Razör vs Comics - ELRIC Vol. 3: "THE WHITE WOLF"

Like many, I too thought that the Elric BD would not fulfill the promised four volume run. And although I found the first volume beautiful but too disturbing for my comfort, I am glad to see the third volume finally hit shelves.

Of course, Razorfist has to weigh in on a project that combines several of his passions, Elric and bandes dessinees. And he does so with such passion that I'm considering giving the series--and Elric in general--a second chance. For most of Elric's adventures are as a sellsword, not as the king of decadent and hellish empire fit only to be destroyed. In this third volume, Elric finally develops into that traveler.

Along the way, Razorfist explains how BD comics are mainstream in France in ways that comics and manga can only hope to achieve, as well as breaks news that this first Elric BD run will have a sequel.

John C. Wright's Roger Zelazny Recommendations

John C. Wright sets forth his recommendations for the best of Roger Zelazny's stories:

I suggest that if you like the family infighting, larger-than-life superhumans, and intrigue, you read yourself some Roger Zelazny’s deservedly famed Amber series. It is a delight: a film noir detective tale (starring my personal favorite character, an amnesiac), which morphs into a fantasy and a Jacobin-style revenge drama.

• 1970 Nine Princes in Amber

• 1972 The Guns of Avalon

• 1975 Sign of the Unicorn

• 1976 The Hand of Oberon

• 1978 The Courts of Chaos

The Merlin books take place in the same background, but they are terrible. Avoid.

Of his work, I recommend LORD OF LIGHT as his best.

Check out Wright's site to see the full list, which covers some of Zelazny's lesser-known works.

The Cosmic Express

In 1930, safe from the predations of Hugo “the Rat” Gernsback, future Appendix N author Jack Williamson returned to Amazing Stories, closing out the year with “The Cosmic Express.” In that far future, a pulp writer and his wife, Eric and Nada, are caught up in the nostalgia for more primitive times.  Eric writes hit savage stories that are a cross between Tarzan and the barbarians Hok/Hauk/Hoak, while Nada is a poet of a nature long extinct. Bored of an Earth that has turned into one city, they decide to use the recent invention of the Cosmic Express to travel to the pristine and savage jungles of Venus. After some bribery, they come face to face with the realities of the uncivilized life, including predatory beasts.

Like many short pulp stories, “The Cosmic Express” is built around its punchline, where the characters of Eric’s stories act with the heroism and competence that he did not display on Venus. It’s a standard punchline story, with the vivid descriptions expected of pulp adventure. To modern readers, this is a divisive story, with many of the usual suspects at Goodreads complaining about the naivety of Eric and Nada. Which, honestly, is the point of the story. For while “The Cosmic Express” serves to instill some proper respect for the peril inherent in nature, it is also a commentary in conversation with other science fiction and fantasy stories.

Talk of cosmic rays, Venusian forests, and man surviving in the wilds of nature suggested the planetary romances of Edgar Rice Burroughs, as well as Tarzan. And the direct challenge to the love of the barbarian certainly brings to mind Robert E. Howard. But where both Burroughs and Howard used the barbarian to explore the savagery of those who call themselves civilized, Williamson instead contrasts the softness of the writer to the characters they create. Here he shows the weakness of the civilized compared to the natural state they glorify. “The Cosmic Express” can be read as a challenge to the resulting glorification of the noble savage in science fiction and an extolling of the material comforts brought by civilization.

The novelty of the Cosmic Express as a method of transportation might be lost to modern readers as well, since the method of travel is reminiscent of Star Trek’s transporters. In fact, Eric and Nada’s adventure reads like an Away Team gone wrong, although one lacking redshirts. The ensuing rescue by Express Beam gives their ordeal the same impact as a miserable weak at camp, and just as easily forgotten, as Eric’s following story shows.

All in all, “The Cosmic Express” is an evocative but safe early short story by Williamson that helps establishes the Great Conversation between science fiction works so beloved by pulp and Campbelline writers. It helped to distance the Amazing Stories-brand of science fiction from the mainstream planetary and primitive romance adventures that served as the mainstream of science fiction, as well as establish Williamson as an author to follow. But the full promise of the fledgling genre and writer would need more time to develop.

