Sojan the Swordsman Read online




  Sojan the Swordsman

  Michael Moorcock

  Edited by John Davey

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  John Clute Introduction

  Michael Moorcock Introduction

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter One Sojan the Swordsman

  Chapter Two The War King

  Chapter Three The Air Pirates

  Chapter Four A Grim Welcome

  Chapter Five Sentenced to Die

  Chapter Six The Prison Tower

  Chapter Seven The Sky Chase

  Chapter Eight Mission to Asno

  Chapter Nine Revolt in Hatnor

  Chapter Ten The Hordes Attack

  Chapter Eleven A Warrior’s Justice

  Chapter Twelve The Purple Galley

  Chapter Thirteen The Sea Wolves!

  Chapter Fourteen Sojan at Sea!

  Chapter Fifteen The Sea of Demons

  Chapter Sixteen Prisoners in Stone

  Chapter Seventeen The Unlucky Ones

  Chapter Eighteen The Plain of Mystery

  Chapter Nineteen Ship of the Ancients

  Chapter Twenty Sons of the Snake God

  Chapter Twenty-One The Castle of Kandoon

  Chapter Twenty-Two The Devil Hunters of Norj

  Chapter Twenty-Three Hounds of the Cergii

  Klan the Spoiler

  Dek of Noothar

  Rens Karto of Bersnol

  Website

  Also by Michael Moorcock

  About the Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION TO THE MICHAEL MOORCOCK COLLECTION

  John Clute

  HE IS NOW over 70, enough time for most careers to start and end in, enough time to fit in an occasional half-decade or so of silence to mark off the big years. Silence happens. I don’t think I know an author who doesn’t fear silence like the plague; most of us, if we live long enough, can remember a bad blank year or so, or more. Not Michael Moorcock. Except for some worrying surgery on his toes in recent years, he seems not to have taken time off to breathe the air of peace and panic. There has been no time to spare. The nearly 60 years of his active career seems to have been too short to fit everything in: the teenage comics; the editing jobs; the pulp fiction; the reinvented heroic fantasies; the Eternal Champion; the deep Jerry Cornelius riffs; NEW WORLDS; the 1970s/1980s flow of stories and novels, dozens upon dozens of them in every category of modern fantastika; the tales of the dying Earth and the possessing of Jesus; the exercises in postmodernism that turned the world inside out before most of us had begun to guess we were living on the wrong side of things; the invention (more or less) of steampunk; the alternate histories; the Mitteleuropean tales of sexual terror; the deep-city London riffs: the turns and changes and returns and reconfigurations to which he has subjected his oeuvre over the years (he expects this new Collected Edition will fix these transformations in place for good); the late tales where he has been remodelling the intersecting worlds he created in the 1960s in terms of twenty-first-century physics: for starters. If you can’t take the heat, I guess, stay out of the multiverse.

  His life has been full and complicated, a life he has exposed and hidden (like many other prolific authors) throughout his work. In Mother London (1988), though, a nonfantastic novel published at what is now something like the midpoint of his career, it may be possible to find the key to all the other selves who made the 100 books. There are three protagonists in the tale, which is set from about 1940 to about 1988 in the suburbs and inner runnels of the vast metropolis of Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. The oldest of these protagonists is Joseph Kiss, a flamboyant self-advertising fin-de-siècle figure of substantial girth and a fantasticating relationship to the world: he is Michael Moorcock, seen with genial bite as a kind of G.K. Chesterton without the wearying punch-line paradoxes. The youngest of the three is David Mummery, a haunted introspective half-insane denizen of a secret London of trials and runes and codes and magic: he too is Michael Moorcock, seen through a glass, darkly. And there is Mary Gasalee, a kind of holy-innocent and survivor, blessed with a luminous clarity of insight, so that in all her apparent ignorance of the onrushing secular world she is more deeply wise than other folk: she is also Michael Moorcock, Moorcock when young as viewed from the wry middle years of 1988. When we read the book, we are reading a book of instructions for the assembly of a London writer. The Moorcock we put together from this choice of portraits is amused and bemused at the vision of himself; he is a phenomenon of flamboyance and introspection, a poseur and a solitary, a dreamer and a doer, a multitude and a singleton. But only the three Moorcocks in this book, working together, could have written all the other books.

