The Dreamthief's Daughter: A Tale of the Albino Read online

  This book is a work of historical fiction. In order to give a sense of the times, some names of real people or places have been included in the book. However, the events depicted in this book are imaginary, and the names of nonhistorical persons or events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance of such nonhistorical persons or events to actual ones is purely coincidental.

  THE DREAMTHIEF ’ S DAUGHTER . Copyright © 2001 by Michael Moorcock and Linda Moorcock. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2234-3

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2001 by Warner Books.

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  First eBook edition: April 2001

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  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  For my god-daughter, Oona von B

  And for Berry and Co.

  Author’s Note

  On May 10, 1941, a few months after Britain had unexpectedly won the crucial Battle of Britain and at last stopped the Nazi expansion, Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy and his oldest remaining friend within the Nazi hierarchy, flew to Scotland on his own initiative. He had crucial information for Churchill, he said. Arrested, he was interrogated by MI5, British military intelligence. What he told MI5 was immediately suppressed. Certain files have since disappeared. Some existing files have still not been made public. Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on June 24, 1941. Many believe that Hess was appalled by Hitler’s decision and was trying to make a final bargain with Churchill. Churchill never permitted a meeting with Hess, who died in mysterious circumstances in 1987.

  Introduction

  Elric Is Me

  Michael Moorcock interviewed by James Colvin for The Dreamthief’s Daughter: A Tale of the Albino.

  JC: Michael Moorcock. Born London in 1939. Went through the Blitz. Came out of World War II wondering why the world was so dull. Left school at 15. Got into journalism and music at a time most of us were starting high school. Editor of Tarzan Adventures at 16, on Sexton Blake Stories by 18, Current Topics, a political magazine, by 21, and editor of New Worlds at 24. A long and lively career and all in your first quarter-century . . .

  MM: That’s right. I’d also climbed a few mountains and seen a bit of the world by then. Not especially unusual in journalism in my day. It’s probably not the same now. Fred Pohl, don’t forget, was 17 when he was running Marvel Tales. One of my best friends went from Lion comics to Deputy Editor of the New Scientist in one move. Somebody else went from Thriller Picture Library to The Sunday Times. Maybe we were short of journalist power after World War II. But there were some clever people about.

  Born when I was, I’d only known the exciting world of war. It was my only familiar world, my only familiar landscape— ruins for as far as the eye could see. We didn’t know it, but we felt it—the end of Empire. Elric’s experience, if you like. As a very early anti-monarchist and anti-imperialist I wasn’t sad to see the institutions crumbling, but at the same time it is your culture that’s crumbling, so it doesn’t necessarily feel that good to you as an ordinary individual. It’s a bittersweet thing, from my side, the end of Empire! It could also be why Elric was so phenomenally successful in Japan!

  As an early reader, I found peacetime schooling agonizingly dull. In my first years, every night was firework night and if some of those fireworks fell on your school or your neighbors, you didn’t really take it in because it was a background reality, scarcely worthy of note. V2 rockets were the worst because you didn’t hear them coming. You just heard them hit a nearby house. You didn’t feel especially scared, though. You were secure in yourself because there wasn’t much doubt your mother loved you. She was always pleased just to see you alive! I wrote about all this in Mother London, my realistic novel. And I might have been such an early reader because reading was about the only entertainment you got in the air-raid shelters, apart from cheery music on the radio or someone’s old Al Jolson records. Climb upon my klick klick knee sonny, KABOOM, boy, kerklick, kerclick, though you’re only BAM kerklick three, sonny, BOOM, boy . . .

  I’ve said this before—I think the kind of reality I experienced was, like J.G. Ballard’s in the Shanghai civilian camp or Brian Aldiss’s in the Malayan jungle, so familiar (because we were so young) and so intense that we never really got used to the concerns of the peacetime middle class. None of us was particularly worried about the H-Bomb or the Red Threat, which seemed to be the “ideas” dominating dinner party conversation in our youth.

  When Ballard and I in New Worlds rejected the modern novel of manners and morality in favor of the likes of William Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch, we did so because we were looking for forms of fiction which better mirrored our own experience. That’s the background, as I see it. We found some of that fiction in science fantasy pulps, some of it in contemporary idiosyncratic writers like Mervyn Peake, Boris Vian, Jorge Luis Borges or Maurice Richardson, some of it in nouvelle vague movies, some of it in the work of the existentialists and the beats, in Faulkner and Greene, the noir fiction of Hammett or Thompson.

  That sense of lost illusions was very strong after the Second World War. Movies like The Third Man reflected that sense. Equally there was a very high value placed on human affections, the bittersweet savored moment (Casablanca, Brief Encounter). There was an appreciation of the value of experience and friendship over orthodoxy and authority. Young soldiers brought that back, too. They’d had enough. They’d seen too much horror, from their friends blown apart before their eyes to discovering the death camps. Refined modernism could only respond, tell us how dreadful the writers felt about it all. The best of these was Elizabeth Bowen.

