Did you catch that reference? Apologies if you did. I finished all the Elric I’m going to be able to find, and have returned with my accursed demon blade Stormbringer to feast upon thy souls. Or tell you about it.
I kid, I kid. I really don’t have a lot to say about it. There were elements that aged very poorly in terms of cultural mores, and elements that aged poorly because the march of fiction has rendered them quaint and pedestrian, but nothing wholly outrageous on either count.
Moorcock may have coined the word multiverse. I could probably find out with a little googling but I don’t care enough to. While now it’s in service of bloating and bleeding film franchises, it once was a very literal homage to joseph campbell’s ideas. A victim of time, I don’t find those elements at all interesting.
Oddly, fiction from the 19th century doesn’t hit me like that. Maybe recency produces something like the uncanny valley in writing, I don’t know.
I don’t think I ever reached the end of the story, assuming it was ever written, but that’s alright. Tho it had more continuity than sherlock holmes, it was always written to be short stories for sff pulp mags, it seems.
In looking up interesting things about it, I discovered that Wendy Pini of Elfquest comic fame had attempted to get an animated adaptation done, and failed.
That info loops back on itself because Chaosium once did an Elfquest rpg with basically the same rules as Call of Cthulhu, and also for a time had Moorcock’s license to Elric rpg. Did that also use the same system? If so, it would make for an amusing combination…
Alright, I gotta jet. Tired as hell. Zzz.
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Raging Bee says
The Multiverse is real.
And it is annoying.
another stewart says
The earliest use of the word multiverse that I found with a few minutes at Google Books was 1834. Google Books is less helpful than it used to be, and there wasn’t enough context for me to tell whether it represented a similar concept. Conceptwise, I expect that H. Beam Piper’s paratime predates Moorcock’s work.
Great American Satan says
Thanks for the information bud.