A Geek History of Time - Episode 247 - The Hidden Influence of Michael Moorcock Part II

Episode Date: January 20, 2024

I'm saying that we were getting to the movies. Yeah, and I'm only going to get into a few of them. Because there were way too many for me to really be interested in telling you this clone version or this clone version in the early studio system. It's a good metric to know in a story art. Where should I be? Or there's beast. I should step over here.

Uh, yeah. At some point, at some point, I'm going to have to sit down with you like and force you, like pump you full of coffee and be like, no, okay, look. And are swiftly and brutally put down by the minute men who use bayonets to get their point across. Well done there. I'm good, Amy. And I'm also glad that I got your name right this time.

I apologize for that one TikTok video. Men of this generation wound up serving a whole lot of them as a percentage of the population because of the war, because of a whole lot of other stuff. Oh yeah. And actually in his case, it was pre-war, but you know. I was joking. Did he seriously join the American Navy? He did.

Fuck it. This is a geek history of time. Where we connect an artery to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock. I'm a World History and English teacher here in Northern California. And my orange cat has lately gotten in the habit of when we're trying to put our son to bed, the cat has decided that is when he most wants to jump up into Robert's bed and hang out. And while we're putting Robert to bed, that's not such a problem. His mom can brush Robert's teeth

while I'm trying to keep the cat's attention down at the front end of the bed and we make it work. The problem comes in when it is time for my son to go to sleep and rottled once attention. And that that causes some problems. And so we had been trying to figure out, you know, how are we going to keep the cat out of the room at least until Robert falls asleep? Well, my wife, being the cleaver one of the two of us figured out that the one thing that is more interesting to Ronald than the foot of Robert's bed is our back patio because that's outside. I mean, it's not really outside, but it's outside.

It's as outside as he ever gets. So a couple of nights ago, she left the door out of the patio open and Ronald went out there and we didn't have a problem getting her son to go to sleep. But getting her son to go to sleep. But about, I don't know, an hour after after my son's bedtime, I heard in a ban noise from from the patio and I got up and I went out there and see, we don't just have the one cat. We have two cats. Ronald is a coward. I don't know how else to put it. I don't mean it in a

terrible judgmental way. He just he's he's not a fighter. He's a lover. Luna is apparently quite ready to go to the mattresses with like anybody. Another cat had gotten into our backyard. And I got out onto the patio in time to see her on her hind legs with her with her tail four times its normal size. Just ready to knock the door down to get out of our covered patio to get at the other cat Who was all of about 18 inches away from the door? Staring at her like what bitch bring it

Bring it um, and she's like oh, yeah., oh, yeah, I will, I will. And, and poor Ronald literally, it's about four feet behind her. And he looked up at me with an expression that, that honest to God, I could hear him saying, I don't understand what's going on. Why can't we just be friends? And so, yeah, so I had to I got him in the house easy, but I kind of had to chase her and literally pick her up because she was not going to let this other motherfucker be in her yard. God damn it. So yeah, um, I found out that she is, as a matter of fact, actually a marine. I had not realized that my other cat ate crayons, but here we are. So that's what I have going on. How about

you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I'm a high school US history teacher up here in the Northern California area. And I have started watching Picard. And for the second time, I've started watching it. The first time I started watching it, it was pre-pandemic. And I was dating a person with whom I was watching it. And then when pandemic hit, I don't know if I told you, but that storied relationship disintegrated because I needed to be home with my kids the whole time. And literally I just, I didn't have the bandwidth. The bandwidth.

Yeah. And she did not like how I needed to leave things and needed to be done. Yeah. You know, like still grateful for the attempt, bummer about the timing. Yeah. It probably accelerated what was naturally going to happen. So it was, it was weird. Oh, very likely. And that's okay, like that's why dating exists. It's interesting because I still have the sense memory of the smell of the cooking in her house and of the incense and of, you know, her lotion

as, you know, we're watching, massaging each other, that kind of thing, in watching Picard. So I had those memories pop up, which was kind of interesting. It's also interesting because I remember thinking at the time, because we were doing our podcast by this point. We were probably 20 or 25 episodes in. Yeah. I think so. Because the podcast started in 2019. Yeah. I started watching Picard with this person in 2020. Okay.

Yeah. But so I remember thinking at the time, wow, nostalgia is really weird this time around because it's a lot darker. So there's probably going to be an analysis of Picard down the road from what we're doing now. OK, I look forward to it. Yeah, but suffice to say, I'm really enjoying the fan service that season three has brought. OK.

