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.