The Dreaming City

Micheal Moorcock was a young man of 22, with his career just starting to take off, when he published the very first story about Elric of Melnibone in Science Fantasy in June of 1961. He had been selling fiction for almost 4 years at that point, and was beginning to make a name for himself. Elric would really put him on the map, and become his best-known and most enduring creation.

Elric was conceived of as a kind of anti-Conan, and the world he inhabited was originally thought of as a kind of anti-Middle-Earth. Where Conan was strong, Elric was unable to so much as walk without special drugs. Conan was a barbarian of no history or lineage, while Elric was the 428^th emperor of the fading empire of Melnibone. Conan’s culture was barbaric, Elric’s was decadent and cruel. Conan was a thief, Elric was born rich. Conan feared magic, Elric was a sorcerer who summoned elementals and demons.

And the world he inhabited was intended as a kind of backlash against Middle-Earth, and thus came out rather Lovecraftian. In the world of Tolkien, the world had declined from a golden era, and magic and wonder faded more and more as the years passed. In Elric’s world, magic had been fading for millennia, but that was a good thing, as magic was depicted as a terrible, inhuman power that either killed men, drove them mad, or enslaved them. Elric never wanted to resort to sorcery, and used it only when he had to, and there was always a price to pay.

“The Dreaming City” was a novella or novelette, longer than a short story, and structured like a novel even if it was short. It is unusual in that it depicted what was later seen as the climactic battle between Elric and his cousin/nemesis Yrkoon, and Elric’s complicity in the invasion and destruction of his home. Elric has been away from the city of Imrryr for many years, but now he has heard that his cousin has usurped his throne and imprisoned his lover, Cymoril.

Without an army of his own, Elric cannot hope to defeat Yrkoon and rescue Cymoril, so he makes a bargain with the sea-raider captains of the Young Kingdoms: he will lead them through the sea-maze that guards the city if they will help him. Thus, in order to serve his own purposes, Elric is willing to oversee the destruction of his race.

Because that’s another difference between Elric and Conan – Conan is human, while Elric is not. The Melniboneans are human-like, but they are creatures of Chaos. An older race of magic and cruelty. Once they ruled the world, but now they are reduced to decadent, apathetic remnants, hiding on their fortress island. The parallels with the British Empire, coming from a British author, are impossible to ignore.

What is remarkable about the story is just how bitter and bleak it is. It begins with an exiled emperor leading a coup against his own people with the help of foreign mercenaries paid with the promise of plunder, but then everything goes utterly and completely wrong. The city is taken, and Elric confronts his cousin. But while Yrkoon is slain, Elric’s cursed nature takes a terrible toll for his victory. His soul-eating runesword, Stormbringer, devours the soul of his lover Cymoril, leaving Elric in despair. Then, as the fleet escapes from the island, the Melnibonean dragons swoop down on them. Elric’s friends and allies are consumed by fire even as he himself uses magic to propel his ship to safety.

So by the end, Elric has accomplished almost nothing that he set out to do. He defeats his enemy, but his people are slain or scattered, his home destroyed, his lover is worse than dead, and his allies are left behind, cursing his name as they are slaughtered. The whole thing is subsumed in this operatic outpouring of tragedy that was quite unlike the Sword & Sorcery of the day. Moorcock took the vibrant, dreamlike prose and violence of the genre and did something very different with it.

Because he was 20 when he invented Elric, the character bears an unmistakable stamp of late adolescence. Elric is a loner, separated from those around him by his melancholy and his brooding. No one among his own people understands him, and he roams the world alone and apart. He repudiates the ways and practices of his own people, and resents when he is forced to use them to achieve his ends. He is fated to be a hero, even though he resents this as well, and fights against it, just wanting to be left alone. He is every rootless, post high-school boy who feels like he is “different” and wants to go his own way, whatever that means. The sexual symbolism of Stormbringer – the sword he depends on and cannot get rid of, though he hates how it keeps sticking into other people as if it had a mind of its own – is a little too on the nose to examine closely.

“The Dreaming City” was the beginning of a long career of adding to the Elric Mythos, as well as the connected “Eternal Champion” books. None of this went very far at improving the essential character. Moorcock later filled out his original run of stories and novellas into a series of books that covered Elric’s life from youth to death, and the whole became rather bloated and self-important. Moorcock’s sometimes brilliant prose and relentless imagination allowed him to get away with a lot, but the character of Elric did not really hold up well as the center of a long-form story. As the anti-hero of a novella he worked, as a world-bestriding hero he became tiresome.

Yet the mark made on the Sword & Sorcery genre remains indelible. Moorcock’s dramatic, vivid world had a huge impact on the later fantasy genre in the 70s and 80s, with his plethora of monsters, demons, and gods inspiring so much of what we think of as fantasy in books, games, and movies. The albino, outcast, brooding prince with his evil sword is such a strong archetype it seems impossible that there was ever a time without him. Whatever came after, “The Dreaming City” remains a landmark in the world of fantasy fiction.

Curses of the Sun

Asherah crossed the mountains, made her way through cities breathing with a hundred smells and a hundred languages. She passed over mountains under a depthless sky, and then she came at last to the land she had been seeking, the land she had begun to half believe was a legend, for no such land could be real. It stretched before her, vast and empty and pale under the moon. Ushar, the desert, where her path led over colossal dunes in the ageless silence to the place where red stone pillars stood over crimson sands.

