Elric Returns

I finally completed The White Wolf’s Son, book three of the Dreamthief trilogy; books 1 and 2 are The Dreamthief’s Daughter and The Skrayling Tree, respectively.  These are Michael Moorcock’s latest contributions to the body of Elric stories.

Let me start by correcting my earlier error: Elric is not just a tangential character here, although he is not the main character either.  All of his adventures herein, just like The Fortress of the Pearl, are somehow sandwiched into the saga as originally set out in six books, starting with Elric of Melnibone and ending with Stormbringer. 

First, The Fortress of the Pearl (published 1989).  This is set somewhere inside the Elric saga, apparently in Weird of the White Wolf before Elric met Moonglum.  Elric (Snake?) has been poisoned with a 24 hour toxin by a local merchant and blackmailed by him into retrieving a magic pearl.  The catch is that the pearl only exists in the dream of a young girl who is in a coma.  He needs the assistance of Lady Oone, the dreamthief, who guides him through the girl’s dreams to find the pearl.  The story is somewhat psychedelic and trippy, but I liked it.  Moorcock did a good job of adding an adventure for Elric (the book came out long after Stormbringer) without affecting the main saga story.

The Dreamthief’s Daughter (published 2001).  We’re introduced to a 20^th century earthbound incarnation of Elric, Count Ulric von Bek, a German nobleman who finds himself at odds with his “cousin” Gaynor von Minct in Nazi Germany, plus a mysterious but articulate devil, Klosterheim.  When he refuses to turn Stormbringer over to Gaynor, the Nazis send Ulric to Saschenhausen concentration camp.  He’s rapidly rescued and then goes off into a parallel dimension, the so-called “Mittelmarch”.  Ultimately he meets up with none other than Elric himself.  Oona, the daughter of Oone, features heavily in this story – Fortress acts as a de facto prequel to this story, or rather, Moorcock used that as the basis for this trilogy. 

FYI:  all these dreamthief women are albinos, just like Elric.  There’s also a human-height intelligent talking fox (Sir Renyard), a Scotsman (Odhran), a French Legionaire (Fromental), a Brit (Sir Bastable), and a German count like Baron von Munchausen (Lobkowitz).  Did I mention Moonglum comes back briefly – somewhere in this big mess?

The Skrayling Tree (published 2003).  Now we’re transplanted to America, but in 1156 A.D.  There’s a heavy dose of American Indian adventure in this story, but fortunately Elric, Ulric, and Oona are back for more.  Ulric has been kidnapped by Indians, and Oona goes off to find him along with another set of Indians. Meanwhile, Elric, tied up to the rigging on Jagreen Lern’s flagship (Stormbringer), projects himself into a 1000 year dreamquest to summon Stormbringer and cut himself loose; so he starts off this adventure in medieval Europe, while Ulric gets a Nihrain steed in Elric’s original stomping grounds.  Gaynor is back as Gunnar, a Viking chieftain who takes Elric to America by longship (a la Leif Ericsson); as is Klosterheim.  1/3 of the story is told by Oona, 1/3 by Ulric, and 1/3 by Elric, and they all meet up at the end.

The White Wolf’s Son (published 2005).  Finally, everything gets wrapped up.  The story is mostly told from the perspective of Oonagh, the granddaughter of Oona.  She has a twin brother Onric, aka Jack, who is blind.  Mind you, he’s Elric’s son AND he’s an albino too, though despite the story’s name his role is extremely minor.  Gaynor and Klosterheim cause more problems – like all villains, they basically want to control everything and in the process destroy the universe as well.  The killer part of this story is that most of it takes place in Hawkmoon’s neck of the woods.  Granbretan and Londra are front center, and even Hawkmoon himself makes a VERY brief appearance (p. 155).  The villains of the Hawkmoon series are much more prominent herein, though, than Hawkmoon, Count Brass, Oladahn, or the Warrior in Jet and Gold.

If you’re a fantasy/sci-fi writer and you want your beloved characters to travel through time and/or space, you have to concoct at least some sort of semi-plausible explanation for how they do so, right?  Not necessarily!  Edgar Rice Burroughs never bothered to explain how John Carter wound up on Mars.  Philip K. Dick explained time travel as a drug’s side effects (Now Wait For Last Year).  Michael Crichton came up with quantum computers to do time travel (Timeline).  And for much of the Elric saga, Moorcock was content to simply invoke the easiest and simplest explanation: MAGIC.  Apparently, that’s not good enough for him anymore.

Thus all three stories are heavily dosed with the abstract mumbo-jumbo that Moorcock loves.  There’s far less swordplay and violence – in fact, Stormbringer’s body count is down to almost nothing since it appears so rarely in the entire story.  The price we pay for having characters travel through time and space is to be inundated with incessant babbling about “The Grey Fees”, the “Balance”, good, evil, God, the Devil, the Stone, the Sword, the Cup, the Grail, the RuneStaff, etc., though all of this also encompasses the overall story and not merely interdimensional travel.  But it reaches the absurd point where even half the characters are confused themselves.  Fortunately all is explained – fairly well, I’ll admit – by the end, but by that I mean the very end of White Wolf’s Son.  Until then you’ll probably be as confused as you are entertained. 