  It all began – as it does for David Mummery in Mother London – in South London, in a subtopian stretch of villas called Mitcham, in 1939. In early childhood, he experienced the Blitz, and never forgot the extraordinariness of being a participant – however minute – in the great drama; all around him, as though the world were being dismantled nightly, darkness and blackout would descend, bombs fall, buildings and streets disappear; and in the morning, as though a new universe had taken over from the old one and the world had become portals, the sun would rise on glinting rubble, abandoned tricycles, men and women going about their daily tasks as though nothing had happened, strange shards of ruin poking into altered air. From a very early age, Michael Moorcock’s security reposed in a sense that everything might change, in the blinking of an eye, and be rejourneyed the next day (or the next book). Though as a writer he has certainly elucidated the fears and alarums of life in Aftermath Britain, it does seem that his very early years were marked by the epiphanies of war, rather than the inflictions of despair and beclouding amnesia most adults necessarily experienced. After the war ended, his parents separated, and the young Moorcock began to attend a pretty wide variety of schools, several of which he seems to have been expelled from, and as soon as he could legally do so he began to work full time, up north in Lond
on’s heart, which he only left when he moved to Texas (with intervals in Paris) in the early 1990s, from where (to jump briefly up the decades) he continues to cast a Martian eye: as with most exiles, Moorcock’s intensest anatomies of his homeland date from after his cunning departure.

  But back again to the beginning (just as though we were rimming a multiverse). Starting in the 1950s there was the comics and pulp work for Fleetway Publications; there was the first book (Caribbean Crisis, 1962) as by Desmond Reid, co-written with his early friend the artist James Cawthorn (1929-2008); there was marriage, with the writer Hilary Bailey (they divorced in 1978), three children, a heated existence in the Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill Gate region of London he was later to populate with Jerry Cornelius and his vast family; there was the editing of NEW WORLDS, which began in 1964 and became the heartbeat of the British New Wave two years later as writers like Brian W. Aldiss and J. G. Ballard, reaching their early prime, made it into a tympanum, as young American writers like Thomas M. Disch, John T. Sladek, Norman Spinrad and Pamela Zoline found a home in London for material they could not publish in America, and new British writers like M. John Harrison and Charles Platt began their careers in its pages; but before that there was Elric. With The Stealer of Souls (1963) and Stormbringer (1965), the multiverse began to flicker into view, and the Eternal Champion (whom Elric parodied and embodied) began properly to ransack the worlds in his fight against a greater Chaos than the great dance could sustain. There was also the first SF novel, The Sundered Worlds (1965), but in the 1960s SF was a difficult nut to demolish for Moorcock: he would bide his time.

  We come to the heart of the matter. Jerry Cornelius, who first appears in The Final Programme (1968) – which assembles and coordinates material first published a few years earlier in NEW WORLDS – is a deliberate solarisation of the albino Elric, who was himself a mocking solarisation of Robert E. Howard’s Conan, or rather of the mighty-thew-headed Conan created for profit by Howard epigones: Moorcock rarely mocks the true quill. Cornelius, who reaches his first and most telling apotheosis in the four novels comprising The Cornelius Quartet, remains his most distinctive and perhaps most original single creation: a wide boy, an agent, a flaneur, a bad musician, a shopper, a shapechanger, a trans, a spy in the house of London: a toxic palimpsest on whom and through whom the zeitgeist inscribes surreal conjugations of “message”. Jerry Cornelius gives head to Elric.

  The life continued apace. By 1970, with NEW WORLDS on its last legs, multiverse fantasies and experimental novels poured forth; Moorcock and Hilary Bailey began to live separately, though he moved, in fact, only around the corner, where he set up house with Jill Riches, who would become his second wife; there was a second home in Yorkshire, but London remained his central base. The Condition of Muzak (1977), which is the fourth Cornelius novel, and Gloriana; or, The Unfulfill’d Queen (1978), which transfigures the first Elizabeth into a kinked Astraea, marked perhaps the high point of his career as a writer of fiction whose font lay in genre or its mutations – marked perhaps the furthest bournes he could transgress while remaining within the perimeters of fantasy (though within those bournes vast stretches of territory remained and would, continually, be explored). During these years he sometimes wore a leather jacket constructed out of numerous patches of varicoloured material, and it sometimes seemed perfectly fitting that he bore the semblance, as his jacket flickered and fuzzed from across a room or road, of an illustrated man, a map, a thing of shreds and patches, a student fleshed from dreams. Like the stories he told, he seemed to be more than one thing. To use a term frequently applied (by me at least) to twenty-first-century fiction, he seemed equipoisal: which is to say that, through all his genre-hopping and genre-mixing and genre-transcending and genre-loyal returnings to old pitches, he was never still, because “equipoise” is all about making stories move. As with his stories, he cannot be pinned down, because he is not in one place. In person and in his work, it has always been sink or swim: like a shark, or a dancer, or an equilibrist…

