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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

I remember when found my first Moorcock sighting.  It was at the library, and I was fifteen.  Even at a distance, that copy of Elric stood out from the books around it.  It was the version with the white and red cover, put out by Ace, I believe.

I looked through it, and I remember thinking to myself “This isn’t like the others.  It’s different.”  I had no idea.  After just a few years reading fantasy, I already had in my head what a fantasy novel ‘should’ be.  Elric was to teach me that I still had a lot to learn.

One of the oddities of getting into the genre as I did—by way of pure accident, without friends or coaches to guide me toward the best books—was that I got to ‘discover’ many authors for myself that were already famous in the field.  I suspect this isn’t uncommon among those of my generation, who didn’t have Amazon suggesting similar books to us or internet forums extolling the best books of the year.  (Life got a lot easier for me when I discovered there was a sf/fantasy independent bookstore in town.)

And so, I feel a certain satisfaction for having pulled Moorcock out of the pile without any knowledge of how important his books had been to many of the other authors I’d been reading.  I actually remember reading the first one and being amazed.  “Can you do this in a fantasy novel?” Elric was unlike anyone else I’d read about, a character I both disliked and loved at the same time.

I’ll fully admit that the books (much like those by Donaldson, which I discovered around the same time) were way over my head.  But I knew it, and that excited me, thrilled me, and drove me to expand my understanding of the genre and writing itself.  I’ll admit to being a Moorcock fanboy—my friends and I even had a love of the old Stormbringer pen and paper RPG.

His Eternal Champion motif is part of what drove me to build a shadowed connection between the various worlds of my epic fantasy stories. Warbreaker includes a sentient black sword, an homage to Stormbringer that I’ve been waiting to work into one of my books for many years.  I owe a lot to Moorcock, as does fantasy at large.  If you haven’t read his books, you’re missing something grand.

About the Author

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Brandon Sanderson

Author

Author Brandon Sanderson is the author of the best-selling Stormlight Archive fantasy series. His published works include Elantris (2005), Warbreaker (2009), the ongoing Mistborn series, the Alcatraz and Reckoners YA series, and many more.

Following the death of Robert Jordan in 2007, Jordan's wife and editor Harriet McDougal recruited Sanderson to finish Jordan's epic multi-volume fantasy series The Wheel of Time from Jordan's extensive drafts and notes. The series was concluded in 2013 with the publication of A Memory of Light, by Jordan and Sanderson.

Wikipedia |Author Page | Goodreads

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