When the two had gone off, back to Jillian’s Tufnell Hill eyrie, Lizard Bayliss offered to buy the drinks, adding that it had been a bloody awful Friday and Saturday so far, and he hoped Sunday cheered up because if it didn’t the whole weekend would have been a rotten write-off.
I’m pleased to say it was Taffy Sinclair who proposed we all go down to the Woods of Westermaine for some goblin shooting, so we rang up Count Dracula to tell him we were coming over to Dunsuckin, then all jumped onto our large black Fly and headed for fresher fields, agreeing that it had been one of the most depressing Saturdays any of us had enjoyed in centuries and the sooner it was behind us, the better.
With respectful acknowledgements to Maurice Richardson and The Exploits of Engelbrecht, published by Savoy Books, Manchester, U.K., and Port
Sabatini, Texas.
The joke goes a little like this: “Michael Moorcock has written for so long in so many different genres that there’s something for every reader to hate.” If you’re an iconic post-WWII literary figure whose résumé includes everything from creating a mythic heroic fantasy anti-hero to editing New Worlds, the magazine that gave voice to the New Wave and the careers of writers like J. G. Ballard and M. John Harrison, then it’s very much true, simply because few readers can keep up with the protean reach of this giant.
How, then, to edit a “best” of Moorcock’s short fiction? How to even create a short list? Luckily, our task was simplified by the brilliant work of John Davey, who had already compiled a 250,000-word manuscript and who deserves the bulk of the praise for its success.
From that manuscript, with Davey’s notes on individual stories in mind, the final volume of approximately 150,000 words took shape. Even so, several admittedly invasive decisions had to be made in compiling the final contents. We decided to leave Elric largely to the excellent new series of reprints from Del Rey, opting to begin this volume with a later Elric story. We also decided that Jerry Cornelius—a Moorcock character who has come to serve as a kind of running commentary on the state of the world—could only be excerpted in a way that would seem incomplete, and thus we left that fine fellow largely to his own devices (for now).
Which brings us to a very important point: This writer, without the aid of those two robust companions, would still have had an amazing career. That career, in the short form, breaks down roughly into stories that fall under the rubric of fantasy/SF and, using a hated term, the literary mainstream. There is some overlap, for those who grade on taxonomy. For example, Moorcock’s “World War Three” stories appear to partake of a variety of influences in style and execution—part of what makes them still seem contemporary. It is this overlap, along with the guiding intelligence and wit of the author, that provides coherence to this collection.
We are sure that many of these choices will be hotly debated, and we welcome that debate. Let anyone who dares stand in our shoes for a month or two, looking out over the depth and breadth of Moorcock’s oeuvre. From that perspective, we think any reasonable person will agree on how devilishly hard it is to say this and not this, that but not that.
Ultimately, our rôle in editing this collection is a personal thank you to a man and a writer we love deeply: Michael Moorcock, whose genius is only matched by his generosity. We believe both of those qualities exist, in quantity, in this book.
Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
The Best of Michael Moorcock Page 47