"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.