Elric Vol. 1: The Ruby Throne

Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné has enjoyed a storied history in comics. First portrayed in a 1971 bande dessinee, Elric next appeared in America alongside Conan the Barbarian. Over the next forty-five years and more, he has continued to wander from issue to issue and publisher to publisher to the delight of comics readers. Most recently, Elric returned to bande dessinee in 2014’s celebrated Elric: The Ruby Throne, the first of a projected four volume series. Written by Julien Blondel, this adaptation, in the words of Moorcock, “is the saga of the Albino I would have written myself if I had thought of it first.”

The story is simple, but utterly disastrous for all in Melniboné. After millennia of dominance and centuries of decline, Elric, the prophesied last king of Melniboné, sits in a funk on the Ruby Throne, his strength sustained only by foul arcane magics. As his city languishes in a decadence where lifeblood flows freer than wine, his cousin Yyrkoon agitates to Make Melniboné Feared Again. The massing of viking-like barbarians on the seas bring Elric and Yyrkoon to an agreement of purpose, and the cousins rout the invaders. But Yyrkoon used the invasion as a pretext to drown Elric and seize the Ruby Throne. The sea refuses to claim the White Demon of Melniboné, and Elric returns to his home to take back the throne.

The ensuing fight feeds all the souls of Melniboné, slave and slaver alike, to demons.

The Ruby Throne‘s artwork rates among the best I have had the privilege to review. Most of the previous bandes dessinees I have read indulge in vibrant reds and blues. Colorist Jean Bastitde instead makes grey and gold the standout colors of the palette. The illustrations are a collaboration between Robin Recht and Didier Poli, combining both styles in every panel. Stylized fantasy armor and realistic human figures blend together for disturbing portrayals of the callousness around Elric. Moorcock himself prefers this version of Elric as it best captures the casually cruel decadence of Melniboné. Coming from a creative culture that in the 90s wallowed in shock and in the 00s indulged in a penchant for torture porn, I am amazed at the restraint even as I am disgusted by the cruel indulgence in the suffering of others.

Melniboné is the sort of decadently cruel paradise that gets scourged time and again in recent fantasy, such as Red Seas Under Red Skies and even Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Mostly by writers promoting new moralities that lead inevitably toward Melniboné. Whether known as Melniboné, Omelas, or Canto Bight, this aristocratic paradise built on proletariat suffering reoccurs constantly. But the answer proposed to deal with its evil shifts over time, including the oppressed accepting a place as the new oppressors, getting away from it all, reform from within, and destruction from without. Within the context of these stories, this is framed as virtue struggling against vice. From the audience’s seat, more often these stories resemble little more than turf wars as yakuza replaces mafiosi replaces yakuza in a constant wave of rebellion that never stops to consider what to replace evil with, only who gets to push in whose eyeballs and lick clean the blood. (A scene illustrated inside The Ruby Throne.) Moorcock and Blondel avoid the hypocrisy inherent in most versions of this myth by framing it as a civil war among the forces of Chaos, with no respite from the evils inflicted on the servile. There are no righteous here, not one.

I’ll be honest, reading this was like getting an eyeful of Hell, with evil deeds done by evil men for evil reasons. And I know I’m not supposed to like it and that disgust is the intended effect. Demons exist, often in human skin and the talent of Team Elric is to turn craftsmanship towards repulsion and horror without resorting to the grotesque. The result is to turn Melniboné into a more vivid depiction of Hell in comics than that found in the excellent Sandman: Season of Mists. The Ruby Throne is an unsettling read, made even worse by the revelation that Moorcock was struggling with the weighty issues of Britain’s decline and somehow in his search for answers made 2+2 equal 6. I can appreciate the exquisite craftsmanship of the story and the art, both steeped in canons long discarded by our contemporaries. I don’t have to enjoy it, though.

Like with Barracuda, your own enjoyment may well depend on your tolerance of grimdark. Make no mistake, earlier SFF stories are just as violent and dark. But The Ruby Throne replaces the weighty fear of the unknown with the more personal fear of man, and that is a more harrowing thing. I would freely recommend The Ruby Throne to fans of Elric’s print adventures. To those who are more squeamish, or are responsible for children and adolescents, I recommend flipping through an online preview or library copy before purchasing.

