A Blackrazor by any other name...

Continuing the theme of books that influenced DnD (and therefore my writing!) the next one I thought I’d tackle was Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga. A lot of Moorcock’s work in the sixties and seventies probably had a direct influence on Gygax and the other creators of the game, not least the Corum sequence and the two Hawkmoon series (The Runestaff quartet, and the Chronicles of Count Brass trilogy), but undoubtedly Elric was a key one.

Everyone who played the game in the early Eighties with me knew of Elric, although only a few of us had read it. The RPG Runequest had a particular supplement relating to Elric as I recall, and since then I think there has been a specific game around him. I got around to reading the Fantasy Masterworks collection of Elric last year, and enjoyed it. I could see why it had appealed to so many people, although I’ve never really got into Moorcock’s style (I did enjoyed Dancers at the End of Time).

Moorcock is often quoted as saying he wrote Elric as a direct opposition to the traditional fantasy works of Tolkien and RE Howard (he famously described Lord of the Rings as akin to a fantasy Winnie the Pooh). Elric, in his original inception in the nine short stories that comprised Stormbringer (re-published by Fantasy Masterworks as ‘Elric’) is a superb anti-hero. He starts the stories leading an attack upon on his own kingdom, he then proceeds to (admittedly inadvertently at times) chop up all his mates, and he becomes addicted to his magical sword, Stormbringer. Perfect for the Sixties, when people wanted their heroes rather more flawed than the idealistic Fifties!

The influence on the game is overt in a number of areas. The DnD alignment system owes a large debt to the concept of Law and Chaos that Moorcock used, although this in itself was probably evolved from Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions (which I’ll review next time). Moorcock took it further, and this battle between the two forces was the key plotline in the later part of the Elric saga (and continued in parts of the Eternal Champion sequence). Law and Chaos are balanced by Neutrality (the Cosmic Balance) and in his books the Eternal Champion served the Cosmic Balance. Moorcock created deities aligned to both Law and Chaos that feature in his books. It’s easy to see how the addition of good and evil created the 9 alignments in AD&D.

Stormbringer, a runeblade that is essentially a Chaos demon in sword form, was a major aspect of Elric’s saga. It was a mighty sword that could chop through anything and drank life energy to sustain Elric, in a vampyric fashion. Its sibling blade was ‘Mournblade’ which had similar powers. In the DnD game the idea of life-drinking magic swords was most obviously emulated in White Plume Mountain (S2), which to my gang was the most frequently played module next to B2: Keep on the Borderlands. I’ve still got the original pale-orange covered one at home! The sword in question was Blackrazor, one of the three personalised magic weapons in the adventure. The author of the module, Lawrence Schick, later admitted he was embarrassed by his blatant rip-off of Stormbringer (he’d thrown the module together from his favourite bits of his own scenarios). Personally I thought it was awesome, and each time we played it there was a full-on scrabble for the soul-drinking sword.

The more subtle influence of Elric on the game was the adventuring aspects of the books. Elric has a group of companions—Moonglum, Dyvim, Rackhir—with whom he adventures, fulfilling ‘missions’ and ‘quests.’ We also had a healthy collection of opposing sorcerers, and a few monsters chucked in for good measure.

There’s a criticism of Moorcock’s Elric books that the characters can be a little flat, and the dialogue a little cheesy, but I think if you read them as a fun fantasy read in instalments (as they can get a touch ‘samey’) then you’ll not go far wrong. And let’s face it we all wanted to have a character as cool as Elric... soul-drinking sword, hot-line to demons to save your arse in a fight, a goth-look that the lasses adored... perfect.

Next up... torn between Fritz Lieber and Poul Anderson....Thieves vs. Paladins...

Anti-heroic fantasy

I originally posted a piece on anti-heroes in fantasy fiction as a guest blog months ago on Alison DeLuca's blogsite Fresh Pot Of Tea. It caught a few views, but I thought its topic was ideally suited to Skulldust Circle and its followers, so I'm re-posting it here :-D

As you're aware my genre is fantasy. I love it; have always loved it, ever since I could read. As a kid I was captivated by the total escapism of fantasy, by the idea of magic being a reality, by the virtues of the heroic struggling against insurmountable evils. It was a passion fuelled by an adolescence dedicated to role playing games, tucked away in mates’ sheds and front rooms, for far too many hours until my complexion emulated Gollum on a bad-skin day.