  Generally the best writing about the war is from civilian women. But modernist fiction didn’t get it for us. Existentialism was in the air we breathed. You had to be totally isolated not to be familiar with the names of Camus, Sartre, or Brecht. I was busking in Paris by the time I was fifteen. I met Kerouac and Ginsberg and didn’t know what they did. And, of course, I was also playing first skiffle, then rock and roll, in the days when it was still thought to reflect a social malaise! All this stuff more closely reflected how we felt and thought. It was a tremendous intellectual and artistic mix. Aldiss’s wonderful Greybeard came out of that, Ballard’s Crash came out of that, and much of my own work, including Elric, came out of that. . . .

  JC: Jerry Cornelius I can see, but Elric?

  MM: Elric might be the first consciously existentialist hero of popular fiction, though b
y no means the first unconscious one! Sam Spade has to be the best example of that. But like Spade, Elric has an awareness of good and evil in his bones, an identification with the underdog, a knowing awareness of his own guilt, as well as a measure of his own courage, a tolerance for weakness in others which he doesn’t allow in himself, all that stuff. Like Marlowe and his creator, Sam and his creator needed a drink from time to time, just to keep going. Elric relies on drugs, herbal supplements and stolen energy to survive. Happily, I don’t share those needs, though they do reflect the situation of the average wealthy “first worlder” today. Come to think of it, people have been making that kind of comparison since Elric started appearing. They say he reflects the times. James Dean. Elvis. Jim Morrison. Jimi Hendrix. All those doomed rock stars uncertain of their identities and depending on needles and pills to make it from one day to the next.

  I remember talking to Benjamin G. Schafer, who was Ginsberg’s assistant and edited a splendid book on the work of Herbert Huncke, the seminal beat. The book was introduced by Burroughs, who had become an enthusiast for New Worlds and borrowed one of his central metaphors from Barry Bayley’s story The Plague (humans as a virus). I congratulated him on the book, which I’d heartily recommend and which is still in print, I think, from Morrow. When Schafer heard my name, he was delighted by the coincidence. He didn’t know about the Burroughs connection, but he’d done his eighth grade English project on an Elric book, Weird of the White Wolf!

  I think that’s why Elric will often appeal to cyberpunk fans as much as he appeals to fantasy readers. I’m proud of the range of my readership, which brings together everyone from old hippies, distinguished military gents, literary figures, journalists, academics, middle-class homemakers, hip-hop fans, goths, punks and respectable oldsters like myself in nice, fresh L.L. Bean smart casuals . . . all brought together by common enjoyment. People have told me how Elric has helped them achieve reconciliations with their parents or children! That’s a very nice thing to be told. I love multiplicity as much as I love community! The range of footwear at my readings is very satisfying. It goes from Dr. Martens to Dr. Scholl’s and everything in between. A pretty good cross section, all in all, and most of them hugely smart!

  JC: So you like your readers? You like meeting them?

  MM: I do. I write for my readers. The idea of just writing for myself seems nuts to me! I’m delighted when I give them something they value. I have an existential view of life which boils down to a sentence: If possible, leave the planet a little better than you found it. My readers seem to share that simple ideal. I respect my readers. I don’t sentimentalize them. I couldn’t ever condescend to them. I’m in open correspondence with them almost daily in my Web domain (www.multiverse.org). Anyone can go there, ask any question, offer any opinion and begin a correspondence with me.

  I’m only as good as my readers say I am. I’d like to go on earning their respect. I consider myself to be working in a tradition of popular intellectualism which went underground with McCarthyism and became science fiction! I will remain in business as long as my readers want me in business. Although a convinced internationalist federalist, I have a strong sense of community and live in one of the best small towns in America, chosen because it reflects that sense. Washington agencies share my view, incidentally. It’s a fine, generous community. I like to function in the larger community the way any good craftsman does—like a fine furniture maker, for instance. I have to offer my customers the best possible value I can provide in aesthetics, craftsmanship and substance!

  William Morris made some of the furniture in my house. His followers made the rest. Bought at a time when it was cheaper than new, all my furniture, fabrics and things like lamps and coffeepots were made by craftspeople working in the Morris tradition. Have nothing in your house that is not beautiful or useful. And very hardy, too! You can sit on it, stack your books on it, lean on it, have domestic arguments around it, throw it at the TV, and it’s as solid as the day it was made. It was one of the reasons we bought old furniture rather than new!

  In my mind it has to do with values and value, of sticking to the principles that first got you into the business. It’s the same sort of sentiments as keeping ticket prices low at the gigs I used to do with Deep Fix or Hawkwind! An identification, if you like, with the ordinary citizen on an ordinary budget. I can’t easily forget my own past, especially since I have been so much more fortunate than most.