Music from Appendix N: Vandy

This is allegedly the song behind Manly Wade Wellman's "Vandy, Vandy", but as David Drake says, "Certainly Manly was quite angry at Hoyt Axton for ‘getting it wrong’."

While there is some confusion if Manly Wade Wellman wrote the song himself, or if the song comes from the Civil War era, here is a link to the lyrics as attributed to Wellman. Axton's version uses slightly different lyrics.

Geek Gab: A Conversation with John C. Wright, Razorfist, and Jeffro Johnson

As I owe both the Puppy of the Month Club and Castalia House a number of articles this week, posting here will be more Instapundit-style until the weekend.  Don't worry, I am working on a few ideas on New Wave, Campbelline vs. Futurian movements, and continued exploration of the trope described in this post. Unfortunately, the ideas need a little more time in the oven on top of time being a bit of a scarce resource this week. Fortunately, this weekend was a treasure trove of pulp and sci-fi conversation.

First on the list is Geek Gab's special episode with John C. Wright, Jeffro Johnson, and Razorfist as they talk pulps. I hope that each guest can return soon.

Don't Split the Party: Conan's Motivations

One of the pure delights of my introduction to pulps as pulp fiction and not individual stories was reading the game bloggers that Jeffro Johnson introduced as part of his Appendix N discussions. Not only was the insight into gaming interesting, but they, as a whole, thought deeper and harder about what made science fiction and fantasy than, say, Tor.com. The best lit crit and the clearest voices telling why the old tales entertained so well was not being done inside the SFF community.

For example, take a look at yesterday's post from Rick Stump, a table-top gamer with more years in that saddle than I have in life:

  It seems that 'because he wanted to' or 'because it is his job' just don't strike contemporary writers as actual motivations, jowever, so they invent really huge events to motivate characters.

  Look at the Bond movies. The first several were '...007, your mission is...'. These days? Every trailer might as well open with a voiceover proclaiming, 

  "This time, it's personal!!!!"

  But the pulps didn't have this problem! 

  To the pulps doing something hard because it was hard was the default. Valuing any life over riches was the hallmark of a hero - being conflicted over saving a life versus becoming wealthy was a sign of moral weakness. Men saved women from peril because that is what men do.

It is a wonderful post on Conan's motivations as seen through his portrayals in the books and movies, that addresses questions that writers and players might have. Insightful and inciteful, this is a must read for pulp fans.

Pulp Radio Wednesday:The Bleak Shore

Among Those Present

"Among Those Present", by Manly Wade Wellman

"Moonlight mean romance to me then, and nothing else. I got a girl and went walking by the river, collegian-fashion; she was a Liberal Arts sophomore. There was a sort of sandy jut out into the water, and we loitered out there. Something I said made her laugh, with her face turned up to me in the mmoonlight. Then she stopped laughing, and her mouth twisted like a snake when you tread on it."

Summary: Mr. Craw is introduced to the narrator by a pair of socialites as a man who claims to be a werewolf. He freely spills his story, from silly medical experiments with pre-Rennaisance potions, to a murder under the moonlight. After many attempts to cure himself, Mr. Craw has come to the socialites' house for another cure, but both he and the narrator think that the couple just wants a bit of fun at his expense.  The narrator quickly leaves.  The Next morning, he reads in the paper about the slaughter of the socialites' party.

***

A shorter story than most in the Sin's Doorway collection, "Up Under the Roof" demonstrates the Hitchcockian wisdom in not showing the monster. Nothing that the  boy would have found up under the roof would have been more terrifying than what the reader might imagine was present. The decision to not encounter the monster at all was a brave one, for some readers may feel cheated. But the story was about a beaten down boy summoning the courage to challenge his circumstances, and not the monster under the roof.

The Pulp Elements:

Action:  While the story itself is nothing more than the confession of Mr. Craw, his account hinges on his first murder and his escape from the asylum.

Impact:  Each action is irreversible, from the making and use of the devil-ointments to the murders that follow Mr. Craw in his path.

Moral Peril:  Mr. Craw damned himself by using the ointment he made from rendered baby fat. He escaped prison through lies. By inviting Mr. Craw over for a bit of fun at his expense, the socialites sealed their fates. By fleeing from Mr. Craw, the narrator allowed him to kill the socialites' party. Once again, Wellman tells a story of the costs of moral failures.