  The marriage with Jill Riches came to an end. He married Linda Steele in 1983; they remain married. The Colonel Pyat books, Byzantium Endures (1981), The Laughter of Carthage (1984), Jerusalem Commands (1992) and The Vengeance of Rome (2006), dominated these years, along with Mother London. As these books, which are non-fantastic, are not included in the current Collected Moorcock, it might be worth noting here that, in their insistence on the irreducible difficulty of gaining anything like true sight, they represent Moorcock’s mature modernist take on what one might call the rag-and-bone shop of the world itself; and that the huge ornate postmodern edifice of his multiverse loosens us from that world, gives us room to breathe, to juggle our strategies for living – allows us ultimately to escape from prison (to use a phrase from a writer he does not respect, J.R.R. Tolkien, for whom the twentieth century was a prison train bound for hell). What Moorcock may best be remembered for in the end is the (perhaps unique) interplay between modernism and postmodernism in his work. (But a plethora of discordant understandings makes these terms hard to use; so enough of them.) In the end, one might just say that Moorcock’s work as a whole represents an extraordinarily multifarious execution of the fantasist’s main task: which is to get us out of here.

  Recent decades saw a continuation of the multifarious, but with a more intensely applied methodology. The late volumes of the long Elric saga, and the Second Ether sequence of meta-fantasies – Blood: A Southern Fantasy (1995), Fabulous Harbours (1995) and The War Amongst the Angels: An Autobiographical Story (1996) – brood on the real world and the multiverse through the lens of Chaos Theory: the closer you get to the world, the less you describe it. The Metatemporal Detective (2007) – a narrative in the Steampunk mode Moorcock had previewed as long ago as The Warlord of the Air (1971) and The Land Leviathan (1974) – continues the process, sometimes dizzyingly: as though the reader inhabited the eye of a camera increasing its focus on a closely observed reality while its bogey simultaneously wheels it backwards from the desired rapport: an old Kurasawa trick here amplified into a tool of conspectus, fantasy eyed and (once again) rejourneyed, this time through the lens of sf.

  We reach the second decade of the twenty-first century, time still to make things new, but also time to sort. There are dozens of titles in The Michael Moorcock Collection that have not been listed in this short space, much less trawled for tidbits. The various avatars of the Eternal Champion – Elric, Kane of Old Mars, Hawkmoon, Count Brass, Corum, Von Bek – differ vastly from one another. Hawkmoon is a bit of a berk; Corum is a steely solitary at the End of Time: the joys and doleurs of the interplays amongst them can only be experienced through immersion. And the Dancers at the End of Time books, and the Nomad of the Time Stream books, and the Karl Glogauer books, and all the others. They are here now, a 100 books that make up one book. They have been fixed for reading. It is time to enter the multiverse and see the world.

  John Clute

  September 2012

  INTRODUCTION TO THE MICHAEL MOORCOCK COLLECTION

  Michael Moorcock

  BY 1964, AFTER I had been editing NEW WORLDS for some months and had published several science fiction and fantasy novels, including Stormbringer, I realised that my run as a writer was over. About the only new ideas I’d come up with were miniature computers, the multiverse and black holes, all very crudely realised, in The Sundered Worlds. No doubt I would have to return to journalism, writing features and editing. “My career,” I told my friend J.G. Ballard, “is finished.” He sympathised and told me he only had a few SF stories left in him, then he, too, wasn’t sure what he’d do.

  In January 1965, living in Colville Terrace, Notting Hill, then an infamous slum, best known for its race riots, I sat down at the typewriter in our kitchen-cum-bathroom and began a locally-based book, designed to be accompanied by music and graphics. The Final Programme featured a character based on a young man I’d seen around the area and whom I named after a local greengrocer, Jerry Cornelius, ‘Messiah to
the Age of Science’. Jerry was as much a technique as a character. Not the ‘spy’ some critics described him as but an urban adventurer as interested in his psychic environment as the contemporary physical world. My influences were English and French absurdists, American noir novels. My inspiration was William Burroughs with whom I’d recently begun a correspondence. I also borrowed a few SF ideas, though I was adamant that I was not writing in any established genre. I felt I had at last found my own authentic voice.