It's, I highly recommend it. OK. I'm not making that my recommendation this week, but I do highly recommend this series. There's a series tenderness shown by by Patrick Stewart and vulnerability shown by him. Tells us something about how they're writing the character. Yeah. So anyway, that's that's what I've got.

When last we spoke, um, you were telling me just a whole bunch about the upbringing, the the culture in which he swam. Yes. The like the the milieu that that gave to us, Michael Morkock. So I assume there's going to be more cock. Yes. Yes. Yes. There will be. Um, and I had just left off with a recap of what the new waves kind of meant in science fiction and stating that, um, you know, fantasy and science fiction are are kind of siblings and the new wave and science fiction is also important in in fantasy as a genre and Morecox influence in the development and the growth of the new wave in SF is

Really hard to overstate in the UK new wave science fiction was very strongly centered as a literary movement within the science fiction magazine New World, which he was the editor of from 1964 to 1970. And he used the magazine as a vehicle to promote new wave, although he probably didn't think of it as new wave at the time, because the term hadn't quite totally been codified. It started out being a term that was used by outside observers in some cases who were not complimentary.

Because the new wave was controversial because it involved explicit sex scenes for the first time in science fiction. It involved a discussion of sexual identity and again race and controversial topics that you know, just like nowadays, I don't want any politics in my you know, film medium here.

There was the same same kind of of call by people who didn't want this stuff to be in their beloved genre. But eventually, New Wave science fiction authors did embrace the term. But authors like Brian Aldis, JG Ballard, and Morkock himself appeared in the pages of New Worlds. Morkhawk himself appeared in the pages of New World and their work departed really very widely in the ways that I described from the genre work that had come before. And so now this is the 1960s. So we kind of have to talk a little bit about what came before in fantasy literature. Obviously we have Tolkien. The Hobbit came out in 1939. Lord of the Rings was first published in the 1950s.

And I mentioned this already in the last episode, but it's pastoralist. It's royalist. It's immensely Anglo-centric. And it esp me break in real quick. Okay. I've noticed in and I might have even asked this in prior episodes. I've noticed a binding together of sci-fi and fantasy. Yes. And I've seen plenty of memes online discussing the difference and how the differences are actually very cosmetic and stuff like that. Yeah. Were they conscious of that bundling even at the time? I think a question like how conscious where they have the bundling, it's going to depend on what author editor or whoever it is that you're talking about. OK. By and large, there is overlap where there are writers who have done both science fiction

and fantasy. Okay. By and large, they tend to like a fantasy writer tends to say a fantasy writer size, fiction writer tends to say a science fiction writer. Sure. Like if you're a horror, like if you're a supernatural horror writer, you kind of, you know, you might kind of bounce between the two, but what my understanding in the reading about it that I've done is that the the twining of science fiction and fantasy with one another

fiction and fantasy with one another. It largely has to do with shelf space in bookstores. Sure. Like, you know, Westerns is like, well, this is fiction, but it's like in a real time period in history. Right. Horror is all of these books are scary. You know, literary fiction is this is in the world

that we inhabit, you know, this is fiction. And science fiction and fantasy both have in common, well, this involves make believe, this involves stuff that doesn't actually exist. And in one of these categories, there is a level of, well, it's, it's whizz-bang, you know, futuristic make believe stuff. And in this other one, it's fairy tale, make believe stuff. Right. You know, futuristic make-believe stuff. And in this other one, it's fairytale make-believe stuff.

Right. You know, and yeah, so that's a very big part of why the two genres have gotten mashed together. In more recent eras, like especially post-new wave, what you have seen within the genre is a move toward more meta-understanding of what separates two genres from each other. And there's some self-awareness. And there is some movement toward like, well, this is speculative fiction, which is like a more literary, I have my nose in the air way of talking about science fiction and fantasy together at once.

You know, and so I think that's where a lot of that is rooted, is just in the realities of trying to sell stuff to people. Sure. Sure. So, but like there's, in point of practical fact, we could probably do at least an episode on that as a thing with the development of just genre fiction as a thing. Yeah. the development of just genre fiction as a thing. Yeah, I mean, I taught in genres a few years back in a drama class that I was

teaching because the structures of COVID and stuff. And so we had a good long discussion about what, what the difference between a thriller and a horror story. Yeah, well, I didn't use horror, but yeah, like thrillers and suspense Ooh, and the difference there and like just breaking things down and and pointing out yes You can have elements of each in each and so yeah largely the divine line becomes the decision that you make But yeah, no, I think genre fiction will be a cool thing to discuss. Yeah, okay, so anyway, so anyway So Tolkien I just mentioned, again, pastoralist, royalist, and immensely Anglo-centric and deeply, deeply, deeply so Catholic.

