Elric: The Stealer of Souls

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!

I notice, for instance, that I claimed to be the product of a particular form of Christian mysticism. While it is true that for a short time (at around the age of seven) I attended Michael Hall School in Sussex, which was run on the rather attractive mystical Christian principles of Rudolf Steiner (in turn a break-away from Madame Blavatsky's brand of spiritualism), it is not really true to suggest, as I did in one of the pieces reprinted here, that I was "brought up" according to Steiner's ideas. In fact, my background was almost wholly secular, much of my immediate circle was Jewish and I was only briefly interested, as a young adult, in Steiner's ideas, which had influenced my mentor, Ernst Jelinek. These, however, did influence the cosmology of the Elric stories. Poul Anderson's marvelous fantasies The Broken Sword and ThreeHearts and Three Lions were probably of equal influence, as was my fascination with Norse, Celtic, Hindu, and Zoroastrian mythology.

I had begun my professional career as a contributor to a British weekly juvenile magazine called Tarzan Adventures, which was a mixture of reprinted newspaper strips and original text. My first regular commission was a series of articles on Edgar Rice Burroughs and his characters, but I was soon writing fiction, some, like Sojan, adapted from the stories that first appeared in my fanzine Burroughsania, which I had founded in my last year at school (I left at the age of fifteen).

These first stories were fantasy adventures bearing, not surprisingly, a strong ERB influence, and I have reprinted one here to give a flavour of what I was doing a few years before I created Elric. More of my early ups and downs in publishing can be found in the various departments of www.multiverse.org. Warts and all, they don't show as much promise as I sometimes like to think. They do offer, I hope, some encouragement to writers who are yet to publish professionally! Re-reading these stories, however, I think they do show a fairly marked improvement as it began to dawn on me that there was a readership for that kind of fiction and that I was no longer-as I had been when I worked as a journalist and for the comics-anonymous.

Over a period of time following almost exactly the period in which I was writing the first Elric stories, I was inclined to distance myself from the work of Robert E. Howard, even though he had been an important influence (unlike Lovecraft, for whom I had no taste). Over the years I have seen many other writers put space between themselves and their main sources of inspiration and have come to understand it as an important, if not particularly admirable, part of the process of trying to make one's individual mark. I soon began giving Anthony Skene the credit he deserved for Zenith the Albino. Eventually I was instrumental in helping get Skene's only Zenith hardback novel, Monsieur Zeniththe Albino, republished in a particularly fine edition by Savoy Books (www.savoy.abel.co.uk/HTML/zenith.html). Until then, there were only three copies of the book known, one of which was in the British Library. In recent times, of course, I have also given Howard due credit and even by the early 1960s was perfectly happy to announce him as an important influence. Tolkien, although my dislike for The Lord of theRings became exaggerated in argument, was never an influence. As with Lovecraft, I think I came to him too late. Neither author needed any help from me to get the readership he deserved. I am proud, however, of my part in getting Skene republished and helping, in a small way, to make so many of his old magazine stories available online.

From being a hero of my youth Monsieur Zenith appears to have become the friend of my seniority. As well as helping Savoy to reprint their extraordinarily lavish version of Monsieur Zenith, I have written a number of stories designed to return Elric to his roots. By linking Zenith (or Zodiac as he's sometimes called) and Elric, I hope I show how they were almost certainly the same person! Sexton Blake is "disguised" by my use of the detective's real name (Seaton Begg) from his days as a Home Office investigator. These stories were recently published as TheMetatemporal Detective (Pyr, 2007). Zenith, rumoured to be a Yugosla-vian aristocrat, disappeared during the intensity of World War II, making his last Sexton Blake appearance in a story called "The Affair of the Bronze Basilisk." Another version of his return can be found at the Sexton Blake web site written by Mark Hodder (Blakiana.com).

Looking back through the non-fiction pieces of the 1950s and early 1960s, I seem to have been consistent in my admiration for Fritz Leiber.

My dislike of The Lord of the Rings has, as I say, been exaggerated. I do, I must admit, dislike the religiosity exhibited by the work's nuttier fans but had, in fact, every reason to like Professor Tolkien. When I was young and The Lord of the Rings was seen as one idiosyncratic book among others-like William Morris's pseudo-sagas, E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Pegana or David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus-Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were both very kind to me, as were writers I admired rather more, like T. H. White, author of The Sword in the Stone, and Mervyn Peake, author of Titus Groan. Peake in particular was a more direct influence on the Elric stories. I came to know Leiber and take as much pleasure from his company as I did from his fine, precise prose which in my view is superior to that of every English fantast of his generation. I don't think I was alone as a boy in preferring, for well-written escapism at least, the work of American writers. And not just for escapism, of course. Faulkner-though not most of Hemingway or Fitzgerald - was a huge enthusiasm, and I had others, including Twain, of course, together with Sinclair Lewis and his generation of realists. There were many I found in the pulps. I had loved the full-blooded science fantasies of Leigh Brackett and the work of the young writer she had befriended, Ray Bradbury, who often appeared in the same issues of Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories. It only occurred to me later how so much that was good about Anglophone fiction came out of California. It wasn't just the great movies being made there from the beginning of the twentieth century. Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars wasn't too far away in the deserts beyond Tarzana, and both Brackett and Bradbury grew up there, making of Burroughs's Mars what others made of Dickens's London. Like his Vermilion Sands, Ballard's Mars is as Californian as the language that influenced the likes of Chandler, Hammett, Cain and all those other Americans whose tone can still be heard, faintly perhaps in English literary fiction, to this day.

