© 1978 Michael Moorcock
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This was the first novel I completed. It was in 1958 when I was very much under the spell of Mervyn Peake and (though to a far less noticeable extent) Bertolt Brecht, who were my two great contemporary heroes. It bears almost no resemblance to the novel I had started earlier - and abandoned - The Eternal Champion, which owed more to earlier enthusiasms, Haggard, Burroughs and Howard. I never submitted the manuscript to a publisher and the book is printed here with only minor revisions of a sort a publisher might make if he had accepted a first novel. Although I was familiar with the SF and fantasy world (I had edited several fanzines and had already been the editor of Tarzan Adventures) I had begun to take an interest in subtler literary forms, and I have wondered, while editing this, what might have happened to my work if E. J. Carnell (editor of Science Fantasy and New Worlds) had not commissioned my first Elric stories and thus started me on a long career of adventure story writing, which produced a score at least of fantastic romances and several science fiction novels. In one sense, I regret the time 'lost' in writing books which never, frankly, stretched my talents very far; in another I think I must have benefited from the apprenticeship in popular story-telling. I gained a number of good habits, and certain disciplines, in the 'sword and sorcery' school, even though the tales were sometimes lazily or hastily written (though never cynically). And I gained friends such as Leigh Brackett (another influence) and Edmond Hamilton (whose first words on meeting me and shaking hands were: "They used to call me The Planet Smasher, but you went one better - you destroyed the universe!"), both of whom died recently, and whom I miss deeply. Leigh in particular had a disciplined narrative style which should act as a model to all those who wish to tell a good fantastic adventure story. And I would not have known, I think, the enthusiasm and kindness of so many readers who still write and who still hope that I will 'relent' and produce further fantastic romances. For the moment, with Gloriana, I am resolved to write no more of them, feeling that it's high time that I flexed my muscles and looked to new tasks. I love writing, but I could not go on writing in one particular mode for long. Generic writing is too limited. And too often readers and writers confuse genre or substance for form (which is why SF is 'so difficult to define' - it is because there is no such thing as SF, whose best practitioners work in quite different forms - fable, romance and so on). I think I shall write in a 'heroic' mode rather than in the mode favored by most modern novelists, the inheritors of the naturalistic writers who (with the exception of Wells and one or two others) have largely been forgotten - Pett Ridge, Arthur Morrison, Leonard Merrick and others, whose work was pleasingly strong on documentary elements but rather weak on imaginative ones - but the form is likely to vary. My ambition is to combine the 'epic' story with the 'psychological', as, it seems to me, my favourite Victorian and Edwardian writers could do so successfully (I am thinking of Thackeray, Dickens, Meredith and Conrad). This crude allegory must give way to irony. The Golden Barge is a simple allegory, as were most of my earlier romances. All of my books have a level of allegory (often quite simple) even if they appear to be more prosaic on the surface. The later ones increasingly substituted irony for allegory. Allegory appears to say one thing on the surface and another thing beneath. Irony allows for more than one interpretation on the part of the reader. There is no 'key'. In one sense the Cornelius books, Breakfast in the Ruins, Gloriana, are all ironic fables. This book is their precursor, more than it is the precursor of the stories of high romance, witchcraft and chivalry on which my earlier career was almost wholly based. Michael Moorcock, |
