Quote:
Originally Posted by Connavar of Rigante  Does that mean i can read Elric like i read Conan ?
Publishing orderwise where a story is about an older king Conan and next is 20 years back to a young mercenary Conan and so on.
For me it doesnt matter, just want to know which reading order hurt the stories.
Man Moorcock's work is too confusing to get hold. It would be nice to have a link with all the short stories and which collections etc
Wiki doesnt make it sense for him.
Hope Fantasticfiction has better control on his things. |
Somewhere (buried in the boxes of papers in storage) I have a chronology of his fiction I drew up some years ago. While it wouldn't cover the works published in the last 10 years or so, that wouldn't take long to catch up on, actually, as the bulk of that has been novels (not all, of course, but most).
At any rate, I'll see what I can do to help with this over the next few days. Suffice to say that
The Golden Barge was perhaps the earliest (surviving) example of his fiction, though it was edited (for consistency and to clean it up a bit) when it was published in 1978 (IIRC). The next notable set would be his Sojan stories, which (unless you're a die-hard Moorcockian) aren't really worth looking into -- very early work, and more interesting for the faint signs of the writer to come, and for indications of his early development.
If you're only intersted in the Elric tales, then the first of the series is "The Dreaming City" (s.s., not the novel, which was a retitling -- without Moorcock's permission, as I understand it -- of
Elric of Melniboné); then came "While the Gods Laugh", "The Stealer of Souls", "Kings in Darkness", and "The Flame Bringers" (all collected together in the collection
The Stealer of Souls). Then came the four pieces that made up
Stormbringer!: "Dead God's Homecoming", "Black Sword's Brothers", "Sad Giant's Shield", and "Doomed Lord's Passing". However, you may not want to read these until the end, as it does tell you of Elric's ultimate fate (this was originally where Moorcock intended to leave the series, and did until several years later).... At any rate, let me know if it's just the Elric stories you're interested in at this point, as this would simplify things considerably.....
