> No matter how many of my remaining brain cells are eaten up by song
> lyrics or “Simpsons” catchphrases, there is one scene from a fantasy
> novel I shall never forget: Our hero has fallen in with a horde of
> savages as they ransack a town. To keep himself from getting caught up
> in their bloodshed, he takes refuge in a house that has so far avoided
> the “slaughter-madness,” only to have his sanctuary violated by a
> barbarian dragging a helpless female villager by her hair.

> Rather than immediately leaping to the woman’s rescue, our protagonist
> tells the intruder to find a safe haven of his own. It is only when the
> barbarian refuses to leave that our hero draws his sword, attacking with
> such swiftness and ferocity that the would-be rapist is cleaved in two.
> Who said chivalry is dead?

> Some readers — those with a complete collection of Hawkwind albums and
> possibly an old Phototron growing dust in the closet — will recognize
> this moment from one of the earliest tales of Elric, the brooding,
> amoral adventurer first set down on paper by Michael Moorcock more than
> 45 years ago. And to them I won’t need to explain why a long-overdue
> reissue, titled Elric: The Stealer of Souls. Chronicles of the Last
> Emperor of Melniboné, Volume I (Del Rey/Ballantine, paper, $15), about
> the exploits of an aging swashbuckler whose heyday predates the Pentagon
> Papers, could not have arrived at a more opportune moment.

> Those unfamiliar with Elric may, at first, find his journeys
> incomparably strange. Moorcock’s hero is designed as a kind of
> anti-Conan: he is a thin, longhaired albino with a darkly cynical
> worldview, unmoved by the decadence and death that surround him — the
> living embodiment of Moorcock’s axiom that “Time is an agony of Now.”

> And oy, does Elric ever agonize. He draws his strength from mysterious
> drugs and an enchanted sword, called Stormbringer, that seems to possess
> an ominous agenda of its own; he betrays the allies who seek his
> assistance and occasionally slays the innocent captives who await his
> rescue; and he is prone to delivering such inspirational pronouncements
> as “Aye, it is fitting that we should be wanderers, for we have no place
> in this world.” Prince Hamlet, by comparison, is a paragon of courage
> and decisiveness.

> What is stranger still is that the world Elric was born into did not
> necessarily need him. Moorcock was 21 years old when he introduced the
> character in the June 1961 issue of a British periodical called Science
> Fantasy. Ray guns and rocket ships were rapidly overtaking swords and
> sorcery as the preferred pulp subjects of the day, and many of
> Moorcock’s lasting science fiction accomplishments — including his
> novella “Behold the Man”; his radical, satirical Jerry Cornelius novels;
> and his immensely influential editorship of the sci-fi magazine New
> Worlds — were several years away.

> Since this is a science fiction column, perhaps the best way to
> understand Moorcock’s past is to peer farther into his future. In the
> late 1970s, with the Tories preparing to take power and George Lucas’s
> “Star Wars” saga in ascendancy, he published his pioneering essay
> “Starship Stormtroopers,” a brilliant, bench-clearing diatribe that
> ought to be required reading for any speculative-fiction fan who is
> ready to put down his 20-sided dice and become an adult.

> In “Starship Stormtroopers,” Moorcock takes a one-man stand against what
> he perceives as widespread reactionary politics in genre fiction,
> railing against not only monolithic science fiction writers like Robert
> A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and A. E. van Vogt (“wild-eyed paternalists to
> a man,” he declares them), but also C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien —
> titans of fantasy who seemed to be obvious influences on him.

> Wielding his pen like Stormbringer, Moorcock writes, “If I were sitting
> in a Tube train and all the people opposite me were reading ‘Mein Kampf’
> with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn’t disturb me much
> more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkien or Richard Adams.” And
> then he takes off the kid gloves.

> What the “utopian fiction” of such authors teaches its readers, Moorcock
> argues, is blind obedience to a romantic hero whose motives may be just
> as ambiguous or pernicious as those of his enemies. “Heroes betray us,”
> he writes. “By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves.” Left
> unchecked and unexamined, our desire to believe in these infallible
> father figures yields Ronald Reagan, George Wallace and Joe McCarthy.
> And, Moorcock says, “At its most spectacular it gives us Charlie Manson
> and Scientology.”

> Moorcock writes that the only true alternative to such figures is the
> anarchist: “a mature, realistic adult imposing laws upon the self and
> modifying them according to an experience of life, an interpretation of
> the world.”

> Whether or not one fully buys into this line of thinking, it’s not hard
> to see how Elric was, for Moorcock, a formative attempt at a character
> who would transcend the problems the author saw in genre fiction and
> exist within this new framework — a hero who rarely won the treasure or
> the girl, and sometimes encouraged the girl to leap into a yawning chasm
> to her doom.

> Through Elric’s incipient adventures, as he contends with villains whose
> names suggest the sounds H. P. Lovecraft made when he cleared his throat
> — the sorcerer Theleb K’aarna, Queen Yishana of Jharkor, a monster
> called Quaolnargn — the morality of these stories is rarely more
> sophisticated than your average heavy-metal album cover. Elric’s quests,
> we are told, are just pantomimes of the continuing and unresolvable
> battle between Law and Chaos, and there is “no Truth but that of Eternal
> struggle.”

> Yet by the end of “The Stealer of Souls,” the underpinning philosophy of
> the stories has grown considerably more mature and even a bit
> Nietzschean. Elric learns that he is destined to be a kind of Übermensch
> figure, a “prelude to history” whose true purpose is to bring about the
> end of the world so that a new era of man can begin. He wrestles with
> the possibility of eternal recurrence, then accepts his fate in the
> torso-splittingly violent manner to which he is accustomed. (Sorry for
> the spoilers, folks, but who wouldn’t appreciate a little advance notice
> when the Apocalypse rolls around?)

> Before the author destroys the earth and makes it impossible for you to
> read his book, however, there is one other tale in “The Stealer of
> Souls” that stands as a perfect parable of the Moorcockian worldview.
> This story concerns a powerful wizard who has placed his soul in the
> body of a cat — a cat that has been captured by an evil tyrant, who can
> now make the spellcaster obey his every command. Elric tries to rescue
> the cat but of course loses it during a terrific battle; nonetheless, he
> tells the wizard that the tyrant can no longer threaten him, and that he
> is free.

> But, the wizard asks, “What if he recaptures the cat — what then?”

> There is no salvation that we cannot imagine to be another form of
> damnation, and our souls are never truly free as long as there are cats
> to hide them in and ill-intentioned men to master them. It’s not a
> pleasant thought, but it sure has the ring of truth. Meow.

> --
> Dan Clore

> My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
> Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
> News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

> "Tho-ag in Zhi-gyu slept seven Khorlo. Zodmanas
> zhiba. All Nyug bosom. Konch-hog not; Thyan-Kam
> not; Lha-Chohan not; Tenbrel Chugnyi not;
> Dharmakaya ceased; Tgenchang not become; Barnang
> and Ssa in Ngovonyidj; alone Tho-og Yinsin in
> night of Sun-chan and Yong-grub (Parinishpanna),
> &c., &c.,"
> -- The Book of Dzyan.