The Stealer of Souls (3 page)

I mention elsewhere how E. J. Carnell, editor of the three surviving British SF magazines, commissioned the first Elric stories. It was in
Science Fantasy
and
Science Fiction Adventures
and
New Worlds
that the likes of Clarke, Aldiss, Ballard, Brunner and even Terry Pratchett published their early work. Philip K. Dick’s first significant novel,
Time Out of Joint
, was serialized in
New Worlds
. Carnell’s taste was broader than that of his American contemporaries. Although unintentionally, he was without doubt the father of what became a significant literary renaissance whose influence would spread throughout Anglophone fiction. In our different ways, he and I were as much an instrument of the Zeitgeist as anyone. By the time I took over the magazine (see my introduction to
New Worlds: An Anthology
, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004) I had a clear agenda: to merge generic SF and literary fiction.
New Worlds
not only ran an exclusive interview with Tolkien, when he was refusing everyone else but also was the first to judge Philip K. Dick as an important writer, and I was able to persuade Tom Maschler of Jonathan Cape to publish his best work in hardback simply as literary fiction. Meanwhile we ran work by Disch, Pynchon, Zoline, D. M. Thomas, Peake and a good many other ambitious writers, artists and scientists, until we at last began to see our hopes fulfilled. Now some of our finest living writers turn increasingly to the methods of SF—and, the insistent Ms. Atwood aside, I need name only Lessing, Rushdie, Roth, McCarthy, Mosley and Pynchon to support my understanding that we are at last all happily wallowing in the same pond, no longer able to distinguish by subject matter or even language what is art and what is not, choosing the techniques that best suit our current subject. Which is not to say that everything
is
art! These stories, for instance, are escapism, however intensely imagined and felt. They were written quickly by a young man who was still throwing everything he had into whatever he did and still getting rejected, whether by editors or girls, enough to hurt. So it’s all in here. All the angst that’s fit to print and maybe a little more that isn’t. I describe somewhere in here how one period of my life was marked by broken glass (and a sequence of small, though happily not especially destructive, fires, miscellaneous victimless hurlings of typewriters and so on) as the elemental agony of my existence, coupled with an indulgence in some good clarets and single malts, overwhelmed me. Elric could not confront many of the contemporary concerns, however, which is how by 1965 I came to re-invent him in the person of Jerry Cornelius, rewriting “The Dreaming City” as the beginning of
The Final Programme
.

In those years I was a bit self-destructive, I think. I was tall, speedy, with a Fleet Street journalist’s capacity for drink and a habit of knocking stuff over or breaking it by accident. Luckily, I was also for the most part pretty amiable. Although not as a rule quarrelsome, I was also eloquent enough, it seems, to wound people, which I never did intentionally. I was self-dramatizing, as my mother had been before me, and I had learned a lot about the melodramatic gesture. I hated that in myself, however, and set about getting rid of it. As a result I sometimes had a grimmer, narrower notion of the truth, which perhaps compensated for having something of a Baron Munchausen at the family home.

Early on I became a very conscious as well as a very rapid writer, pouring my life pretty much as it happened into my work. Emotional, visual, intellectual, it was all thrown into the pot. Like most writers I know, I wasted nothing. Many of the fantastic landscapes in my early stories were versions of those around where I lived in Notting Hill, when I would take my children out to the park and write while they snoozed or played. Holland Park had been blitzed, but though the house itself had been consumed by incendiary bombs, the outbuildings and the wonderful botanical gardens had been preserved pretty much intact. The already exotic plants and birds of that park, in particular, deserve credit for their inspiration of early books such as
The Fireclown
and
The Shores of Death
. The Blitz proved an excellent experience for the chaotic landscapes I wrote about in
Stormbringer
.

It took me a decade or so to realize that my stories are notable for their absence of fathers. Whether the character is Elric, Jerry Cornelius (his modern avatar), Gloriana or Colonel Pyat, fathers are rarely around for their offspring. My father’s decision to leave my mother at the end of European hostilities was a blessing in so many ways but had clearly made something of an unconscious emotional impact on me. So what else is Elric looking for? You’ll have to forgive me the odd reference to Freud or Jung because I began producing these stories at the time I was writing essays about the psychological roots of fantasy fiction. Although, of course, it was not my business to jam these ideas down the throats of readers of fiction, a glance at
Wizardry & Wild Romance
(MonkeyBrain Books, rep. rev. 2004), a version of those early essays, will show that they were not, at pretty much any level, unconsciously written. I was certainly aware of the Freudian interpretations of black swords or the Jungian interpretation of incubi and succubi.

While Mervyn Peake’s fiction soon became my favourite fantasy (ironically, it contains no real supernatural elements), I had also read a great deal of Gothic fiction and other, harder-going stuff, like Southey’s
Palmerin of England
and the few available translations of Peninsula Romances a kid like me would be likely to find. I’d shuddered at
The Monk
, skipped a bit through the longueurs of
The Mysteries of Udolpho
, loved the imagery of
Vathek
. As many of us do, who develop an enthusiasm, I had gone back as far as it was possible to go and met another early influence on the way—John Bunyan’s
The Pilgrim’s Progress
, together, of course, with Milton’s
Paradise Lost
. Cornerstones of Puritan literature? But they worked for me. Bunyan taught me that you could tell more than one story in a single narrative. Milton taught me that Satan can be excessive attractive. To this day I advise people who want to write fantastic fiction for a living to stop reading generic fantasy and to go back to the roots of the genre as deeply as possible, the way anyone might who takes his craft seriously. One avoids becoming a Tolkien clone precisely by returning to the same roots that inspired
The Lord of the Rings
.