Before I came to write the first Elric stories I was already absorbing the kind of literature which influenced my generation, including that of the great French Existentialist writers and film-makers. I made my first trip to Paris at the age of fifteen. I went to see Sartre's Huis Clos and Camus's Caligula. I read their novels. I became an enthusiast for the likes of Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Boris Vian, Blaise Cendrars and William Burroughs. Although no great fan of most of the Beats, I had met some of them in Paris and had friends who were huge admirers.

Later, I did come to know and like Burroughs. I absorbed the ideas of the time as much through conversation as by reading and, when I had gone from editing Tarzan Adventures to becoming an editor at Sexton Blake Library (a pulp series that had begun before World War I and that had published many of those Zenith stories before World War II), I had lost my taste for most fantasy fiction. SBL publishers, Amalga-mated Press, at that time the largest periodical producers in the world, were horribly overstaffed in those easy years. Editorial offices were full of young men like me who came to journalism through juvenile publishing but who were huge enthusiasts for surrealism and the situation-alists, for Brecht and Beckett and Ionesco. They would go on to do great things, not always as journalists.

We went to Paris every chance we had. At George Whitman's Paris bookstore (then called Mistral but now known as Shakespeare amp; Company) I would busk with my guitar, seated on a chair outside the shop (George didn't mind since he knew all the money went back to him), and then as soon as I had enough, buy a couple of paperbacks for the rest of the day. It was there, in the shadow of Notre Dame, that I read my first true SF story, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, and wondered what I'd been missing. As it turned out, Bester was one of the few SF writers of his day that I enjoyed. He was a sophisticated, much-traveled man. He was associated with a group who published primarily in Galaxy magazine and included Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Philip K. Dick and Robert Sheckley. During the shame of McCarthyism, they were amongst the earliest to raise literary voices to examine modern times often far more rigorously and amusingly than literary writers had done. There were a few brave voices who, like their Russian counterparts, found places to publish and speak to a public who mourned what was going on.

I wasn't the only one to see some sort of literary salvation in science fiction. That Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest and Edmund Crispin shared enthusiasm for certain kinds of SF is well-known, but many of us found it sketchy and condescending (Amis hated Burroughs and the Ballard of Atrocity Exhibition). But less obvious people, including Doris Lessing (then known only as a realist), were keen SF readers. Considered by many to be the finest literary writer of his day (and a prescient SF writer, as in his The Old Men at the Zoo) Angus Wilson had recommended that Sidgwick amp; Jackson in the UK publish Tiger! Tiger! , the original title of The Stars My Destination. Wilson, Elizabeth Bowen and an increasing number of writers of social fiction, as well as a surprising bunch of well-known philosophers, were discriminating readers of SF and other kinds of imaginative fiction. They sometimes even wrote it.

Although the Amis camp demanded that SF remain a kind of literary ghetto, the rest of us wondered if it was possible, through the genre, for popular fiction and literary fiction to find common ground. At some point in the nineteenth century, perhaps even the early twentieth century, fiction had become the victim of a random kind of snobbery which denied a public to many highly accessible writers of equal ambition and artistic success and thus also discouraged a popular public from reading the established canon ("too highbrow"). My friends - Ballard, Bayley and Aldiss especially-believed much as I did. Quite a bit of our late-1950s and early-1960s conversation envisaged a magazine that would combine the values of the best SF and the best contem-porary literature as well as features about what was happening in the arts and sciences.

You can imagine-with all these glorious ideas of reuniting the values of popular and literary fiction, which we shared with composers and visual artists as well as film-makers-the last kind of fiction I imagined myself writing was what Leiber had christened both heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery but which I had, it appeared, already termed epic fantasy (see "Putting a Tag on It"). By some strange twist of fate I was telling tales that had more in common with the nineteenth century than the twentieth in order to help support an avant-garde movement which looked forward to the twenty-first.

Though Tolkien had been published, he was still relatively obscure, and his kind of fantasy fiction was never published in the mainstream (Tolkien's primarily academic publisher, George Allen amp; Unwin, was better known as Jung's). Hard as it is to believe now, TheLord of the Rings was considered as some kind of post-nuclear allegory, too risky to chance in a paperback edition (which Tolkien, anyway, regarded as a bit vulgar). Both Burroughs and Howard were thoroughly out of fashion in the United States (though not so much in Britain), and there was no longer any kind of market for supernatural adventure fiction. The eagerness with which the public embraced the fantasts when they were finally released, an uncaged flock, upon the world, is a good lesson for publishers and for politicians.

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, TimeOut 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 victim-less 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 contem-porary 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 amp; 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 suc-cubi.

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 TheMonk, 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 TheLord 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 amp; 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 amp;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." 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 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