  I had already written a short novel, The Golden Barge, set in a nowhere, no-time world very much influenced by Peake and the surrealists, which I had not attempted to publish. An earlier autobiographical novel, The Hungry Dreamers, set in Soho, was eaten by rats in a Ladbroke Grove basement. I remained unsatisfied with my style and my technique. The Final Programme took nine days to complete (by 20th January, 1965) with my baby daughters sometimes cradled with their bottles while I typed on. This, I should say, is my memory of events; my then wife scoffed at this story when I recounted it. Whatever the truth, the fact is I only believed I might be a serious writer after I had finished that novel, with all its flaws. But Jerry Cornelius, probably my most successful sustained attempt at unconventional fiction, was born then and ever since has remained a useful means of telling complex stories. Associated with the 60s and 70s, he has been equally at home in all the following decades. Through novels and novellas I developed a means of carrying several narratives and viewpoints on what appeared to be a very light (but tight) structure which dispensed with some of the earlier methods of fiction. In the sense that it took for granted the understanding that the novel is among other things an internal dialogue and I did not feel the need to repeat by now commonly understood modernist conventions, this fiction was post-modern.

  Not all my fiction looked for new forms for the new century. Like many ‘revolutionaries’ I looked back as well as forward. As George Meredith looked to the eighteenth century for inspiration for his experiments with narrative, I looked to Meredith, popular Edwardian realists like Pett Ridge and Zangwill and the writers of the fin de siècle for methods and inspiration. An almost obsessive interest in the Fabians, several of whom believed in the possibility of benign imperialism, ultimately led to my Bastable books which examined our enduring British notion that an empire could be essentially a force for good. The first was The Warlord of the Air.

 

