I'm often asked who my favourite Elric artist is. There have been so many good ones from Cawthorn in England to Phillippe Druillet in France (both have also done graphic novel versions), to Michael Whe-lan and Robert Gould in the United States. Frank Brunner, Howard Chaykin, Walter Simonson. Rodney Matthews, Jim Burns, Chris
Achilleos and, of course, the great Yoshitaka Amano. And now it's John Picacio's turn. It might be worth mentioning here that Elric does not, of course, exhibit human albinism but an alien condition that occasionally produces a "Silverskin" of Melnibonean royal blood. He has no real equivalent amongst the races of the Young Kingdoms, with whom we have much more in common. That human albinos have had something of a bad press in our world, frequently cast as villains (cf. The DaVinci Code) is demonstrated in Anthony Skene's description, also reprinted here, of how he was inspired to create Zenith. Monsieur Zenith came into existence less than a decade after Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera, but over a half century before him came Jean Blanc in Le Loup Blanc, creation of Paul Feval, the prolific feuilletonist who supplied the French public with a considerable amount of its popular fiction in the middle of the nineteenth century. It came as something of a shock to realize Elric had such a long pedigree. I am indebted to Jess Nevins's extraordinary Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana and to Jean-Marc Lofficier, of The Black Coat Press, for details of Le LoupBlanc. Anyone who would like to investigate this wonderful world any further can do so by reading Lofficier's Tales of the Shadowmen series. I might feel a little astonishment at the title, Stormbringer, being used by others so frequently, but Terry Pratchett believes that fiction is a huge cauldron which one helps fill and from which one takes. He and I are sardonically agreed about the number of writers who tend to take out rather more than they put in…
Over the years, in Elric's translations into French, Japanese, Por-tuguese, Spanish, Hebrew, Italian, Greek, Albanian, Serbian, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Russian and so on, many variant maps have been published, and I thought it would be of some interest to readers of this edition if I included the occasional map of Elric's world, beginning with Cawthorn's first-ever map. As Elric explored more and more of the world of the Young Kingdoms, Jim was able to add an increasing amount of information. We intend to publish further maps in subsequent volumes.
To give something of the flavour of the time in which the stories were published, we have reprinted the introductory material Carnell attached to them when they appeared for the first time. There are no "early drafts," I fear, since all the stories were first draft and the only carbon copies were given away to various charity auctions soon after they were published. I have no idea who owns these manuscripts. In a subsequent volume, however, I shall be publishing Elric's first appearance in the guise of Jerry Cornelius.
It is still a little strange for me to accept that Elric has become part of the pantheon of epic fantasy. I suppose I hoped for something of the sort when I was sixteen or thereabouts, but my ambitions changed. Or so I thought. I have been extraordinarily lucky in doing pretty much all I ever dreamed of doing as a teenager. Indeed, various ambitions came together in the late 1980s when Hawkwind, the band with which I frequently performed, staged a rock version of The Stealer of Souls and Stormbringer, put out as The Chronicle of the Black Sword, complete with a mime troupe enacting the story. I also had a great time collabo-rating with Eric Bloom on Blue Oyster Cult's version of "Black Blade," which I first performed in a different form with my own band the Deep Fix at Dingwalls in the late 1970s.
It seems Elric will, like the Eternal Champion he is, keep coming back in various incarnations, but this version is without doubt my favourite and probably the last I shall produce. I must thank Betsy Mitchell for her commitment to this project. And finally I thank my friend John Picacio who, by coincidence, began his professional illustrating career with my Behold the Man and followed it with a representation of Elric in Tales from the Texas Woods. If you are familiar with Elric, I trust you enjoy revisiting him in this present form. If you are new to him, I hope you find him good, rather dangerous company.
Michael Moorcock
Rue Amelie, Paris/Lost Pines, Texas
October/December 2006
ELRIC
The Stealer of Souls
AT THE BEGINNING
I'm inclined to forget how many contributions I made to fanzinesbetween, say, 1955 and 1965. I continued to contribute to themwhile I was editor of Tarzan Adventures and even wrote the oddletter while I was editing New Worlds . One of the finest of thesefanzines was AMRA , essentially a serious magazine for that handful of people then interested in fantasy fiction and specifically-thus the title-the work of Robert E. Howard. Run by anenthusiast, George Scithers, who is still involved in enthusiast publishing (most recently Weird Tales ) to this day. By the evidence ofmy approach, I must suppose that Fritz Leiber had not yet takenpart in the correspondence and had therefore not come up with theterms "sword and sorcery" or "heroic fantasy." Actually, I still prefer my own suggestion. I would not include the Peake books in thatlist anymore, and there are a few others I would mention if writingthe piece today. It was probably written in the middle of 1960. Ireprint it here because, with my "Aspects of Fantasy" essays, whichbecame Wizardry and Wild Romance , it immediately precedesthe Elric stories and gives some idea of the atmosphere in which"The Dreaming City" was published, at a time when supernaturaladventure fantasy (to give it another tag) was thought to have onlya very limited readership…
PUTTING A TAG ON IT
(1961)
I'VE ALWAYS KIDDEDmyself, and until recently had convinced myself, that names were of no importance and that what really mattered was the Thing Concerned, not the tag which was put on said Thing. Although in principle I still agree with the idea, I am having to admit to myself that names are convenient and save an awful lot of wordage. Thus with "Science Fiction": a much disputed tag, agreed, but one which at least helps us to visualize roughly what someone who uses the words means.