To Rescue Tanelorn
Read To Rescue Tanelorn Online
Authors: Michael Moorcock
CONTENTS
Foreword: My Eternal Champion by Walter Mosley
THE LAST ENCHANTMENT (Jesting with Chaos)
PHASE 1: A Jerry Cornelius Story
THE BLACK BLADE’S SONG (The White Wolf’s Song)
Sophie, Katie, and Max Moorcock
“The Eternal Champion” first appeared in
Science Fantasy
magazine (edited by John Carnell), no. 53, June 1962.
“To Rescue Tanelorn” first appeared in
Science Fantasy,
no. 56, December 1962.
“The Greater Conqueror” first appeared in
Science Fantasy,
no. 58, April 1963.
“The Last Enchantment” was written for
Science Fantasy
magazine in 1962 but did not appear until 1978 in
Ariel: The Book of Fantasy,
vol. 3, edited by Thomas Durwood.
“Master of Chaos” first appeared in
Fantastic Stories of Imagination,
edited by Cele Goldsmith, May 1964, illustrated by Virgil Finlay.
“Phase 1” was written in 1965 and first appeared as part of
The Final Programme,
Avon Books, 1968.
“The Singing Citadel” first appeared in
The Fantastic Swordsmen,
edited by L. Sprague de Camp, Pyramid Books, 1967.
The Jade Man’s Eyes
was first published by Unicorn Books, 1973.
“The Stone Thing” first appeared in
Triode,
no. 20, edited by Eric Bentcliffe, October 1974.
“Elric at the End of Time,” illustrated by Rodney Matthews, was written for Big O Books in 1977 but did not appear until 1981, without illustrations, in Ace Books’
Elsewhere,
edited by Terri Windling and Mark Alan Arnold; it was subsequently published with Matthews’s illustrations by Paper Tiger, 1987.
“The Black Blade’s Song,” under a different title, first appeared in
Elric: Tales of the White Wolf,
edited by Edward E. Kramer and Richard Gilliam, White Wolf Books, 1994.
“Crimson Eyes” first appeared in
New Statesman & Society,
December 1994.
“Sir Milk-and-Blood” first appeared in
Pawn of Chaos: Tales of the Eternal Champion,
edited by Edward E. Kramer, White Wolf Books, 1996.
“The Roaming Forest” first appeared in
Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E. Howard,
edited by Scott A. Cupp and Joe R. Lansdale, MonkeyBrain Books/FACT, Inc., 2006.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Cover artwork for
Science Fantasy,
no. 53 by Gerard Quinn (June 1962). Copyright ©
Science Fantasy
for New Worlds Publishing. Reprinted by permission of
Science Fantasy
for New Worlds Publishing.
“Captains of Chaos” sketch by James Cawthorn (1963), previously unpublished. Reprinted by permission of James Cawthorn.
Title page illustration for “Master of Chaos” by Virgil Finlay (
Fantastic Stories of Imagination,
May 1964). Reprinted by permission of Lail M. Finlay.
Cover artwork for
The Singing Citadel
by Bob Haberfield (Mayflower Books, 1970). Reprinted by permission of Bob Haberfield.
Cover artwork for
The Jade Man’s Eyes
by James Cawthorn (Unicorn Books, 1973). Reprinted by permission of James Cawthorn.
Interior artwork for
Elric at the End of Time,
“Elric on Horse,” © Rodney Matthews (Paper Tiger, 1987). Reprinted by permission of Rodney Matthews.
Cover artwork for Anthony Skene’s “Zenith the Albino!” by Eric Parker
(Detective Weekly,
no. 323, April 1939). Reprinted by permission of Savoy Books.
FOREWORD
MY ETERNAL CHAMPION
by Walter Mosley
My first experience with Michael Moorcock was at a little newspaper kiosk at the entrance of a tube station in London, 1968. There I saw the bright, psychedelic colors of the paperback edition of the first volume of the Corum chronicles. I was on a tour with a bunch of high school kids from California. We were supposed to be broadening our cultural awareness. But instead I spent every available moment reading that book and at least six other Moorcock masterpieces while others
ooh
ed and
aah
ed at the Tate Gallery, Carnaby Street and a dozen other places that I never gave a second glance.
Michael Moorcock was the beginning of my literary education. He has maintained that role ever since.
Moorcock’s writing is intricate, fabulous and mellifluous. Reading his words I was, and am, reminded of music. His novels are symphonic experiences. They dance and cry and bleed and make promises that can only live in the moment of their utterance.