CS Lewis has the Narnia series, which was also the 50s. Right. And this was explicitly written for kids. It is an overt Christian apology. Right. Like, yes, okay, the line is Jesus for fuck's egg. We get it. Clive. Okay, we understand. Like, very English. It's so like wow. Yeah, so so English. Now, also in the 1950s, we have the author pool, Anderson, who's an American, who is writing books like the broken sword, three hearts and Three Lions, and The High Crusade. And Anderson's stuff is pretty straight up. Heroic Fantasy, it's Ferries, Chivalric Knights. Endings aren't always happy, but moral lines are very clear cut. The good guy is a good guy. The bad guy is a bad guy. Like there's no, there's no gray areas.

It's, it's fairytale kind of morality. Jack Vance in the 1950s put out the dying earth. Okay. And at some point, I'm going to have to write it. I'm going to have to do something about Jack Vance because I absolutely unabashedly love Vance so much. His world building is bonkers. It's wonderfully wonderfully picker-esque. It's delightfully weird. In the dying earth, he has a protagonist, Kugel the clever, who is 110% a D&D thief like totally like I could stat him out. And QGL is a

Rogish character. He is not heroic like he's always looking for the angle. He's always looking about, you know, how can I backstab this person and get ahead? Sure. But he always winds up getting his come-up hits in the end. He always winds up coming a cropper of his own vinyl motivations. Okay. He gets away with all of it because he's clever enough to pull himself out of all the crummy situations he gets himself into. But it's always by the skin of his teeth and he always winds up embarrassed as part of it. Okay. The rest of the stories set in the dying earth always end with the hero fixing what's wrong and getting the girl like it's it's very

very very funny kind of stuff. And then we have Fritz Lieber and Fawford in the Graham House who are two of my favorite fantasy characters ever. This is very much sort and sorcery stuff. It's Conan with more humor and less philosophy. Every Conan story is a polemic about civilization. It's all a soft. We need to be barbaric. It's Conan written by a guy who's not on the fast track to suicide.

Yeah, yes, yeah, pretty much. And Faford and the Grey Mouser, the eponymous heroes are mercenaries. They are not squeaky clean, but they're always heroic. They're always, you know, you know, they, they, like the gray mouse or if you stat him out as a D&D character, he might have a level or two in warlock, but he barely ever uses those abilities and like, you know, and he always, you know, he always, they always wind up getting sucked into saving the damsel in distress or they fall backwards into saving the city from the awakening of eventual ancient goddess or what have you? Like, yeah. So, um, I'm focusing

for now on the stuff that was in circulation at the time, a work arc first published, Elric. There is a whole lot of fantasy literature to be found earlier, no matter what popular conception might tell you about Tolkien being the atom of fantasy authors. He's kind of more like the Moses, but that's kind of beside the point. Like, fantasy has a history that goes all the way back to the the Victorian era and before, but at the time that we're moving into the postwar era and we see the new wave happening in science fiction, this is what was being put onto bookshelves as fantasy. Did they have as many public libraries

as part of their culture in England or like how are people getting these books? That's a really good question. I presume they did, but I don't know. Okay. I know that booksellers and bookshops were certainly at that time, they were a big thing. That would be something I would need to look up, I'm not sure. But this is stuff that is being put out. And of course, remember that Morkock is publishing

New World magazine, which is a anthology sized magazine that's being put out on, I want to say, it started out on a monthly basis. Later on, they started losing money and had to go quarterly. But so, one way or the other, this is the stuff that's getting out and being read by people, popularly. So in 1961,

Morkock wrote The Dreaming City. And it's a direct response to all of this and it is not just a, oh, hey, I see what he did there. I'm going to do my own version of that. It is, it is a retort. It would be a good way of describing it. It's the first appearance of his most famous and influential protagonist, Elric of Mel

Nibone. In it, Elric leads a fleet of mercenaries into the capital city of his own homeland to reclaim his throne as emperor of Melnibone and rescue his true love and cousin, the beautiful Chymaril from his other cousin, the ambitious and incestuous Yirkun, whose Chymaril's brother, who betrayed Elric and is going to force himself on chimeril. Now, in a traditional fantasy plot, Elric would arrive and liberate his people from the tyranny of his cousin. He would defeat year-cune after a difficult fight and rescue his true love from peril. The throne of Meldomo Day would be his and he would rule rightly and justly thereafter.