Romance:  Mr. Craw ends the life of a young woman quite taken with him, as the moonlight turns him from man to beast.

Mystery:  Is Mr. Craw telling the truth about being a werewolf?

Structure:  Story within a story. The narrator's tale acts as a framing story to Mr. Craw's account. It also provides the obligatory revelation and punch line that characterizes pulp short fiction.  Mr. Craw's account once again follows the five act structure.  The inciting action is the choice to experiment with the devil ointments.  The turning point is Mr. Craw's move to quiet his frightened date.  And the resolution is his decision to lie to earn his freedom from jail.

In response to the "Larroes Catch Meddlers" review, Kevyn Winkless pointed out:

I'd go a step further and note that the image you use to illustrate the structure is particularly apt because the reason for the difference between "Larroes Catch Meddlers" and a typical pulp story is that most pulp stories are heroic, while this one is a tragedy - and the plot structure you've offered is the Elizabethan tragedy structure.

The key difference is that heroic action is driven by the heroes' virtues; tragedy is driven by the protagonists' failings.

Mr. Craw's story, like "Larroes Catch Meddlers" is driven by his failings - and the failings of the narrator.  Thus the use of the tragedy structure comes as no surprise.

Up Under the Roof

"Up Under the Roof", by Manly Wade Wellman

The thing up under the roof sounded as an amoeba looks, a mass that stretches out a thin, loose portion of itself, then rolls and flows all of its substance into that portion, and so creeps along. Only it must have been many, many thousands of times larger than an amoeba.

Summary: A twelve year old boy, currently trapped in a stiffing house, is haunted nightly by strange noises from the garrett above his room. Night by night, the sounds grow more disturbing, as though some thing is trying to break through the ceiling. One day, the noises don't wait for nightfall before starting. The boy grabs an axe and heads into the attic.

***

A shorter story than most in the Sin's Doorway collection, "Up Under the Roof" demonstrates the Hitchcockian wisdom in not showing the monster. Nothing that the  boy would have found up under the roof would have been more terrifying than what the reader might imagine was present. The decision to not encounter the monster at all was a brave one, for some readers may feel cheated. But the story was about a beaten down boy summoning the courage to challenge his circumstances, and not the monster under the roof.

The Pulp Elements:

Action:  Had the boy encountered the monster, there would have been a fight.

Impact:  By confronting that thing under the roof, the boy drives it off. Since that day, it has not returned.

Moral Peril:  At first glance, this is another one of Manly Wade Wellman's stories where mortal peril replaces moral peril. As the boy says:

But I knew then, and I know now, that there was something, or that there had been something, that was a mortal peril until I drove myself to face it. If I had done anything else that day, it would have come looking for me that night.

However, the crisis point of the story is whether or not the boy can summon enough courage to face his monster. Prior to this point, he has been beaten down by uncaring guardians and ignored by the same. The only help he had was what he could give himself. Courage, after all, is a classical virtue. Did the boy have enough?

Romance:  There is only one character.

Mystery:  What is up under the roof?

Structure:  An abbreviated version of Lester Dent's Master Formula. The original formula was intended for 6,000 word stories. "Up Under the Roof" is far shorter. It follows the Master Formula conventions of heaping trouble on the hero's shoulders, introducing a mystery, and shoveling even more trouble onto the hero. But where a longer story has room for multiple twists as it winds its way to the conclusion, "Up Under the Roof" heads straight towards the revelation and punchline that ends Master Formula stories. Michael Moorcock showed how the Master Formula can be adapted to longer works. Here, Manly Wade Wellman adapts it to a shorter work.

Just Released: Appendix N

Today is a holiday for many in the writing circles I frequent, for Jeffro Johnson's much anticipated Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons has been released at last!  A survey of the books that inspired the classic role-playing game, Jeffro's work has ignited renewed interest in the sword and sorcery fantasies that have been forgotten over the years. Originally begun as an investigation into how the tales of Conan, John Carter, and Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser influenced the mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons, it has become the cornerstone of the Pulp Revolution.