  I like to produce a good, hard-wearing book you can use over and over again. For that reason I try to start every new book as if I have to prove my credentials to the reader for the first time—writing, as it were, for the reader who has never heard of me, as well as for my regular readers. I think both would expect me to deliver the same sort of value, and my regular readers would be disappointed if all I did was rearrange the characters and plots. I can’t stand that kind of literary Xeroxing myself and suspect the majority of my readers feel the same. I try to feel the frustration I felt, all those years ago, before there really was a fantasy genre and publishers knew it was impossible to make money from the likes of Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien. Yes, I’m that old. I can remember the time when Prof. T was just another marginalized eccentric old Anglo-Saxon scholar and people didn’t know what to call what you did.

  JC: So you might say you were in at the start of the fantasy genre?

  MM: It certainly wasn’t a recognizable genre as it is now. It’s very strange to be part of the creation of a new genre. Of course, it’s not something you’re conscious of when starting! You hardly know what you’re doing until other people start imitating you. I’m sure Hammett and Chandler must have felt this. You develop your own specialized tool box, sit it down to eat your lunch, and, when you turn back, a bunch of other people are using all your tools! And they’re using them not to solve a problem but to construct a spectacle. I felt this strongly, for instance, in Warlord of the Air , where I created a specific method for dealing with myths of British imperialism. Then someone else does sixteen books about airship adventures in a nostalgic version of the British Empire. Your work, done for a reason, gets buried amongst those which follow it, whose reason is mostly to reproduce the frisson received from the original!

  As far as consciously structured trilogies are concerned, for instance, only Tolkien and I had published them by, say, 1967. I developed it for myself because it mirrored sonata form and allowed a certain flexibility within a very clear structure. Now it appears to be the normal form, though the classical underpinning of the structure has been lost to a kind of rambling picaresque in most of what I see. I still like to write over three or four volumes. That way you can examine a subject from a lot of angles. But never so you slow down the action! In order to avoid cliché both of plot and subject, you have to come up with another lot of problems, another bunch of tools to provide solutions, just to tell the stories so they don’t sound like a lot of stories you’ve read before, by me or by someone else.

  The medium is the message. I found that early on when I tried to write generic science fiction. A genre is like folk art. You can take from it, but it’s very hard to do anything really original within its terms and ambitions. I’m not putting down genre fiction, because human nature demands repetition the way human life needs a steadily beating heart, but ironically, while part of my fictive infrastructure involves the notion of stories being told and retold, I’m not the kind of writer that enjoys telling the same story over and over again.

  I am, of course, telling one big story in many different aspects, but I have lots and lots of stories still to tell. And it helps if the plots are a bit different, too. It’s a peculiar flirtation with repetition, a bit more like music, I suppose, which has always influenced my structuring. Music depends both on repetition and surprise—an unexpected chord change, a subtle alteration of the note. Because I am really writing one huge narrative, my familiar characters are always there, somewhere in the background, living their lives, wanting me to tell their ne
w stories. Some are more vociferous than others.

  JC: You mean Elric is somewhere inside you, talking to you?

  MM: I think of him as nearby, rather than inside me! I’m not sure I’d want him that close. He is, of course, me. He’s the shape of my unconscious. The Beast from the Id. He always has been. I wrote an essay about that many years ago. It was published in Sojan by Savoy Books, and I think it’s still in print from them. Elric’s problems are dramatized versions of my own. His ambivalence reflects almost any thinking person’s ambivalence in these interesting times. People are learning not to trust causes and political or economic formulae (including so-called Reaganist “deregulated” economics, which are just as abstract as any others), and we’re in the process, I suspect, of developing new moral attitudes while some of the old moral attitudes (no longer functional, or inappropriate in a current context) turn into a kind of orthodox bigotry which creates many of the tensions in society—just as the old, unquestioned ideas and the new ideas constantly war in Elric.

  JC: Is that why, in the new book, The Dreamthief’s Daughter , you confront Elric with modern times?

  MM: It’s one of the reasons. My fantasy novels have never been that far away from the real world that I know. It might not be everyone’s real world, of course, but the way I have lived my life has been perhaps a little more adventurous than many. While no atheist, I work on the assumption that we might only have one crack at this world, one conscious life, so I’m going to make the most of it! I hate violence, but I’m not scared of it. I’m also terrified of flying in large jets (though perfectly happy in disintegrating old seaplanes!).

  My curiosity overwhelms my ordinary human caution. I’ve seen most of the wonders of the world—and they can only be completely appreciated in the actuality. I’ve experienced extremes of climate. I’ve known what it was like to starve, to be about as completely on your own as it’s possible to be in this world, well away from any contact with emergency services in a way it’s hardly possible to be these days!