So here’s a quandary. Given that many of us who read fantasy and sci-fi and all its sub-sub genres (Elfpunk anyone?) came into the genre loving tales of the great and good defeating the gibbering armies of The Dark ^Tm , how come the anti-hero is so pervasive in speculative fiction?

They’re everywhere! Take the most successful fantasy series of the last ten years—George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire—it is replete with anti-heroes. Tyrion Lannister has to be the favourite character amongst a sea of schemers and blaggards. He’s selfish, rude, corrupt, bitter, in fact all the traits that make a great bad guy. Yet amongst his venom there are redeeming features that make us fascinated by him. By book two we love him and by the latest he’s more or less the only one (other than Arya) we care about.

Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards series has Locke Lamora, a thief and a con-man as the main character. Here we have a different flavour of anti-hero. Whereas Tyrion is a nasty piece of work who occasionally displays redeeming features, Locke is actually an alright guy—he loves his friends etc.—who screws people over for a living. Like Robin Hood or the IRS. He’s a ‘hero’ who is also criminal.

And there’s so many more in fantasy that you wonder if we ever wanted true heroes. Severian in Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun (torturer…tick), Sand dan Glotka in Abercrombie’s The First Law books (yay, another torturer…tick), Thomas Covenant in Donaldson’s epic (rapist…tick), Cugel the Clever in Jack Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth (thief, cheat, rake…tick), Raistlin in Dragonlance (black magic, betray brother…OK…tick), Fitz in Hobb’s Farseer trilogy (assassin? Hey, sure…beats looking after the horses…tick) and, of course, Elric.

Now Elric I did love as a kid. More accurately I coveted Stormbringer, the soul-drinking sword that Elric was dominated by. To a DnD player the idea of a sword that munched on opponents life energy (and therefore boosted your own) was fantastic. The weapon Black-razor in White Plume Mountain was an obvious copy and Elric even got his own RPG supplement for RuneQuest.

Elric was the first great fantasy anti-hero in my mind. Before him we had the muscle bound might of Conan, the noble Aragorn and the almost biblical Aslan. In his very first appearance we meet him on the way to slaughter his own nation. He then further fails to impress us by wining about his doom-ridden destiny, betraying people all over the place, becoming addicted to a vampire-sword and then killing all his buddies one by one. Admittedly some he kills by accident, because he gets carried away with Stormbringer; but you’d still not add him as a friend on Facebook would you?

So why do we love them? These are characters that are far darker than the tough guys of the cinema. We all admire the surly Han Solo and love the hard as nails Clint Eastwood characters. But these are characters that are morally dubious, at times nasty and at times ruthless. They are killers, torturers, thieves—the sort most of us would eschew in reality. Why do we enjoy reading about them?

I think it’s the escapism in another form and I think therefore that that is why fantasy (the ultimate asylum from our troubled world) is replete with them. These are characters whose achievements within the books seem all the more admirable, characters that surpass all the faults and the weaknesses that they have, to become victorious. They are creations who resonate with us because of their flaws, which after all we all have (though perhaps not to the extent of these characters). Why should a being in a fantasy world have to have any less hang-ups than us?

Anti-heroes act in ways that appeal to our darker instincts. They allow us to slip away from the frustration of modern life and the constraints of society and unleash a bit of spite. Far better to read about Tyrion Lannister’s Machiavellian antics or Elric hoovering up a few souls than turn around and give our annoying bosses a head-butt on the nose.

And we can see characters every bit as flawed as ourselves and revel in the redemption that many achieve and know that for even the most screwed-up and damaged that there is hope.

So long live the anti-hero and remember even Aslan probably had some darker moments that were cut from the books. I fact I distinctly remember him hanging out with the Snow Witch sharing a crack-pipe…