IN 1961, WHEN ELRIC OF MELNIBONÉ MADE HIS first appearance, Michael Moorcock was a young man in a hurry. Fast forward 60-plus years and Moorcock’s new Elric novel The Citadel Of Forgotten Myths is shortly to be published. For all that Elric is one of Moorcock’s Eternal Champions, a paladin who keeps Law and Chaos in Balance, this wasn’t originally supposed to happen.
“I expected to do one story,” Moorcock says down the line from his home in Texas. “I didn’t have much interest in magazine? “And so I wrote it, and tried to make it as different as possible from anything else,” remembers Moorcock.