In the early works there was a lot of swordplay and magicks, Shakespearean villains (and heroes) locked in struggles that were both unwinnable and unending.
But these brilliant facades were only the beginning of the power Moorcock exerted over me. Reading his books I understood, for the first time (and most clearly), that a novel is only a movement, an act, a scene in the greater theme of a master fiction writer.
Moorcock’s mind encompasses not one world but a whole, and expanding, galaxy of possibilities, fates and second chances.
He understands destiny, lives under its unforgiving logic but never accepts it. Instead he rebels for us like the knight in Ingmar Bergman’s
The Seventh Seal.
Each story expands our possibilities, but in the end we hit a wall and are given the existential choice that Camus’s Mersault faced on the morning of his execution.
Michael Moorcock refuses to be guided by the dead hand of history. His lively intelligence and his spirit, hardened by the German bombing of London, makes him a beacon of hope and, oddly, a realist who tells you, “You will die, my friend, and that death may be terrible and tragic. But today you live and this is your only chance to be somebody real and tangible in the malleable, seemingly meaningless movement that some people mistake for time.”
It is a great honor for me to be given the chance to introduce Michael Moorcock in this book. It is a gift to the world that he and his writing still map our hubris and folly, our hope and our ecstatic demolition.
INTRODUCTION
Strictly speaking, not all these stories are being presented here in the order in which they were published. While the main body of the Elric novels are appearing as I first wrote them, the short stories and novellas are a bit of an exception. I wrote most of them, of course, during that prolific period of the early 1960s when I was publishing a lead story virtually every month in one of the Nova magazines, all edited by E. J. “Ted” Carnell.
“The Last Enchantment” was actually written after the story “The Caravan of Forgotten Dreams,” published as “The Flame Bringers.” It was, as the story implies, supposed to be the last Elric story. After I had submitted it, Carnell asked me to write the sequence which became the serial published in book form as
Stormbringer.
He was also an agent, so he suggested he send the story to one of the American magazines. I forgot about it. Many years later, after Ted had died tragically early, his successor found the story and sent it to me. In 1978 a young man called Armand Eising, who with Thomas Durwood planned to publish
Ariel,
an ambitious fantasy magazine in large size with full colour, asked me for an Elric story and since I had recently received “The Last Enchantment” back, I gave it to him to be illustrated by Frank Frazetta, one of the many great graphic artists who have over the years embellished my work. (Frazetta’s cover for
The Silver Warriors,
aka
Phoenix in Obsidian,
the second Eternal Champion tale, became pretty iconographic, being turned into a snow globe and then imitated in this century by the poster designer for the first Narnia film!)
By 1964 Cele Goldsmith, the brilliant editor of
Amazing
and
Fantastic
magazines, was publishing epic fantasy stories and, because Carnell was overinventoried with my work, I submitted “Earl Aubec and the Golem” to her. It appeared as “Master of Chaos.” To my astonished pleasure, it was illustrated by the great Virgil Finlay, whose work had embellished so many of the magazines I had admired as a boy, including
Weird Tales
and
Famous Fantastic Mysteries
. This story developed the idea of Chaos being acted upon by the human imagination, a recurring theme in my fantastic fiction. “To Rescue Tanelorn…” was written in a slightly different manner for me, echoing Dunsany more than my work usually did, and introducing Rackhir, the Red Archer, who, as well as enjoying his own adventures, became a stalwart friend of Elric.
The concepts which have been the backbone of most of my science fantasies appeared pretty rapidly, one after the other. “The Eternal Champion” offered the notion of a hero constantly reincarnated to fight for the Balance, no matter what other loyalties he might possess, and
The Sundered Worlds,
which will not be published in this series since it was pretty much pure science fiction, first offered the idea of “the multiverse,” a quasi-infinite number of universes, any one of which is only marginally different from the next.
Both ideas seemed to inspire other writers (and physicists!) almost immediately. What was original to them also captured the imagination of games creators and graphic novelists until within only a few years my own work was somewhat lost amongst all the material it had inspired. Even the symbol representing Chaos, which I had created in a doodle meant to represent the opposite of Law (a single arrow), became universal to the degree that people now regard it as an ancient sign. I suppose it
is
ancient to many younger readers born after 1963. I myself, of course, had been similarly inspired by what had gone before me—for instance, the “alternate world” tales of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, whose Harold Shea stories graced the pages of
Unknown Worlds
and remain some of the best examples of their kind, in turn inspiring writers like Poul Anderson to write his magnificent
Three Hearts and Three Lions.