    The Coming of the Teraphiles Read onlineThe Coming of the TeraphilesThe Vengeance of Rome Read onlineThe Vengeance of RomeThe Oak and the Ram Read onlineThe Oak and the RamThe Steel Tsar Read onlineThe Steel TsarByzantium Endures: The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet Read onlineByzantium Endures: The First Volume of the Colonel Pyat QuartetThe Weird of the White Wolf Read onlineThe Weird of the White WolfThe Champion of Garathorm Read onlineThe Champion of GarathormThe Revenge of the Rose Read onlineThe Revenge of the RoseThe Dreamthief's Daughter: A Tale of the Albino Read onlineThe Dreamthief's Daughter: A Tale of the AlbinoThe Complete Ice Schooner Read onlineThe Complete Ice SchoonerThe Land Leviathan Read onlineThe Land LeviathanMasters of the Pit or Barbarians of Mars Read onlineMasters of the Pit or Barbarians of MarsThe Skrayling Tree: The Albino in America Read onlineThe Skrayling Tree: The Albino in AmericaLord of the Spiders or Blades of Mars Read onlineLord of the Spiders or Blades of MarsThe Chronicles of Corum Read onlineThe Chronicles of CorumThe Vanishing Tower Read onlineThe Vanishing TowerThe Jewel in the Skull Read onlineThe Jewel in the SkullThe Final Programme Read onlineThe Final ProgrammeThe Shores of Death Read onlineThe Shores of DeathKnight of the Swords Read onlineKnight of the SwordsThe Adventures Of Una Perrson Read onlineThe Adventures Of Una PerrsonHawkmoon: The Jewel in the Skull Read onlineHawkmoon: The Jewel in the SkullThe Sailor on the Seas of Fate Read onlineThe Sailor on the Seas of FateByzantium Endures: Pyat Quartet Read onlineByzantium Endures: Pyat QuartetJerusalem Commands: Between the Wars Vol. 3 Read onlineJerusalem Commands: Between the Wars Vol. 3Gloriana Read onlineGlorianaModem Times 2.0 Read onlineModem Times 2.0The Hollow Lands Read onlineThe Hollow LandsThe War Hound and the World's Pain Read onlineThe War Hound and the World's PainThe City in the Autumn Stars Read onlineThe City in the Autumn StarsThe Jade Man's Eyes Read onlineThe Jade Man's EyesThe Bull and the Spear Read onlineThe Bull and the SpearLegends From the End of Time Read onlineLegends From the End of TimeRayguns Over Texas Read onlineRayguns Over TexasThe Chronicles of Castle Brass Read onlineThe Chronicles of Castle BrassSojan the Swordsman Read onlineSojan the SwordsmanThe Queen of the Swords Read onlineThe Queen of the SwordsCount Brass Read onlineCount BrassThe Whispering Swarm Read onlineThe Whispering SwarmPhoenix in Obsidian Read onlinePhoenix in ObsidianThe Rituals of Infinity Read onlineThe Rituals of InfinityThe City of the Beast or Warriors of Mars Read onlineThe City of the Beast or Warriors of MarsConditie van muzak Read onlineConditie van muzakThe Laughter of Carthage: Pyat Quartet Read onlineThe Laughter of Carthage: Pyat QuartetA Cure for Cancer Read onlineA Cure for CancerThe Eternal Champion Read onlineThe Eternal ChampionThe Warlord of the Air Read onlineThe Warlord of the AirThe English Assassin Read onlineThe English AssassinSojan the Swordsman ; Under the Warrior Sky Read onlineSojan the Swordsman ; Under the Warrior SkyThe Vengeance of Rome - [Between The Wars 04] Read onlineThe Vengeance of Rome - [Between The Wars 04]The Queen of Swords Read onlineThe Queen of SwordsJerusalem Commands Read onlineJerusalem CommandsThe Best of Michael Moorcock Read onlineThe Best of Michael MoorcockByzantium Endures - [Pyat Quartet 01] Read onlineByzantium Endures - [Pyat Quartet 01]Chronicles of Corum Read onlineChronicles of CorumThe Fortress of the Pearl eas-2 Read onlineThe Fortress of the Pearl eas-2Stormbringer es-6 Read onlineStormbringer es-6The Condition of Muzak Read onlineThe Condition of MuzakThe Pale Roses lfteot-1 Read onlineThe Pale Roses lfteot-1The Bull and the Spear - 05 Read onlineThe Bull and the Spear - 05Legends from the End of Time: Elric at the End of Time lfteot-5 Read onlineLegends from the End of Time: Elric at the End of Time lfteot-5The Laughter of Carthage - [Between The Wars 02] Read onlineThe Laughter of Carthage - [Between The Wars 02]The Sword and the Stallion - 06 Read onlineThe Sword and the Stallion - 06The Sailor on the Sea of Fate Read onlineThe Sailor on the Sea of FateThe Dream of Earl Aubec ttoew-1 Read onlineThe Dream of Earl Aubec ttoew-1Elric at the End of Time eas-1 Read onlineElric at the End of Time eas-1Dancers at the End of Time: An Alien Heat Read onlineDancers at the End of Time: An Alien HeatThe Ancient Shadows lfteot-3 Read onlineThe Ancient Shadows lfteot-3The End of All Songs dateot-3 Read onlineThe End of All Songs dateot-3The White Stars lfteot-2 Read onlineThe White Stars lfteot-2The Laughter of Carthage: The Second Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet (Colonel Pyat Quartet Series Book 2) Read onlineThe Laughter of Carthage: The Second Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet (Colonel Pyat Quartet Series Book 2)To Rescue Tanelorn ttoew-2 Read onlineTo Rescue Tanelorn ttoew-2The Last Enchantment ttoew-3 Read onlineThe Last Enchantment ttoew-3Revenge of the Rose Read onlineRevenge of the RoseThe Hollow Lands dateot-2 Read onlineThe Hollow Lands dateot-2An Alien Heat dateot-1 Read onlineAn Alien Heat dateot-1The Oak and the Ram - 04 Read onlineThe Oak and the Ram - 04The Vanishing Tower (elric saga) Read onlineThe Vanishing Tower (elric saga)The Weird of the White Wolf (elric saga) Read onlineThe Weird of the White Wolf (elric saga)The Bane of the Black Sword (elric saga) Read onlineThe Bane of the Black Sword (elric saga)The Dreamthief's Daughter Read onlineThe Dreamthief's DaughterThe Knight of Swords Read onlineThe Knight of SwordsDreamthief's Daughter toa-1 Read onlineDreamthief's Daughter toa-1Elric of Melnibone (elric saga) Read onlineElric of Melnibone (elric saga)Dancers at the End of Time Read onlineDancers at the End of TimeThe Skrayling Tree Read onlineThe Skrayling TreeThe White Wolf's Son Read onlineThe White Wolf's SonThe History of the Runestaff Read onlineThe History of the Runestaff