But don't just take my word for it:

From Alexander Macris, founder of The Escapist and creator of Adventurer, Conqueror, King:

Fantasy fiction can and does re-tell the same story endlessly because the story that fantasy re-tells is the best story - the mythic story, the story of the human experience with the sublime. But to do so, to re-tell the best story, the fantasy author must first know it, in its purest and most undiluted form. A chef who hopes to serve a fine meal must have eaten a feast of the freshest morsels, or he will not know what a fine meal is. One who has only tasted reheated and repackaged TV dinners cannot know the taste of better.

Learning the great story is a lifetime of effort and most of us come to it unprepared. We cannot recognize it when we see it. It is too rich for our blood. Howard, Leiber, Vance, Zelazny, Tolkien - all of them were closer to the great story than we are. When we read their works, we find ourselves closer to the fountainhead of the imagination, closer to the mother lode. There is an earnestness, a vitality, a vigor that has been sapped from their epigones. The success of Dungeons & Dragons has spread the beauty of fantasy everywhere, but in so doing it has spread it thin. Appendix N is the original sauce.

From Brian Niemeier, author of the award winning Soul Cycle series:

What Jeffro found when he defied the gatekeepers and delved deep into science fiction's "problematic" past was a lost canon of shared lore that every SFF fan would have been familiar with as recently as the 1970s. This genre-defining body of works now lies largely forgotten to the grave detriment of the field. With Appendix N, Jeffro lays the groundwork for a renaissance that affords science fiction the chance to recover its hidden roots.

Did you know that the line between science fiction and fantasy was once so blurry as to be almost nonexistent? That it was the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, more than Gene Roddenberry's much later work, that inspired NASA scientists to put men on the moon? That a sci-fi generation gap divides the genre conceptions of new and old school SF fans?

Jeffro's exhaustive research uncovered these, and many more, astounding revelations. Now you can benefit from his tireless work and learn the secret history that the self-appointed guardians of science fiction don't want you to know.

From Schuyler Hernstrom, author of Thune's Vision:

Jeffro has indeed unearthed something. It is the hidden heritage of our beloved genres. I feel a little embarrassed, frankly, that I was so wrong about the fiction that I love so much. What I thought I knew about the genre was a series of walls and fences, put into place to guide me toward opinions and attitudes that were presented as things inevitable. There were few signposts in this landscape. There was the Campbellian stuff. Then came the New Wave, the fathers of Now. Before all that was the Dark Ages. The pulps. Only greats like Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft had the talent to last beyond that laughable and amateurish milieu. And though they remain, their work is forever tainted with the regressive ideas that lace their work. Hovering nearby, neither here nor there, was Tolkien. The source of all fantasy, so I was told. Beloved by millions, trashed by Moorcock and Brin and other forward thinkers, he sat always in the corner, a relic of the days of yore, reeking of pipe smoke and full of old fashioned ideas. Critics, editors, writers, and bloggers, all worked overtime to assure me that we were Almost There. The baggage of the past had given way to a new era where science fiction could finally be regarded as Important, as a force to fight for human progress, as a true literature worthy of critical acclaim in the loftiest towers of the sorcerers who produce taste and proper opinion. 

That dragonfly frozen in amber, Appendix N, yielded a different story. My ideas and attitudes about the genre were changed irrevocably. For me as a writer, it could not have come at a better time. The variety and quality of Appendix N, the mashing of genres, the incredible breadth of works in the forgotten canon, it was all cool water to a man dying of thirst. 

It’s not just me. Jeffro’s work has become a lodestone, pulling at a set of emerging and disparate writers. We are out there, creating what we want from influences as varied as Lord Dunsany and anime. From the maps he drew we are navigating rivers back to their sources. We are exploring myth and knocking the rust off old ideas like heroism and honor. Venues like Cirsova are embracing the pulp heritage with no caveats or apologies. We are creating our own markets and finding readers. The stones of shattered temples are repurposed, the building material for new cathedrals. 

And all from curiosity about the origins of a game.

A First Glance through "Our Pulp Fiction Heritage"

I was recently shown the excellent essay "Our Pulp Fiction Heritage and the Significance of Moldering Magazines" written by Robert Bee.  First among its many gems is an account of the many pennames used by science fiction writers, using Appendix N authors Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore as an example.

