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| (Art: James Cawthorn, 1957?) |
Michael Moorcock was born at the beginning of World War II, and memories of the bombed out rubble of London during the Blitz later contributed to some of his fictional apocalyptic landscapes. As a pre-teen, his earliest adult reading material came from books left behind by his father after the war, including those of Edgar Rice Burroughs (The Mastermind of Mars, The Son of Tarzan) and George Bernard Shaw (The Apple Cart). The writings of P.G. Wodehouse were also a formative influence in his early years. A Gustave Doré-illustrated edition of Milton's Paradise Lost also provided raw material for his imagination.
At the age of 7, Moorcock began attending Michael Hall, a progressive school in Sussex designed around Rudolf Steiner's spiritual philosophy of anthroposophy (Steiner was himself reputedly psychic). This humanistic, alternative English education had an influence on Moorcock's own way of thinking as well as on the development of his fictional mythology to come.
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| Burroughsania V1, #2, Art: Michael Moorcock? (possibly modelled on ERB's The Gods of Mars novel cover by Frank Schoonover?) |
At the same time, he was producing his first real fanzines (although by age 9 he had already created a “mini-fanzine” titled ‘Outlaw’s Own’). Moorcock cites ‘Book Collectors’ News’ as his first real fanzine, with ‘Burroughsania’ coming shortly afterwards (other fanzines included ‘Fantasiana’, ‘Jazz Fan’ and ‘Rambler’). ‘Burroughsania’ (later amended to 'Burroughsiana') was, as clearly hinted at in the name, devoted to the works (and films presumably) of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The fanzine would later expand its scope to include the likes of Robert E. Howard and Ray Bradbury. It was in 'Burroughsiana’ that Moorcock began presenting his first fantasy stories, based around the character of “Sojan the Shieldbearer”.
Sojan
As befitting its fanzine platform, Sojan was very much an homage to Burroughs’ Martian hero archetype, although he was not a transplanted Earthman as John Carter was (or was he? – it gets a bit complicated). As a character, Sojan was about as complex as Robert E. Howard's "Conan", although its possible that he may have been slightly smarter and less brutish towards women. The setting of the stories is the planet Zylor, a semi-civilized medieval world populated with lizard-monsters and myats (a kind of horned reptile mount), and featuring warring nation-states battling one another in fleets of Royal Airships armed with long-range "air-guns".
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| 1977 Savoy Books collection, Art: James Cawthorn |
The third sequence, "Sojan and the Sea of Demons", begins adding more fantasy and science-fiction elements to Sojan's world, as well as a deeper portrayal of geopolitics. After some typical incidents regarding mistaken identity, Sojan journeys through a monster-infested sea to eventually infiltrate an evil priesthood who plan to take over the world with the power of the incorporeal "Old Ones" (ancient and powerful inhuman entities). The next three adventures respectively involve Sojan's discovery of an abandoned spaceport, another religious cult, and a band of sorcerers who like to hunt men in their own version of "The Most Dangerous Game".
During this same period Moorcock also wrote similar "sword and planet" stories featuring Dek of Noothar from Mars (who battles savages and mind-controlling sorcerers while questing for the enchanted "Sword of Life"), Klan the Spoiler (in a very early writing effort which comes across more as a practice run) and Rens Karto of Bersnol (who, with is centaur friend Skortan, encounters Sojan in Moorcock's first interplanetary crossover).
A detailed look at the stories of Sojan the Swordsman (as well as Dek, Klan and Rens Karto) can be found HERE.
James Cawthorn
Around this time, Moorcock also began corresponding with artist-writer James Cawthorn, who soon began illustrating ‘Burroughsiana’ and its Sojan tales (Cawthorn had already begun creating amateur comic strips featuring Howard's "Conan"). Cawthorn would continue to be an important contributor to Moorcock’s fictional universes for half a century.
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| This issue features "The Purple Galley", a Sojan story. |
Not long after the creation of the Sojan stories, Moorcock spent some time in Paris, busking blues songs in front of the bookstore Mistrals (now Shakespeare & Co.). It’s at around this time that he also started to move away from juvenile fantasy and towards the French existentialist writers Sartre and Camus. Busking profits led to his coming across his still favorite science fiction novel, Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (originally titled Tiger! Tiger! in Europe), and from there he began to appreciate other members of the Galaxy magazine stable, including Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth, Philip K. Dick and Robert Sheckley. The impact of this early exposure would be more strongly felt in the early 1960s.
Moorcock's Multiverse
Sojan and his friends have never really been treated as part of Moorcock's large-scale, interconnected multiverse (which includes of course Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, Jerry Cornelius, Ulrich Von Bek, etc..). This may be because these stories were written for juvenile audiences and thus the style of their their texts do not quite "fit in" with Moorcock's psychologically-deeper Eternal Champion series. Also, Moorcock's later series "Kane of Old Mars" (another homage to Burroughs) somewhat makes this collection redundant.
However, an "Introduction" appears in more recent Sojan collections which tie Sojan’s world into that of Moorcock’s mature multiverse mythology. This prologue describes a man ("Sir John"/"Sojan") who is repeatedly reincarnated throughout time and space to become a hero in each new world he materializes in. In each new incarnation, he fights to maintain a balance between good and evil men. This (probably) new text essentially describes Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion”, an ur-character who reappears (usually implicitly under different names) as the main character in many of Moorcock's later books.
In another story ("The Plain of Mystery"), dragon-like creatures called “shifla birds” appear, this name apparently a precursor to “skefla’a”, the name of the multiverse-navigating organ of the Phoorn (the Melniboneans’ dragon-kin - see The Skrayling Tree (2003), "Duke Elric" (1997)). A couple episodes later Sojan visits the castle of Kandoon, whose name would later be finessed into Kaneloon, an important city on the edge of Chaos (see "The Last Enchantment" (1962), "Master of Chaos" (1964), and "The Sleeping Sorceress" (1973)).
Another more foundational harbinger of things to come occurs in the story “Rens Karto of Bersnol”, where Rens and Skortan are accidentally transported to Sojan’s world of Zylor through some kind of teleportation technology. This concept could be seen to imply a “multiverse”, defined later as parallel realities which are variations of one another and which can be crossed between under certain conditions. The multiverse would not be “officially” created until 1962’s “The Sundered Worlds”, but here a temptation towards such a cosmology already seems to appear.
In another series, Moorcock’s similar character “Dek of Noothar” encounters the “Sword of Life”, which invigorates its wielder with power and protects the wielder from psychic attack. The concept of a power-transferring sword (not exactly unique in fantasy, of course) would reappear in a less benevolent form as Elric’s runesword "Stormbringer", probably the most famous sword in fantasy next to Arthur's "Excaliber".
Epilogue
https://dmrbooks.com/test-blog/2019/8/29/sojan-shieldbearer-the-original-eternal-champion
http://www.savoy.abel.co.uk/HTML/sojan.html
https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/533505/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00C2V4RS6
Next Chapter: The Golden Barge
(Previous: Introduction)
