Now that I am older and, I hope, smarter... wiser even, I appreciate the language more. The pulp magazine influence pulses through the book like the heartbeat of a long dead Robert E Howard. I also understand more of the vocabularty. I probably knew what a courtesan was back then, but grimoire, no doubt, flew right by me.
You can't always recapture your youth, but it can be fun to try sometimes.
But this post has absolutely no gun content.
The Elric sagas are a handful of books written in the 70s. Elric is an albino emperor of the decaying 10,000 year old Melnibone empire. In a dying power struggle of that empire he get's a hold of a semi-sentient soul-stealing sword kept by the God's of Chaos that is then a curse to him for the rest of his life, now reduced to a quasi-mercenary.
(But he does use lots of exclamation points!)
Weird. We were just at our local Used Book Store yesterday, and I was looking for some Elric.
ReplyDeleteBut be warned! All the Elric stories were part of a Larger "Universe," and unlike Modern Sci-Fi/Fantasy, some of the Stories were STORIES, not NOVELS, designed to fit into a Monthly Magazine. So you need to find the Collections Books.
Do a Good Wiki search, print out the List, and try to read them in order. This is one writer you don't want to Jump around with.
"But he does use lots of exclamation points!"
ReplyDeleteIt's been decades since I read any of Moorcock's Elric stories, but I remember him using the word 'ironic' an awful lot as well.
Those were the books that started the cooperative venture which became my rather large SF & Fantasy library. My friend, Larry, and I couldn't afford to buy all of the books by ourselves, so one of us would buy one and share it with the other person. We kept all the books together at Larry's house, and eventually just pooled all of our books into one collection.
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