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
Terry, the magazine was "Fantastic Universe." In an essay, "The Secret
Life of Elric of Melnibone," Moorcock said he was in touch with deCamp
and Hans Santessen (apparently sometime in the late 1950s) about writing
"a new series of Conan tales" for the magazine, which Santessen edited.
Then (Moorcock says) his interest in Howard waned.
Then in 1960, in a pub, "...Ted [Carnell, editor of "Science Fantasy"]
and I were talking about Robert E. Howard, and Ted said he'd been
thinking of running some conan-type stuff in 'Science Fantasy.' I told
him of the 'Fantastic Universe' idea which had fallen through when
'Fantastic Universe' folded, and said I still had the stuff I had done
and would he like to see it. He said he would. A couple of days later,
I sent him the first chapter and outline of a Conan story. To tell you
the truth, writing in Howard's style had its limitations, as did his
hero as far as I was concerned ....
"Ted liked it -- or at least he liked the writing, but there had been a
misunderstanding. He hadn't wanted Conan -- he had wanted something
along the same lines." And so, Moorcock says, he created Elric.
Terry Allen wrote:
>
> 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.