And so Elric himself figuratively went back to those wellsprings increasingly as I told his story. But it is here, in what became the first two books, I think you’ll find the psychological roots, the essence, if you like, of Elric, before I understood that we were as locked together as firmly as Conan Doyle and Holmes and that my creations would engulf me in a tidal wave of imitations or inspirations. Poor Bob Howard, distraught over the death of his mother, took a shotgun to himself and at least avoided the Conan clones, just as Tolkien never had to see Gandalf bobbleheads or gaming companies lifting and vulgarizing aspects of his work wholesale. I’m sure Howard would have learned how to deal with anything, had he survived, and I still enjoy a fantasy of him as an old guy in a rocking chair, sitting on his front porch and swapping technical tips with his visitors while sometimes privately confiding that the fire’s gone out of the stuff since he first started doing it. Except, of course—and then he’d reel off a list of names crossing a spectrum as wide as the state. Howard could not predict the success of his character any more than I could guess Elric’s future. Unaware of the coming influence of Dungeons & Dragons and others, I cheerfully permitted free use of my ideas and cosmology until I had the peculiar experience of watching different companies going to law over characters and cosmologies I had created, which is why the Elric gods and demons appeared in the original D&D book but were later dropped.

We’ve come a long way since 1957, when it was still possible to order the set of
The Lord of the Rings
and wait a week before receiving the first editions at, as I recall, a guinea apiece. Tolkien’s phenomenal story was still considered as much an expensive rarity as Arkham House Lovecrafts, luxuriously illustrated limited editions of Dunsany or the Gnome Press editions of the Conan books. Ironically, none was as widely published as Anderson’s second novel (his first was a mystery)
The Broken Sword
, which was done in an ordinary commercial edition by Abelard-Schuman. This was long before Lin Carter’s rediscovery series of fantasy classics, which provided a rich education for those interested in what was still a pretty disparate bunch of books! Before Carter’s series, the fantasy canon was an expensive prospect, even if you could find the book in print.
Weird Tales
of the magazine’s golden age were, however, still relatively cheap in the second-hand bookstores, especially those that specialized in giving you half price on any title you brought back in good condition. This meant that all my copies had big purple rubber stamps on the inside pages. I think I’d miss that purple if I saw the magazines in any other state! That’s where I was introduced to the likes of Seabury Quinn, Clark Ashton Smith and other exotically named individuals, good writers who could find no commercial publication save in the marginal pulps, which, like
Black Mask
, had their own specific readerships. Some, like Frank Owen, loved couching their stories in styles influenced by Chinese tale-tellers. Other
Weird Tales
writers even pretended to be translating from Far Eastern sources. I remember coming across a story by Tennessee Williams which purported to be, as I recall, a previously untranslated Greek scroll.
Weird Tales
, which had published almost every major fantasist including Lovecraft, Howard, and Bradbury, inspired Carnell. He always saw
Science Fantasy
as the most literary of his magazines (though
Science Fiction Adventures
published
The Drowned World
and several other Ballard or Aldiss classics) and ran the best of John Brunner’s Society of Time stories; Thomas Burnett Swann’s tales of the Greek gods and demigods; together with stories by H. K. Bulmer, John Phillifent, Keith Roberts, E. C. Tubb and a few others, all at the top of their form.
Science Fantasy
also published some Mervyn Peake stories for the first time as well as some beautifully done covers by Gerard Quinn, Brian Lewis and James Cawthorn. Admittedly, Lewis’s hefty Elric was painted before the story was completed. There was worse to come. Jack Gaughan’s illustrations for the first U.S. Elric paperbacks of
The Stealer of Souls
and
Stormbringer
, with their strange, spiky hats, influenced Barry Windsor-Smith’s depiction for a later Conan-meets-Elric comic story drafted by Jim Cawthorn and myself. I’m never sure where Jack got those conical hats, which looked like dunce caps to me, but he seemed very proud of them and I never liked to complain too much, at least until it couldn’t hurt him. Soon after the British edition of
Stormbringer
appeared there came a number of other creations called “Stormbringer.” At least two music albums (by John Martyn and by Deep Purple), a band, some comics and even TV shows have borrowed it. Other bands around the world have also referenced the sword. That Stormbringer failed to appear in the movie
Red Sonja
was thanks to some swift footwork by lawyers. While I’ve watched as people lift stuff like the Chaos symbol, created as the opposite of Law’s single arrow, and murmured “be my guest” as the multiverse term and concept is cheerfully appropriated, I’ve always felt especially proprietorial when people rip off my big black sword. The fully-loaded Raven Armoury version has to be kept in a gun cupboard, just in case….

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 Whelan 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 Melnibonéan 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 Da Vinci 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 Féval, 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 Loup Blanc
. 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, Portuguese, 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.