Both de Camp and Anderson were, at least as fantasy writers, fellow spirits. Sprague and I became good friends and it was he, of course, who first encouraged me to write epic fantasy, when the magazine
Fantastic Universe,
edited by Hans Stefan Santesson, a much-loved anthologist, wanted to bring such fiction back to the ordinary newsstands. Hans commissioned me to write, with de Camp’s blessing, a new Conan story which, in the end, never materialized, as I have explained elsewhere. While I now have to agree with the purists who have rejected the Conan tales by other hands, we were working in a somewhat different context in which we were a handful of enthusiasts attempting to present Howard’s enduring character to a wider audience.
Pretty much all the ideas which formed the backbone of my fantastic fiction (and indeed were later developed for my literary fiction) came out in a year or two. I was developing very rapidly as a writer, expanding in many directions at once, rather like Chaos itself. I wrote all kinds of journalism and, in researching many of my features, added material to my fiction (for instance, a feature on Alexander the Great led to my writing “The Greater Conqueror” for a painting by Gerard Quinn, the star artist of
Science Fantasy,
intended for the cover but ironically used on another issue).
“The Eternal Champion” was an idea I had originally begun to write as a serial for a fanzine I produced when I was seventeen called
Avilion
which scarcely made it into reality, since I only had a chance to run off a few copies before my arrangement with the firm that allowed me to print my fanzines for free came to an end. Both the magazine and the serial were set aside as my work with Amalgamated Press took up most of my time, and I had to devote myself to the detective adventures of Sexton Blake (whose battle with the albino Zenith had been one of my boyhood enthusiasms) and the graphic tales of Robin Hood, Kit Carson, Dick Turpin, Buck Jones or Dogfight Dixon RFC that we turned out monthly. Most of my taste for red-blooded pseudo-historical fiction went into producing scripts for the great Don Lawrence, with whom I collaborated on many stories for
Olac the Gladiator
and
Karl the Viking,
some of which had the fantasy elements I would later begin to incorporate into the stories I wrote for Carnell’s magazines. With Lawrence, I produced features on Alexander the Great and Constantine the Great for magazines like
Look and Learn
and its companion
Bible Story,
for which I also wrote features on the great cathedrals of England, as well as the exploits of various colourful biblical figures. All this taught me, I believe, how to present a fast-paced fantasy adventure and also helped me research the story for which I won an early Nebula Award, “Behold the Man.” For a liberal humanist I read the Bible more thoroughly, as I’ve since discovered, than many professed Christians!
A year or two before I published “Behold the Man” in the Easter number of
New Worlds,
which by then I was editing, I had, in the winter of 1964, begun to wonder how it would be possible to turn my talent for writing mythic stories of eternal heroes to address more immediately the issues of the modern world which were increasingly beginning to concern me. I believed that what modernist fiction had become was no longer capable of addressing these issues and I was frustrated because, for me, most science fiction seemed to dodge the implications also. I wanted to find a form which confronted those issues as squarely as possible.
I felt I could do this somehow by using what I had learned while writing Elric, and in the end I came up with Jerry Cornelius, whose original I had seen in Notting Hill while I ate at my local café. This beautiful young man, with his ascetic features, elegant clothes and floating long hair, had suddenly appeared as I looked up. Behind him was the name of one of our local greengrocer’s shops, Cornelius of London. And so I had, in one moment, both the image of my modern-day hero and his name. That, unlikely as it seems, is exactly how Jerry Cornelius was conceived. All I had to do then was try to develop a technique which did the same thing I had been doing with the Elric stories.
Rather than produce a thinned-down version of Elric, I realized I could create something out of the Elric mythos but make it relate thoroughly to modern times. The answer was simple. I took the first Elric short stories back to what had first inspired them (including my sojourn in Lapland climbing mountains) and adapted the plots to the story which was to become the first Cornelius novel,
The Final Programme.
Parts of this novel were cut up and appeared in
New Worlds,
and “Phase 1,” harking back to “The Dreaming City,” the first Elric story, was intended to be one of these fragments but is actually published here in this form for the first time, to show how that transition came about. I was, of course, to return to both Elric and Jerry when the occasion demanded or the mood was on me, and when Sprague de Camp asked for an Elric story for his sword-and-sorcery anthology
The Fantastic Swordsmen,
I obliged with “The Singing Citadel.” A later anthology would include “The Sleeping Sorceress,” which I would develop eventually into a full-blown novel. I seemed to have been inspired to develop a certain sibilance in my titles by 1967!
