Today I got to meet the man who wrote the first fantasy novel I ever read. The novel was Stormbringer, and the man was Michael Moorcock.
If you’ve ever read his Elric novels (really, any of his novels), you know how anarchistic, lawless and decadent they are. And not like “Peel me another grape, Hortense” decadent, but more like “Baby’s blood makes cakes moister” decadent, which is what comes of worshiping the Lords of Chaos, one assumes. Mr. Moorcock’s worlds are inherently unstable, their laws unreliable, yet his characters always look for order in the mess. They rarely find it, but that’s part of the fascination of his books for me: Mr. Moorcock knows how to destroy his characters by turning their needs against them. What kind of a person writes like that? Are their opinions apparent in their rhetoric? Do they scream their politics at passersby? And therein lay the surprise: Michael Moorcock, the rocker, the drug-user, the man who thought he was dead, the English anarchist… was like someone’s kindly great uncle over for Sunday dinner. I found him (and his wife) to be… delightful.
Mr. Moorcock read from his new book Elric: Stealer of Souls, the opening chapters of which are the basis for Marvel’s 1982 Graphic Novel #2, The Dreaming City, which was also the book I brought to get autographed. I got a few minutes of Mr. Moorcock’s reading:
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1a. This is what happens when hookers get uppity and think they have feelings.
— in response to The Sex Movie
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