Bad like Gene Vincent, sick like Lenny Bruce and haunted by addiction like Bill Burroughs, though Elric ostensibly existed in a dawn world of antiquity this was belied by his being so obviously a creature of his Cold War brothel-creeper times, albeit one whose languid decadence placed him slightly ahead of them and presciently made his pallid, well-outfitted figure just as emblematic of the psychedelic sixties yet to come.
By 1963, when the character first appeared in book form, Britain was beginning to show healthy signs of energetic uproar and a glorious peacock-feathered blossoming, against which setting Elric would seem even more appropriate. The Beatles had, significantly, changed the rules of English culture by erupting from a background of the popular and vulgar to make art more vital and transformative than anything produced by the polite society-approved and -vetted artistic establishment. The wrought-iron and forbidding gates had been thrown open so that artists, writers and musicians could storm in to explore subjects that seemed genuinely relevant to the eventful and uncertain world in which they found themselves; could define the acceptable according to their own rules. Within five years, when I first belatedly discovered Elric sometime during 1968, provincial English life had been transmuted into a phantasmagoric territory, at least psychologically, so that the exploits of this fated, chalk-white aesthete somehow struck the perfect resonance, made Moorcock's anti-hero just as much a symbol of the times as demonstrations at the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square or Jimi Hendrix or the OZ trial.
Naturally by then Moorcock himself had moved on and was editing New Worlds, the last and the best of traditional science fiction magazines published in England. Under Moorcock's guidance, the
magazine became a vehicle for modernist experiment, gleefully re-imagining the SF genre as a field elastic enough to include the patho-logical and alienated "condensed novels" of J. G. Ballard, the brilliantly skewed and subverted conventional science fiction tropes of Barring-ton Bayley and even the black urban comedies dished up by old Sexton Blake mucker Jack Trevor Story. Moorcock's own main contribution to the magazine-aside from his task as commander of the entire risky, improbable venture-came in the form of his Jerry Cornelius stories.
Cornelius, a multiphasic modern Pierrot with his doings cata-logued by most of Moorcock's New Worlds writing stable at one time or other, rapidly became an edgy mascot for the magazine and also for the entire movement that the magazine was spear-heading, an icon of the fractured moral wasteland England would become after the wild, fluorescent brush-fire of the 1960s had burned out. His debut, starting in the pages of New Worlds in 1965 and culminating in Avon Books' publication of The Final Programme during 1968 was a spectacular affair-
"Michael Moorcock's savagely satirical breakthrough in speculative fiction, The Final Programme, a breathtaking vivid, rapid-fire novel of tomorrow that says things you may not want to hear today!"-and a mind-bending apparent change of tack for those readers who thought that they knew Moorcock from his Elric or his Dorian Hawkmoon fantasies. Even its dedication, "To Jimmy Ballard, Bill Burroughs, and the Beatles, who are pointing the way through," seemed dangerously avant-garde within the cosy rocket-robot-ray-gun comfort zone of early sixties science fiction. As disorienting as The Final Programme was, however, its relentless novelty was undercut by a peculiar familiarity: Cornelius's exploits mirrored those of Elric of Melnibone almost exactly, blow for blow. Even a minor character like the Melnibonean servant Tanglebones could turn up anagrammatized as the Cornelius family's retainer John Gnatbeelson. It became clear that, far from abandoning his haunted and anaemic prince of ruins, Moorcock had in some way cleverly refracted that persona through a different glass until it looked and spoke and acted differently, became a different creature fit for different times, while still retaining all the fascinating, cryptic charge of the original.
As Moorcock's work evolved into progressively more radical and startling forms over the coming decades, this process of refracting light and ideas through a prototypical Melnibonean gemstone would continue. Even in the soaring majesty of Mother London or the dark sym-phony of Moorcock's Pyat quartet, it is still possible to hear the music of Tarkesh, the Boiling Sea, or Old Hrolmar. With these later works and with Moorcock's ascent to literary landmark, it has become fashionable to assert that only in such offerings as the exquisite Vengeance of Rome are we seeing the real Moorcock; that the staggering sweep of glittering fantasy trilogies that preceded these admitted masterpieces are in some way minor works, safely excluded from the author's serious canon.
This is to misunderstand, I think, the intertextual and organic whole of Moorcock's writings. All the blood and passion that informs his work has the genetic markers of Melnibone stamped clearly on each para-graph, each line. No matter where the various strands of Moorcock's sprawling opera ended up, or in what lofty climes, the bloodline started out with Elric. All the narratives have his mysterious, apocalyptic eyes.
The tales included in this current volume are the first rush of that blood, the first pure spurts from what would prove to be a deep and never-ending fountain. Messy, uncontrolled and beautiful, the stories here are the raw heart of Michael Moorcock, the spells that first drew me and all the numerous admirers of his work with whom I am ac-quainted into Moorcock's luminous and captivating web. Read them and remember the frenetic, fiery world and times that gave them birth.
Read them and recall the days when all of us were living in Melnibone.
Alan Moore
Northampton
31 January 2007
INTRODUCTION
The past is a script we are constantly rewriting. Experience changes over the years to suit whatever story we believe we are telling about ourselves and our friends. It's why the police and the courts are forever questioning accounts offered by honest people.
If proof of this were needed, it is in the stories I have told over the years about how Elric came into being. Nothing crucial hangs on my slightly varying versions of my hero's conception; and in reprinting those versions I've made no attempt to make them coherent, so readers will discover some inconsistencies here which, were I interested in pro-moting a particular version of events, I would have edited out. They are what I believed to be truthful accounts when I wrote them or else I was arguing within a specific context, as in a letter I wrote to the fanzine Niekas some short while before the four-part serial published as Stormbringer came out in 1963-1964. In such arguments, where I was defending myself against criticism, I gave more emphasis to certain experience than I would have done ordinarily. Like much of my fiction, which nowadays seems so solidly a part of a genre's history, when the Elric stories first appeared there were some readers who found them offensive or otherwise infuriating. Then, as now, some readers seemed to be uncomfortable with their ironic tone. They were probably the first "inter-ventions" into the fantasy canon, such as it was. Later, writers like Stephen Donaldson, Steven Erikson, and Scott Bakker would be similarly criticized. The criticism I received in letters or in fanzine reviews at the time made me far more defensive than I would be these days. I've always known that fanzine critics prepared you for the worst any mainstream critics could say about you. They weren't unlike some aspects of the web. It's interesting to note in these pieces (which I've placed so as to avoid spoilers) the evident strength of my feelings when Elric was still, as it were, newborn and in need of his parent's protection!