A few years later, around the summer of 1973, my enthusiasm for the fin de siècle, Art Nouveau, the aesthetes and so on began to form the ideas which would eventually go into my sequence generally known as The Dancers at the End of Time. I eventually finished this sequence in the middle seventies and by then was working regularly with the artist Rodney Matthews producing a vast series of posters, cards, notelets and calendars. Our publisher, Peter Ledeboer of Big O Graphics, asked me if I could write a story for Rodney to illustrate. This eventually became the rather strange blend of Elric and the Dancers called, obviously enough,
Elric at the End of Time.
This magnificently illustrated book, with picture after picture in gorgeous colour, was eventually published by Paper Tiger. It shows Our Hero, of course, in an entirely different situation from his usual ones! The idea was inspired by M. John Harrison’s suggestion that the denizens of the End of Time would be seen very much as the Gods of Chaos by the likes of Elric and his kind. Some readers weren’t too happy about my writing what was, after all, primarily a humorous story, but it seemed to me that there was a chance to offer an aspect of Elric which was not one of unrelieved gloom! There’s always a danger, as one’s work grows in popularity, of taking oneself too seriously. That’s why from time to time it’s worth writing a bit of self-parody like “The Stone Thing,” which I originally wrote for a friend of mine Eric Bentcliffe, who put out some very funny fanzines a few years ago.
The Jade Man’s Eyes
was done for my friend Bill Butler, a bookseller and poet who also published a number of offbeat books from his shop in Brighton. Most of the books he published were typically done for love rather than profit and, since he was an Elric fan, this was one of several projects I did with him in the hope of making him a little money! Sadly, he died in 1977, and I wrote a rock song about him (since he had always wanted me to write a rock song about him) called “The Great Sun Jester,” which was recorded a year or two after his death by Blue Öyster Cult (who also did a version of an Elric song, “Black Blade”).
In the early 1990s Ed Kramer proposed an anthology of Elric stories written by other hands, such as Neil Gaiman, Tad Williams and Karl Edward Wagner. I wrote “The Black Blade’s Song,” published as “The White Wolf’s Song,” for this, linking it into my stories of the moonbeam roads and the Second Ether, while the story I did for the anthology’s sequel, “Sir Milk-and-Blood,” takes Elric into the sequence of modern-dress stories I wrote which links him back to Monsieur Zenith, who originally inspired him. I wrote “Crimson Eyes,” for instance, for the
New Statesman
’s special Christmas issue, and Elric/Zenith’s other adventures in conflict with
The Metatemporal Detective
have recently been published in the volume of that name. I wanted to bring my hero back to his origins in homage to the stories which originally excited me as a boy.
There is one further homage here. Because Rackhir was in this volume, it seemed reasonable to include a fairly recent story concerning him. I wrote it as a firm nod to Robert E. Howard for an anthology,
Cross Plains Universe,
done in 2006 for the World Fantasy Convention held in Austin, the nearest large town to where I live in Texas. The book was intended to celebrate and commemorate Howard, and I was flattered to be asked to join in. Readers of Howard, as well as myself, will see a few nods to Conan as well as my own cosmology and its heroes.
I have written almost all my Elric stories because I was asked to do so, either by commissioning editors or by readers. My affection for the crimson-eyed albino has never waned. Since I began writing I have always maintained a close relationship with my readers and have done my best, whenever possible, to accommodate them when they have asked for a certain kind of story. While I retired from writing long epic fantasy stories or, for that matter, science fantasy novels with the most recent sequence involving Elric and others of my own heroic pantheon, ending with “The White Wolf’s Son,” I still take great pleasure in producing the occasional shorter story or graphic tale, and I suspect I shall continue to write these until my career comes at last to an end. Meanwhile, we have these, so wonderfully, gloriously, handsomely illustrated by Michael Kaluta. I hope you enjoy them.
Michael Moorcock,
Lost Pines, Texas,
May 2007
NB: In addition to the appearance of “Phase 1” as an independent story, three other stories appear here for the first time in one of my own collections: “The Eternal Champion,” “The Jade Man’s Eyes” and “The Roaming Forest.”