She rode a black horse with a long head and thin legs. It was taller and more agile than her lost pony, and very much swifter, but it did not have the same endless endurance. Asherah wore her sword at her side and new, black-fletched arrows bristled from her quiver. She bore new mail armor and a new scar underneath it. Her pale skin was wrapped in black cloth to keep the sun from it, and her eyes were painted dark to cut the glare. She had begun to learn the ways of the lands of daylight.

At first sight the desert looked like a land without form, the dunes in high waves like ice frozen on a pond. She remembered cascades of ice, and how the water would freeze solid at the grasp of winter and be fixed in shapes all through the cold seasons. This was like that, only the sand shifted beneath the hooves of her steed, and the sighing wind caught up the dust and whirled it into the sky. She was glad to have her face covered, to keep her from breathing it in like ground glass.

She had been warned to keep to the caravan routes that led south across the wasteland to Ahrimaz, and she saw the tracks of many beasts and men in the sand, and so she followed them. In places great posts stood up from the dunes, pennons bright at the tops of them, and they helped to mark the path. Asherah rode with her bow in hand and an arrows set to the string, ready in case some raiders or thieves thought to test her. This way was usually followed by caravans of pack animals, guarded by mercenaries. She rode alone, and so she knew she would seem a ripe target.

The trail led through the dunes and then into a barren, rocky land where ancient river channels cut through the stone and left wandering canyons it would be easy to become lost in. She camped by day in deep shadows, hiding from the fierce sun and the terrible heat. It was like the furnaces of a nightmare, under that blazing light. She traveled by night when there was cool air and starlight to guide her. The day was too bright, and too savage.

She rode for ten nights and sheltered for ten days, and then she followed the rising ground to a stony hill that let her see all around. The caravan path led southwest from here, into kinder lands, and she saw the beginnings of the grasslands she had been told of.

Her path led due east. She rode down the rocky hillside to a narrow defile where there was an oasis, with a small pool welling up from the stone. She let her horse drink while she filled her waterskins, and then she mounted again and rode away from the trail, and into the deep desert, where lay the accursed lands she sought.

Ill-Met in Lankhmar

“Two Sought Adventure” was the first published story by Fritz Leiber, printed in Unknown magazine in 1939. It was the introduction to the inimitable team of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser – the heroes who would go on to star in a multitude of stories and dominate Leiber’s literary legacy. He produced over 30 stories about the pair through his life, writing them through the 60s, 70s, and 80s until just a few years before his death in 1992, which makes them among the most long-lived Sword & Sorcery heroes in the canon.

Originally, the characters were invented by his friend Harry Fischer, and indeed they were based upon the pair – Leiber the tall one, Fischer the short – but while Fischer contributed to several stories, it was Leiber who made them immortal, most especially with his Hugo and Nebula-winning novella “Ill-Met in Lankhmar”. It was an origin tale, depicting the first time the two heroes met, and told, almost by accident, one of the most central and emotional stories about them.

Through the 60s and 70s Leiber was going through the Lankhmar stories and putting them in some sort of order, trying to tie the previously only loosely-connected tales into a kind of cohesive whole. That, in turn, put him in mind to fill in some gaps. The story of how the two met had not been told before, and it seemed an obvious choice. The story was published in 1970 in Fantasy and Science Fiction, then anthologized the same year in the inaugural Fafhrd and Gray Mouser collection Swords and Deviltry. It caused a sensation then, and remains among his best-remembered and -regarded works even today.

Leiber was not a young man when he wrote it. Howard was maybe twenty when he started carving out “The Shadow Kingdom”. Leiber was about sixty when he wrote “Ill-Met”, and half a century had passed since the pulp days of the 1920s. He wrote a story that is indelibly Sword & Sorcery, told with a poetic voice and yet with the grungy, underworld aesthetic he always evoked with the pair. He could have made it a romp or a caper, but instead he told a tale of tragedy. He told a story of his two heroes doing what they do best – stealing – and while they succeed at it, they pay a terrible price, all the more tragic because they are not the ones who pay, but those they love, who they unwittingly set in harm’s way.

It is a dark story, full of thieves, cutthroats, beggars, and sorcerers. It gives full play to the setting of Lankhmar as a place of both wealth and squalor. He shows us two heroes who are not heroes yet, who are fighting and scraping to survive, clinging to the dreams of adolescence, trying to be men when they are not quite there yet. Details like the Mouser’s sad and desperate home he has made for his beloved Ivrian, trying to care for her as a lady, strike a chord that it far too keen and knowing to have been written by a young man.

Yet Leiber does not skimp on the action, and the story is a thrill ride, with chases, swordfights, and humor to spare, and then he wallops you with the unexpected twist, and shows that his heroes have been joined all their lives not simply by friendship, but by a shared grief and guilt that they can never wipe away. They have their revenge, but the ending is still so raw that he had to write “The Price of Pain-Ease” the same year to give his heroes some closure.

1970 was an in-between year for Sword & Sorcery. The 60s boom in Howard reprints and pastiches was receding, though not yet gone, and the popular vision of S&S had not hit its lurid stride in the comics yet. Leiber was a respected master of Fantasy and SF, and could have simply rested on his laurels, but he chose not to. He showed that S&S still could tell vital, emotional stories. That it was not limited to young men fetishising gore and nudity, that it was not just naked slave girls and bulging biceps. He showed what Sword & Sorcery literature could be when it is taken seriously and written with care and respect and love for the form. None of those things should be forgotten.