Amazon.co.uk: Sword of South LondonThe following are a few snippets from a
Mike Moorcock interview with Amazon.co.uk promoting his new Elric book . In
it he mentions his enjoyment of REH and also the fact he was writing a Conan
story for an American mag.that went bust.
Anyone know anything about that ?
Terry
Sword of South London
An author-article by Michael Moorcock
Michael Moorcock just can't seem to shake Elric and sure enough, his most
popular creation is back for a brand new novel The Dreamthief's Daughter. In
this exclusive essay, Moorcock talks about his infamous creation, his early
influences and rock & roll.
Someone asked me the other day if I returned to Elric once every decade, the
way some vampires are supposed to return to their native earth. I laughed
before I realised there was something in what she was suggesting. It wasn't
simply to do with Elric.
Or maybe in some ways Elric represents my psychological home base and about
once every 10 years I find that he's somehow moved from the back of my mind
to the front and is demanding urgently that I hear him out, get the new
story down. He helps me find the well-springs again. It seems I write Elric
books not for the money, not even for the art, but from a deep
psycho-cultural impulse which makes me turn to the Prince of Ruins the way a
Monarch butterfly decides it's time to head for Canada.
I had begun reading novels long before the end of the war and amongst them
were Edgar Rice Burroughs's Son of Tarzan and The Warlord of Mars which gave
me a taste for fantasy, but my first great enthusiasm was Richmal Crompton's
William and E Nesbit's Bastable stories. I discovered pretty much all my
favourite fantasy writers in the space of a few months. Mervyn Peake, whom I
knew, was the strongest influence on me, but I had loved the work of Abraham
Merritt, DeCamp and Pratt, Leigh Brackett, CL Moore and Robert E Howard as
much as I enjoyed Lord Dunsany and TH White.
Professor Tolkien had been very kind and patient with me as a boy, so I was
very much looking forward to his Lord of the Rings. I gave so much a week to
a bookshop and bought the volumes as they were published. I was so
disappointed in the plot and the language that I swapped them for six issues
of Planet Stories and decided to write my own fantasy epic. One day.
I was already a full-time professional editor and writer by the time I
bought the Tolkien books as a boy and I had written almost every kind of
fiction, in almost every form. I had not bothered to write for the SF
magazines of the day because they didn't pay enough and because the kind of
fiction I liked was out of fashion with most of the readers. Tolkien had not
by then reached the mass market and was read by very few people. I was
working for IPC in the late 50s when Harry Harrison (Deathworld, Stainless
Steel Rat) was freelancing for us. One afternoon he told me he was going to
meet Ted Carnell, editor of Science Fantasy and New Worlds magazines, with
another editor friend of ours. Why didn't I come along?
We didn't go far. We went to The White Swan across the road from the office.
Ted was already there with another professional journalist who wrote the odd
SF story, Peter Phillips, then working for the Daily Herald. I mentioned
that I had written the beginning of a Conan story for an American magazine
which had gone bust and Ted said he wouldn't mind running something like
that, to see how it went down with the readers. After a bit of confusion I
wound up introducing a character who was as much at odds with Robert E
Howards' brawny Conan as he was with Professor Tolkien's happy hobbits.
