Michael Moorcock

Life

Michael John Moorcock was born on 18 December 1939 in Mitcham, Surrey, on the edge of London, in the first winter of the Second World War; the bombed city of his childhood is a recurring landscape in his fiction. He left school at fifteen and was soon writing and editing for pulp and comic publications: by seventeen he was editor of Tarzan Adventures, and at nineteen he was writing for The Sexton Blake Library. In May 1964 he became editor of New Worlds, which he turned into the most adventurous science fiction magazine of its time, publishing J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Thomas M. Disch and the writers of the "New Wave," and keeping it afloat partly by churning out fantasy novels at astonishing speed.

Moorcock was also a musician, performing with and writing for the space-rock band Hawkwind and writing lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult, including "Black Blade," about Elric's sword. He wrote literary novels such as Gloriana (1978) and Mother London (1988), comics, a Doctor Who novel and polemic. In the 1990s he moved to Texas, and he has since divided his time between Texas and Europe. He won the Nebula for Behold the Man (1967), the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2000, and was named an SFWA Grand Master in 2008.

Work

Elric of Melniboné first appeared in "The Dreaming City," published in the British magazine Science Fantasy in 1961. He was conceived as a deliberate reversal of Robert E. Howard's Conan: not a brawny barbarian but the frail, albino last emperor of a decadent, inhuman island empire, dependent on drugs and sorcery for strength, bound to demonic patrons, and wielding Stormbringer, a black runesword that drinks the souls of those it slays — including, at last, those he loves. The stories were collected in The Stealer of Souls (1963) and Stormbringer (1965), and the saga of The Elric Saga has continued for decades.

Elric became the key figure in a much larger design, the Eternal Champion: a single hero reincarnated across a multiverse of parallel worlds as Elric, Corum, Dorian Hawkmoon, Erekosë and others, forever caught in the struggle between Law and Chaos and the cosmic Balance between them. Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions had already pitted Law against Chaos; Moorcock gave the idea a multiversal scale, symbolizing Chaos with a star of eight arrows. His 1978 essay "Epic Pooh" attacked Tolkien and the consolatory fantasy it inspired, and his fiction stood for the opposite: doomed heroes, moral ambiguity and a restless formal experimentalism that fed Dark Fantasy.

Legacy

Moorcock's influence on games is deep and specific. Gary Gygax listed Stormbringer, The Stealer of Souls and the Hawkmoon series on Appendix N, and the first Dungeons & Dragons (1974) organized its entire moral universe on the Law-versus-Chaos axis that Moorcock and Anderson had popularized, the ancestor of D&D's Alignment system. Intelligent, ego-driven magic swords in the game recall Stormbringer. TSR's Deities & Demigods (1980) included a Melnibonéan mythos, but Chaosium already held the rights, and TSR dropped it from later printings; Chaosium published the Stormbringer roleplaying game in 1981 and later Hawkmoon, Elric! and other adaptations.

Beyond D&D, the eight-arrowed Chaos symbol and the idea of Chaos as a seductive, mutating cosmic force passed into Games Workshop's Warhammer Fantasy Battle, where commentators have long traced its Chaos gods and iconography to Moorcock. The albino anti-hero, the cursed weapon, the eternal champion reborn across worlds and the multiverse held in cosmic balance all became common coin of fantasy games and fiction.