strange new novel set in a blood-soaked and bewitched world, anti-time and anti-history, in which nightmare armies battle, statues scream and heroines can be turned into big white worms at the drop of a warlock's hat.

Mr. Moorcock stirs up this hell-brew with an inventiveness that leaves one gasping. His is the territory that has always been dear to a certain kind of English writer, the genuine exotic, who exists to remind us that we're really a most exotic race.

I'm thinking of people like Mervyn Peake and, in the last few years, Jane Gaskell. Stormbringer (Herbert Jenkins, 12/6d.) has, for me, the same kind of offbeat integrity and complete involvement with a dream-world that impressed me in The Serpent, Miss Gaskell's novel about Atlantis.

Mr. Moorcock's Bright Empire of Melnibone existed "ten thousand years before history was recorded-or ten thousand years after history had ceased to be chronicled, reckon it how you will." It is far from easy to describe, but it is a kind of primitive myth-land with touches of Victorian Gothick, Wagnerian darkness and even undertones of the Book of Revelations.

The plot is about the battle between the Forces of Law and

Chaos for nothing less than the future of the universe. The characters have a kind of human form, but we're told they are less than men, ghostly epic-types who live only to intrigue and slaughter to settle the shape of quality of the world of real men which is to follow them.

So Stormbringer is an exciting fantasy about the eternal struggle of Good and Evil. The forces of Order are led by Elric, the last ruler of Melnibone, a red-eyed albino who has little real physical strength, but draws it from the soul-sucking sword. With Stormbringer in his hand, he is ten feet tall and a match for any Theocrat called Jagreen Lern, his warrior-priests and the Lords of Hell. Without the sword, he couldn't take on a reasonably skilled light weight.

Elric is an excellent character, pretty well-rounded and convincing for a myth-figure. He could have been the familiar strong, but lily-white hero. Mr. Moorcock doesn't make him any such thing.

Elric and Stormbringer-between whom there's a skillfully established love-hate relationship; neither can do without the other-take the field in a world ruled by chance, destiny, sorcery, all the supernatural forces that strangle men's free will. The atmosphere is chilly and oppressive and that's, perhaps, my only quibble at Mr. Moorcock's fascinating novel.

I don't ask for sweetness and light from science fiction, fantasy and its associated literatures, but I wish more young writers like Michael Moorcock would show us characters who are real masters of their fate and not just dancing on a cosmic puppet-master's strings.

But I wouldn't have missed Stormbringer for anything. The excitement and blood-letting never lets up, from the moment Jagreen Lern kidnaps Elric's wife and Elric and his buddies set hot-foot across the Sighing Desert and the Pale Sea to dish the villains of Pan Tang.

Elric himself is no goody-goody, his crimson eyes burning with hate as phantom horsemen bear down on him. "He was capable of cruelty and malevolent sorcery, had little pity, but could love and hate more violently than ever his ancestors." He'll lop a man's head off for sheer expediency and ask questions afterwards.

But slowly he emerges as a lone goodish man in a landscape that drips with blood and hate. And Mr. Moorcock's landscapes are compelling.

There are dark battlefields where bloody men come screaming out of the night, black-cowled midnight horrors with fixed grins, ghastly wailing winged women running amok with their wings clipped, doom-laden seas where black, rat-infested warships fill the air with fireballs.

Elric fights an army of vampire trees with his vampire sword as they try to tear him apart using branches like superhuman fingers. He takes a journey in time to fight that dead hero of another age, Roland, to get his magic horn.

Is there too much blood? I said the weird inventiveness of it all leaves one gasping. Does it tend to drain one dry? Is there a danger of Mr. Moorcock's work becoming a parody of itself as this kind of literature often does? On the strength of this one book, he avoids it by a hair's-breadth and I can recommend Stormbringer. In a tight corner I would rather have Elric's sword than Arthur's Excalibur for all its malevolent habit of doing what it likes and standing there, alive, sinister and smiling when nearly every other character has had his chips in some way.

Most of all, I feel that Mr. Moorcock's battle between good and evil is a sad story. If it did happen in some early world of supernatural twi-light, a lot of men died in vain.

Elric fought for a decent world of the future, one that he would never enjoy. What did we get? Buchenwald, the atom bomb and brain-washing. Perhaps Mr. Moorcock's world has something? Could the sorcerers have done much worse than that?

THE ZENITH LETTER by Anthony Skene (1924)

"Woodlands"

Oakhill Gdns

Woodford Green

Essex

2.7.24

Dear Mr. Young,

Many thanks!

The Editor of the Union Jack of course receives letters from readers galore as to his yarns and most of them have something to say about Zenith.

They are not all complimentary, some are very much the reverse; but the Albino is usually liked (or disliked) very much indeed.

That shows, I think, that to them, as to you-and me, Zenith is a living man. It is impossible to feel strongly about a phantasm.

One likes appreciation naturally. Literary art, so far as I understand it, is translation, by means of words, from the mind of the writer to the mind of the reader, of certain interests and emotions. When I read that for you Zenith lived, I was delighted to perceive that, so far as you were concerned, I had succeeded.

In 1913, I encountered, in the West End, a true albino, a man of about fifty-five.

He was a slovenly fellow: fingers stained with tobacco, clothes soiled by dropped food. Yet he was dressed expensively, and had about him a look of adequacy.

I should have forgotten him in a day or so; but when, an hour afterwards and five miles away, I sat down to have my lunch, he walked in to the restaurant and sat himself within a few feet of me.

This coincidence made an impression upon my mind, and when I needed a central figure not quite so banal as Blake for the U.J. stories, I re-created this albino fellow "moulded nearer to the heart's desire."

As I expect you will agree, Mr. Young, the lordly crook exists in most of us, only he is shackled by conventions and virtues. The Jekyll-and-Hyde trick of setting him free is, of course, a trick of the writer's trade. One cannot, alas, have the excitement of a crook's brief life in actuality; but one can, vicariously, with arm-chair and cigarette, experience not only the actions thereof, but the re-actions also. I am telling you what you have already divined.

Regarding my novels, I regret to inform you that I have written none. The disgusting truth is that novel-writing does not pay. I have planned a novel, and soon I shall write it. I think it will be good, but I do not expect to make more than PS50 out of it. That's that. I have to live, Mr. Young. Novel-writing is an expensive hobby.

Otherwise, you appear to have read all my long stories. In my opinion (which is probably unreliable on the subject) the best chapters I ever wrote were the first one of two in "The Case of the Crystal Gazer" and the best yarn "The Tenth Case" (published immediately after "A Duel to the Death," in 1918). The Editor liked "The Curse of the Crimson Curtain" (published recently).

In addition to these Union Jack, etc., yarns I have written nothing but newspaper articles, and one or two "shorts" not worth mentioning.

I have a single copy of most of my Zenith yarns, but I need these frequently for reference, and further copies are, I fear, largely out of print.

I am now writing an S.B. Library story of which, when it is published, I should like to send you a copy.

That I have awakened so strong an interest in one who is, obviously, intellectually superior to the average reader of the Union Jack, I find both flattering and stimulating.

Sincerely yours,

Anthony Skene