Something that sets Moorcock’s sword-and-sorcery apart from the work of many contemporaries who were also in just as much of a hurry to make a sale, is that they engage the imagination on multiple levels. Many of the threads that sometimes connect these tales tend to be mostly thematic, or even rather straight-forward and playful character-hopping cameos (all of the four aforementioned Eternal Champions appear in one another’s respective series), or else don’t really arise until later works (such as Elric’s The Moonbeam Roads trilogy). Most of these stories were written early in his career or had their genesis in his fast-paced, pulpier style of writing, and thus they are unabashedly and unapologetically fantasy adventure tales written with speed, color, and imagination. It is these stories, specifically the core works of Elric, Corum, Hawkmoon, and Erekosë, that are likely to be of most interest to fans of Tales From the Magician’s Skull – and these works also just happen to be some of the best entry points into Moorcock’s long, and at times complicated, body of work. Moorcock has always kept moving his own goal posts, repeatedly striking out into new territory while maintaining a connection with the kinds of stories for which he is best known – but some of lore surrounding his later work, work that sees him heavily invested in stringing threads between series and characters in a recursive web of characters and cross-references, can perhaps frustrate a newcomer’s desire just to read and enjoy his fun adventure stories, such as those tales of his justly famous Eternal Champion. and, on occasion, ‘all of the above,’ it’s that Moorcock has also playfully created a kind of uber-narrative spanning his entire output as a writer. It isn’t simply that Moorcock’s six decade (and counting!) career has seen him writing everything from pure pulp sword-and-sorcery, New Wave science fiction, alternative history, space opera, genre satire, contemporary litfic. One of the barriers to entry to the works of varied and prolific British author Michael Moorock is the interconnectedness of much of his work.

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