However, what Moorcock does give us is:  A) more Elric and Strormbringer – even Mournblade, B) some “Elric on Earth”, which is actually cool, and C) FINALLY some decent conclusion about the Hawkmoon story, because he dropped the ball big time on that the first time around (Corum and Erekose get a few lines).  So for those of you who think that SIX Elric books was not enough, pay heed.  Now, where’s the Elric movie????

Summer of '84

It’s summer of 2007, as hot and humid as any other I can remember, and by now I’ve gone through almost 40.  But a few special summers stick out in my memory, and none more than this one: 1984.

 I had just finished sophomore year in high school in Paris, and most of my friends, including my best friend Phil, somehow chose that particular summer to have their families move away from Paris.  Fortunately we got home leave that summer, so we were able to spend about 6 weeks in the US, which for us was like heaven.  The night before the flight home was as exciting and difficult to sleep through as Christmas Eve.

 With our own house rented out, finding a place to stay was a challenge each time we returned.  This time we traded spaces with a family in DC, who had a small house off McArthur Blvd.  I was 15, my brother 14, and my sister was 9, but we were all much larger than the young children this family had, so the beds were all a bit on the small side.  Their “kitchen table” consisted of a booth from a subway car, about as large as the kiddie section of a McDonalds and way too cramped for a normal sized teenager.   They also had air conditioning, but with a huge Chinese bed on the ground floor (!) with really no practical purpose other than to block airflow through the ground floor of the house, the A/C didn’t work too well.   The kitchen had no glasses, only coffee mugs.  Finally, this was one of these Foreign Service families who had travelled all over the world and wanted EVERYONE who entered their tiny Bag End hovel to know it.  They decorated it like a travel museum – “this is where we’ve been!! aren’t we great??” – including the afore-mentioned bed in the living room.  With all the way-too-small crap of the entire house (built for hobbits!) what they really needed was a large, circular door to complete the Middle Earth connection.  Damn travel snobs.  Our own apartment in Paris was 3 times larger – these people clearly got the better end of the swap.  Returning to Paris and our own place was a rescue from claustrophobia. 

 The 1984 Olympics were going on in Los Angeles, and our relatives lived in McLean – in a normal sized house with properly functioning air conditioning and no Chinese bed – so we spent a considerable amount of time there.  We also watched lots of “Mork & Mindy” for some reason (don’t ask me why).  I didn’t pay a great deal of attention to the Olympics, even Mary Lou Retton’s perfect 10, as much because I generally don’t care for the Olympics anyway as for the absence of the Soviet Bloc because of their boycott. Interesting – Romania did NOT join the boycott, but Retton won anyway.  The Romanian women’s team did win the gold for the team competition, whereas the US men’s team won the gold.  For being smart enough to buck the trend (“80 percent of success is showing up” - Woody Allen), Ceaucescu’s gang cleaned up with 53 models, #2 after the US with 174.  The overall consensus even among Americans was that our stellar performance was only because so many countries who usually compete heavily with us (e.g. the USSR and East Germany) were absent.

 Reagan was President, Bush Sr. was Vice-President, and the upcoming November election would feature Walter Mondale & Geraldine Ferraro getting hosed big time (keep that in perspective when we see Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers!). 

 I got my first contact lenses, and had a devil of a time learning to take them out and put them in, but it was worth the effort.

 The trip started with a stay at the Howard Johnson’s hotel in Crystal City, where I got a massive sunburn, with the resulting days of unbearable itchiness.  D’oh!

 We met up with Phil, whose family was living in Greenbelt while they were waiting for their sea shipment to arrive from France; they would eventually move to Sterling.  This was notable as it was the first time we’d ever met any of the people we had originally met in Paris, in the US.  The place they were staying in had a VERY OLD black & white TV with a distorted picture tube.  More “dark brown and yellow” than black & white, and anything round, like an aspirin, looked more like an egg.  (“How do you remember this stuff??”)

 I was also doing lots of reading, in particular devouring, for the first time, H.P. Lovecraft (horror) and Michael Moorcock (fantasy).  We were also heavily into role-playing games at that time, so we got Stormbringer, which was Chaosium’s RPG for the Elric books.  I had bought Judas Priest’s albums Sad Wings of Destiny and Sin After Sin at the PX in Belgium prior to the trip, and Black Sabbath Master of Reality at Henderson Hall here in the US, so those three albums served as a musical backdrop for the horror stories and Elric saga.  Twisted Sister were big at this time, particularly their hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It” with the classic video featuring Niedermeyer from “Animal House” as the nasty father.  More magic, listening to that, reading that, in this stupid little hobbit house. 

 It was a great summer – and I STILL listen to those albums fairly often.  At least NOW I can drive....