Although fans and scholars have traced many of these pennames, much pseudonymous work has not been reprinted. The husband and wife writing team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore relied on at least seventeen pennames. Although there have been several anthologies of Moore and Kuttner's work, much of their writing, which helped shape the development and maturation of SF as a genre, remains between the covers of various pulp magazines (Kuttner and Moore, Two-Handed Engine). This fact is unfortunate because Kuttner and Moore were at times overshadowed by their pseudonyms and were not given credit for the sheer breadth and quality of their work. Some pulp magazines had issues largely written by Kuttner and Moore under various pseudonyms. They were such an effective writing team that if one of them stepped away from the typewriter for a minute the other could take over the story where the other writer left off (Clute, Encyclopedia, 827). Their stories were varied enough that some of their pennames conveyed a "heteronym," a term coined by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa who wrote his poetry and prose under a variety of pen names. Pessoa's heteronyms differ from pseudonyms in that he invented a biography and a different writing style for each of his "other selves." Kuttner and Moore's strongest heteronyms include "Lewis Padgett" and "Laurence O'Donnell." The Lewis Padgett stories, largely published in Astounding during the 40s and 50s include classics such as "The Twonky" and "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," and the Baldy series about persecuted supermen. The Padgett stories are slick, clever SF, with humor and complicated plots. The Lawrence O'Donnell stories, most notably "Clash by Night" and "Fury" are thematically complex with strong characterization and literary touches such as epigraphs, quotations, and mythological references. Kuttner and Moore also wrote under other pennames several superb science fantasy and far future novels for Startling Stories during the 40s. Kuttner and Moore's pennames conveyed distinct enough styles that fans might list their favorite writers as one or more Kuttner and Moore pseudonyms without connecting the pennames back to the original writers.

I am in awe of the skill needed, not just individually in the creation of distinct heteronyms, but also needed to work so seamlessly together as a team and in the other's heteronymic style.

It also makes me wonder what lost works of Appendix N are hidden in the moldering pages of the pulps.

Michael Moorcock's Three Day Novel

In his early days of writing, famed fantasy and Appendix N writer Michael Moorcock was a disciple of Lester Dent's Master Plot.  In the first chapter of the now out of print Michael Moorcock: Death is No Obstacle, "Six Days to Save the World", he describes the writing techniques he used to write his early novels in three days each.

Because Death is No Obstacle is out of print, I am using excerpts from Wet Asphalt, no doubt quoting far more than needed.  As always, this advice is offered to give insight into the writing process and not to dictate from a mountaintop on how to write.

"If you're going to do a piece of work in three days, you have to have everything properly prepared."

"[The formula is] The Maltese Falcon. Or the Holy Grail. You use the quest theme, basically. In The Maltese Falcon it's a lot of people after the same thing, which is the Black Bird. In Mort D'Arthur it's also a lot of people after the same thing, which is the Holy Grail. That's the formula for Westerns too: everybody's after the gold of El Dorado or whatever."

"The formula depends on that sense of a human being up against superhuman forces, whether it's Big Business, or politics, or supernatural Evil, or whatever. The hero is fallible in their terms, and doesn't really want to be mixed up with them. He's always just about to walk out when something else comes along that involves him on a personal level." 

"There is an event every four pages, for example -- and notes. Lists of things you're going to use. Lists of coherent images; coherent to you or generically coherent. You think: 'Right, Stormbringer: swords; shields; horns", and so on." 

"[I prepared] a complete structure. Not a plot, exactly, but a structure where the demands were clear. I knew what narrative problems I had to solve at every point. I then wrote them at white heat; and a lot of it was inspiration: the image I needed would come immediately [when] I needed it. Really, it's just looking around the room, looking at ordinary objects and turning them into what you need. A mirror: a mirror that absorbs the souls of the damned."

"You need a list of images that are purely fantastic: deliberate paradoxes, say: the City of Screaming Statues, things like that. You just write a list of them so you've got them there when you need them. Again, they have to cohere, have the right resonances, one with the other." 

"The imagery comes before the action, because the action's actually unimportant. An object to be obtained -- limited time to obtain it. It's easily developed, once you work the structure out." 

"Time is the important element in any action adventure story. In fact, you get the action and adventure out of the element of time. It's a classic formula: "We've only got six days to save the world!" Immediately you've set the reader up with a structure: there are only six days, then five, then four and finally, in the classic formula anyway, there's only 26 seconds to save the world! Will they make it in time?" 

