The Onion asked, ‘Where to start with fantasy overlord Michael Moorcock?‘

The unsurprising answer were his Elric stories.

As a youthful fantasy nerd, Elric was one of the shibboleths used by my fellow travelers. To be totally honest, I actually discovered him because he was written up in a 1st edition Dungeone & Dragons rulebook entitled Deities & Demigods. But that was how things were done. In the absence of the internet, such things seeped into the brain by different means.

And, in the mid eighties through the early nineties (roughly my Moorcock period), those books were damn hard to find. Naturally, once I’d succeeded in tracking down the books, one at at time (mostly from used bookstores), they became popular and were reasonably widely published.

That’s one of the things that rarely gets mentioned when talking about liking something before it was cool. Before something is cool, you can’t freaking find it. It’s like trying to put together a puzzle when you have to buy pieces one at a time. And you’re buying the pieces from guys who like they live in their moms’ basements and you try to not ask yourself if that’s your future, too.

I haven’t read the Elric stories for a long time and one wonders what it would be like to read a deliberate attempt to read a Conan novel written for a David Bowie, counter-culture world – which is pretty much what we’re talking about.