"10 - Elric at the End of Time 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

The Last Enchantment was meant to be the final

Elric story. It was written in 1962, only a short while
after the first had appeared in magazine form and
before I wrote what was to become Stormbringer. I
gave the story to Ted Carnell for his magazine Sci-
ence Fantasy but he didn't want a "last" Elric story.
He persuaded me to write some more novellas and
in his capacity as my agent sent The Last Enchantment
to America, where it was rejected. Some fifteen years
later Ted's successor, Les Flood, came across the
story and returned it to me. It eventually appeared
in Ariel magazine in the U.S. in 1978, illustrated by
Tim Conrad. That was its only publication until now.
Like Elric at the End of Time it has never been pub-
lished in England and this is its first appearance in
book form.

The Sojan stories are my first fantasy tales to be
professionally published. They were begun in the
1950s for Tarzan Adventures, before I came to edit the
magazine. I was seventeen when they started to
appear and they were not published in book form
until Dave Britton and Mike Butterworth republished
them as Sojan, the first book they did as Savoy Edi-
tions. It was re-illustrated by Jim Cawthorn, the origi-
nal illustrator who has worked with me through my
whole career as a writer of fantastic fiction. This
book was primarily a compendium of my earliest
work, together with some of my writing about my
own fiction and I have included one or two other
pieces from Sojan here.

The Stone Thing was written in response to a re-
quest from Eric Bentcliffe, editor of the fanzine Triode,
which I used to write for in the fifties. It is one of
several parodies of my own work which I've done
over the years (some of which, it could be argued,
were not published as such) and it's one I'm par-

ticularly fond of. Triode specialised in humorous "fan
fiction"Чstories written about actual personalities in
the SF fieldЧand dates from the period in which
science fiction fans did not take themselves quite so
seriously as nowadays, and those who made religion
from an enthusiasm were generally mocked for it. I
hope the story itself will show some readers that I
am neither in touch with secret supernatural forces
nor the spokesman for an illuminating new mystical
knowledge. As a matter of fact I'm by nature ex-