Michael Moorcock’s classic character Elric, Emperor of  Melniboné, returns to print in a new omnibus edition containing The Stealer of Souls and Stormbringer as well as a foreword by Alan Moore, letters to and from Moorcock, and much more fascinating “Melnibonélia.” The volume is lushly illustrated by John Picacio. Here is an excerpt from the introduction by Michael Moorcock.

Elric with swords © John Picacio

The past is a script which 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 promoting 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 1963-4. 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 ‘interventions’ into the fantasy canon, such as it was. Later, writers like Donaldson, 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 parents’ 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 (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 Three Hearts 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 which 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. . .

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 these two books, put out as The Chronicle of the Black Sword, complete with a mime troupe enacting the story. I also had a great time collaborating with Eric Bloom on Blue Öyster 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. 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, if rather dangerous, company.

Runemarks is the newest book from acclaimed author of Chocolat, Joanne Harris.
Seven o'clock on a Monday morning, five hundred years after the end of the world, and goblins had been at the cellar again. . . . Not that anyone would admit it was goblins. In Maddy Smith's world, order rules. Chaos, old gods, fairies, goblins, magic, glamours-all of these were supposedly vanquished centuries ago. But Maddy knows that a small bit of magic has survived.

Read more about this book and view a trailer at RunemarksBook.com!