"Once you've started, you keep it rolling. You can't afford to have anything stop it." 

"The whole reason you plan everything beforehand is so that when you hit a snag, a desperate moment, you've actually got something there on your desk that tells you what to do." 

"I was also planting mysteries that I hadn't explained to myself. The point is, you put in the mystery, it doesn't matter what it is. It may not be the great truth that you're going to reveal at the end of the book. You just think, I'll put this in here because I might need it later." 

"You start off with a mystery. Every time you reveal a bit of it, you have to do something else to increase it. A good detective story will have the same thing. "My God, so that's why Lady Carruthers's butler Jenkins was peering at the keyhole that evening. But where was Mrs. Jenkins?" 

"What I do is divide my total 60,000 words into four sections, 15,000 words apiece, say; then divide each into six chapters. ... In section one the hero will say, "There's no way I can save the world in six days unless I start by getting the first object of power". That gives you an immediate goal, and an immediate time element, as well as an overriding time element. With each section divided into six chapters, each chapter must then contain something which will move the action forward and contribute to that immediate goal. 

"Very often it's something like: attack of the bandits -- defeat of the bandits -- nothing particularly complex, but it's another way you can achieve recognition: by making the structure of a chapter a miniature of the overall structure of the book, so everything feels coherent. The more you're dealing with incoherence, with chaos, the more you need to underpin everything with simple logic and basic forms that will keep everything tight. Otherwise the thing just starts to spread out into muddle and abstraction. 

"So you don't have any encounter without information coming out of it. In the simplest form, Elric has a fight and kills somebody, but as they die they tell him who kidnapped his wife. Again, it's a question of economy. Everything has to have a narrative function." 

"First, [Lester Dent] says, split your six-thousand-word story up into four fifteen hundred word parts. Part one, hit your hero with a heap of trouble. Part two, double it. Part three, put him in so much trouble there's no way he could ever possibly get out of it. Then -- now this could be Lester Dent or it could be what I learnt when I was on Sexton Blake Library, I forget -- you must never have a revelation of something that wasn't already established; so, you couldn't unmask a murderer who wasn't a character established already. All your main characters have to be in the first third. All you main themes and everything else has to be established in the first third, developed in the second third, and resolved in the last third."  

"There's always a sidekick to make the responses the hero isn't allowed to make: to get frightened; to add a lighter note; to offset the hero's morbid speeches, and so on...The hero has to supply the narrative dynamic, and therefore can't have any common-sense. Any one of us in those circumstances would say, 'What? Dragons? Demons? You've got to be joking!' The hero has to be driven, and when people are driven, common sense disappears. You don't want your reader to make common sense objections, you want them to go with the drive; but you've got to have somebody around who'll act as a sort of chorus." 

"'When in doubt, descend into a minor character.' So when you've reached an impasse, and you can't move the action any further with your major character, switch to a minor character 's viewpoint which will allow you to keep the narrative moving and give you time to think." 

One last note: later in the book, Moorcock talks about how he is also fond of using stock characters, especially those from the Commedia Dell'Arte.

Moorcock takes the essential story of a Doc Savage novel, the treasure hunt, and applies it to fantasy.  Imagery, time, and character roles are all key elements to the pre-writing needed prior to the actual writing.  Using the Commedia dell'arte also gives a stock set of character types to draw from.

Also of interest in the comments is a discussion on how to scale Dent's 6,000 word formula into a 60,000 word short novel. With novels currently in the 100,000-200,000 word range, the formula could also be scaled readily into 120,000 and 180,000 forms.  However, brevity suits the pulp style better than the length of a modern doorstopper as recent authorized Doc Savage novels, such as The Sinister Shadow, suffer a bit when compared to the originals because of their length.

UPDATE:  The introduction to Death is No Obstacle yielded this tidbit as well:

And he also takes for granted a due sense of the serious nature of the entire project of storytelling. “If you believe, as I do, in simple good and tangible evil, and that evil starts with petty greed and tends to get the ascendancy, you've got to find ways of expressing that in fiction, while still giving everything its proper shadings and subtleties," he says.

