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in the pulp tradition of fantasy: he was trying to write
literature. However you might feel about the degree
of his success, it’s hard to deny that there’s something
rather appealing about his stubborn attempt to re-create
something old when all around him were attempting to
be ‘modern’.
He did not really belong in the 20th century, did dear
old Ronald Reuel. He was a man more comfortable
with the past, and the forms of the past; he wrote his
fiction at least partly as an exercise in creating a saga of
an imaginary past that might live in the present century.
And that’s the crucial difference: Tolkien’s models were
the Kalevala and the Icelandic sagas. Although modern
fantasy may tip the hat to ancient myths or medieval
sagas, borrowing images here and situations there, its
real antecedents lie in the pulp fictions of Fritz Leiber,
Jack Vance, Clarke Aston Smith and Robert Howard:
the masters. Whatever you may say about their prose
(and it was often dull and frequently hilariously bad),
these writers nevertheless told stories with leanness
and bravado and imagination, qualities sadly lacking in
most of today’s writers of fantasy.
How did we get from there to here? How did we get
from writers who could pack a punch in the space of
ten pages, to writers who can’t seem to tell a story in
ten books, let alone one? That’s a whole other story but,
in the Reader’s Digest version, one writer stands out as
having acted as the bridge between those pulp masters
BUY fantasy books online from and
and the current spate of fantasy writers. That writer is
Michael Moorcock.
There’s no denying that Moorcock has written some
excellent heroic fantasy. The first few books in the Elric
series, The First Chronicles Of Corum and Gloriana
(especially Gloriana) are all magnificent novels. Yet
side-by-side with those fine works one must set the
substandard epics he has been churning out in parallel
since the 1960s, in which character names and settings
change but essentially the same story is told, over and
over again.
Given that he did invent Elric and Hawkmoon, it is
regrettable that Moorcock’s career in heroic fantasy is
strewn with such rubbish as The Second Chronicles
Of Corum. Like so much of his later work, these three
books each begin with an identical account of the callto-arms
and kitting out of the hero, continue with a
quest narrative that is remarkably similar in each book,
and end with an identical climax and denouement. The
series is the same story told three times. Moorcock
tries to justify his cynical treatment of the reader on
the grounds that the novels record the ceaseless struggle
of the Eternal Champion, when really they are the
efforts of a hack writer trying to pay the mortgage. In
retrospect, such contemptuous treatment of the reader
of fantasy has done as much to set the standard of
contemporary mass-market fantasy as anything Tolkien
ever did. Moorcock has convinced a generation of
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