It was like seeing Star Wars for the first time, experiencing literature in a new way. It combined the scholarship of literature with the excitement of comic books. As a teenager, Elric of Melnibone was like no other book I had read. He is one of the architects of the fantasy genre. I must say I am stunned to learn that a giant like Moorcock is having such difficulty getting his groundbreaking work onto the screen.

The BBC are still developing a TV series based on Moorcock's four-volume History of the Runestaff fantasy series.Īnd don't forget Corum. We may yet see some of Moorcock's other work on the screen, though. The production budget would also need to be enormous. The Elric stories are pretty grim and almost nihilistic in a way that even GoT at its grimmest is not, and they also lack a well-developed, large supporting cast that a TV show or even a movie would really need to work. An Elric movie has been mooted since the 1970s and never taken off, long before The Witcher or GoT came on the scene. However, Geralt is similar to Elric only superficially: both are white-haired and have the nickname 'the White Wolf,' but Geralt is not a sickly albino and his day job, killing monsters for coin, is much lower-profile than Elric's stories which normally see his homeland, the entire world or, on occasion, the entire universe in peril.Īlthough Geralt and Elric are very different characters, that superficial similarity seems to shut Hollywood's interest in the character, although I suspect such interest was relatively low to begin with: the Elric stories are hugely important in the history of SFF, but are much less well-known these days than either Sapkowski or Martin's work.

Elric went on to appear in numerous short stories, novellas and novels (most notably Stormbringer, published in 1965), the most recent of which was published in 2010.Įlric may be counted as one of fantasy's single most influential and important characters, inspiring a character of the same name in the television series Babylon 5, the rather blatant homage character of Anomander Rake in Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen and, indeed, Geralt of Rivia.

So much for “homages”.'Įlric's creation first appeared in the 1961 novella The Dreaming City, as a nobleman of a doomed empire cursed to wield the soul-feasting, intelligent sword Stormbringer. 'Heard today that some companies are turning down Elric project because it reminds them too much of GOT and The Witcher.

Stormbringer michael moorcock