For Moorcock, fiction is primarily and essentially a moral entertainment. He believes, he says, that "morality and structure are very closely linked."

Let me repeat that.  "Morality and structure are very closely linked."   Misha Burnett's Five Pillars proposed that moral conflict is a necessity of the pulp style, whether it is directly questioned by a pulp detective under stress or the Shadow's vengeful war on crime.  I have also been reaching towards an idea of structure as a sixth pillar, whether it be the five act structure, various writers' master plots, the repetitions of "Rattle of Bones", or six days to save the world.  That these two pillars might be in fact unified is on the surface counter-intuitive, as there is nothing inherently moral about five act structure.  Certainly, this thought will require further investigation.

Observations on Weird Tales

***

I have been listing to recordings of various panels from Pulpfest, a convention for pulp enthusiasts and collectors.  While the convention focuses more on the hero pulps like Doc Savage and the Shadow, a groups of panels focused specifically on the horror, fantasy, and science fiction pulps that birthed the modern genres, Appendix N, and gaming of all stripes.  The king of these pulps was Weird Tales.

Writers who got their start in this magazine include H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, Tennessee Williams, Edmund "World Wrecker" Hamilton, Ray Bradbury, Manly Wade Wellman, Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner. C. L. Moore, Theodore Sturgeon, Margaret St. Clair, and August Derlith. Weird Tales published or had the right of first refusal to a majority of Appendix N authors and works, with most of the exceptions writing before or after the magazine's run. It represents the foundational pulp magazine against which the other horror, fantasy, and science fiction pulps reacted. Initially, these magazines would pick up stories rejected by the whims of Farnsworth Wright. Later, in Joseph Campbell and the Futurian editors, they would reject Weird Tales' pulp sensibilities for the frontiers of hard SF and social SF. Over time, it is those styles of pulp fiction, championed by NYC publishers and fan clubs like the Futurians and the Hydra Club, which claimed to be the mainstream of science fiction and the Golden Age. However, the shadow cast upon genre fiction by Weird Tales reaches to the present day:

"To this day, all horror writers take something out of somebody in Weird Tales. Whether it be Clive Barker or Steven King, who is very vocal about his admiration for it. Any of them you can name - Dean Koontz - they all received their education from Weird Tales. Think of Weird Tales as the doctoral thesis you have to read to enter the college." - Frank Schildiner 

I also noticed that Weird Tales and many of its authors were centered around Chicago instead of New York City. It is curious that these Chicago authors, without links to NYC fandom circles, were the ones who have slid into obscurity, just like pulpier Campbellian writers outside that clique have as well.

Finally, meet the character that was too pulp even for Weird Tales: Doctor Satan. A villain in the vein of Fu Manchu or Fantomas, he reled on a mixture of science and the occult to aid his crimes. Unfortunately, it was the readership, not the editors, who forced Weird Tales to cancel his stories, as they did not want to read hero pulp stories in Weird Tales. This might be one of the first anti-pulp revolts in the history of science fiction and fantasy. With a readership one-sixth of hero pulps like Doc Savage or The Shadow, Weird Tales was eager to please its audience, which was writing to the magazine and pledging to cancel their subscriptions. This revolt certainly precedes Campbell's revolution by a couple years. A suspicious soul might even wonder if New York fandom voices were loud in that tumult, just like they were in later anti-pulp movements.

Pulp Radio Wednesday: Tarzan, Lord Of The Jungle - "Tarzan And The Stranger"

Quick Thoughts: Appendix N

Appendix N may not be the sum total of the canon of fantasy, but it represents a wider variety of subgenres and styles than the current field of fantasy, which was deliberately pruned to epic fantasies in the flavors of Tolkien pastiches, pastiches reacting to Tolkien's conventions, or D&D-inspired settings. It may not be the sun-source of all gaming, but it provides a view into what people actually read as opposed to what nearly 80 years of Worldcon SocJus fandom says people should read.. Appendix N represents a wider world of reading experiences than today's bookshelves, so when we sing of its praises, it's because people have been hiding good stories from us. Perhaps if Appendix N catches on, we might see a return to clever, tightly written, and shorter novels as opposed to the ever growing word bloat of the Wheel of Time, A Song of Ice and Fire, and the Cosmere.