That is not what happens. So someone tells me this, this is not that. No. Elrich's fleet devastates Mel Nibbodez, outer defenses, and lands an army of violent cutthroats in the heart of the capital city. While his army of cutthroats fight and loot their way across the city, Elric sneaks away to find Kymaril, Yurkoun is waiting for him and the two men fight each of them wielding one of the two flabled, sorry, black runeswords of Mel Nibbonae. Elric has stormbringer and Yurkoun has mourn blade. Oh wow, good names. Oh yeah. Oh, like so evocative.

Tell me one of them. That's the other. That's the other. Oh no. And then he's like, oh, you've ruined my sword. But I'll see. Yeah. And that one I'm hardly not mad about.

Um, Elrick wins the fight. Uh huh. But in the process, Stormbringer not only kills your coon, but also Kymaril devours both of their souls to feed itself and and gives some of that and feeds some of that life force to Elr giving him additional speed at the fortitude. Wait a minute, we see something like this in the second season of Vox Markina. Don't we? Yeah. So devastated by the loss of his life, the loss of the love of his life, Elric returns to the battle to find his army fleeing from Melnibane and reinforcements.

Now, his army are mercenaries, right? Yes. His army are all pirates and cutthroats and bad men. So this is that like he's not quite a good guy, but he has an honorable code. Yes. Okay. Or he tries to. We'll get to it.

They all run back to their ships. They flee and the dragons from beneath Melnibene have been awakened and they're being chased by the dragon riders of Melnibene. And Elric uses sorcery and calls upon his demonic patron, Ariak Duke of Hell, demonic patron, and Ariak, Duke of hell, to aid in the fleet's escape. Okay. Ariak decides, sure, I like you. I'll help you get away. So Elric and the ship he is on, get teleported to just outside a port, thousands of miles away. The rest of the fleet winds up getting burned in the water and destroyed

by the melt of its hands. Now, is this a literary reprisal of them for running off, or is this a reduction so that we only have this ship to follow, and also we like the Odyssey or what? I'm going to get to it. Okay. So in a fit of despair, seeing that everything has failed, all of his attempts to try to reclaim his throne, save his people from their own decadence and unite with love in his life, all of these things that he wanted to do, they've all failed in a fit of despair, Eric Flings Stormbringer off of the ship. Oh. And then reala, and then remembers, oh right, without the sword, I'm essentially a cripple,

which I'll get to in a moment. And so he dives into the water after it and swims to shore to the gears and insults of his own crew who are calling him a coward and a traitor because he's abandoning them. Uh-huh. Okay. So now he's a man without a country without a ship. Uh, potentially without a sword, but something tells me. No, you know, you get to get the sword back. The point I'm trying to make here and the reason that only one ship gets away and the reason all of this happens is because part of more cox point is that Ellorick is a fuck up. Okay. He's a very powerful sorcerer. He is one of the most powerful spellcasters in the world and he has a badass magical

sword that makes him a deadly warrior. But he's a self-centered and self-alow than jerkass. He is doomed to always hurt those around him. And although he makes a show of trying to be heroic, he always falls back on Stormbringer or else the assistance of demonic forces to get him out of sticky situations which always winds up killing the people he cares about. Okay. So here's the thing, Elric,

and I realized the way I had the way I wrote this, left some important details out before I got into the plotline of that story. One of the things that you learned very early on in the story is that Elric is the result of hundreds of generations of royal inbreeding. And so, and so he is very intelligent, but he was born feeble, like immensely physically weak, terribly frail. Okay. Like, you know, think about, you know, Teddy Roosevelt being an asthmatic weakling is a kid. Right. This is kind of the same kind of concept.

He has to, if he, before he found Stormbringer, in order to maintain his own vitality, be able to move around and do things he had to concoct elixirs of special herbs. And if he doesn't have, if he's not feeding stormbringer, which like many of many of the stories of Elric will start with him, you know, lying exhausted on a palate somewhere because no, I'm not, I'm not going to feed the sort of, I'm not going to kill people to do that. No. And so he's relying on the herbs to try to keep him able to move. And he's run out of herbs. You know, this,

this is recurring kind of thing. This seems very like he grew up watching a relative who was addicted to pain killers after the war or something. Because we're describing is is the it's addiction. It is. Yeah, you're describing addiction. Yeah. Yeah. It 100% is. Yeah. And there was not any mention anywhere of an overt connection to anybody in his life. However, it should be noted that he was in the music scene of the time and heroin was a big thing. Well, okay, okay. So I was going to say even in 61, but it it kind of I guess it depends on what kind of music because I'm thinking of all the blues musicians who were in rehab at the same time in Tennessee. Which was in the mid 60s, so they it was said if you wanted to hear the best blues music in the world, you would go to this one particular rehab center

Yeah, like yeah wild scene that the author painted Yeah, so is is heroin That big in England in 1961 Or is that us kind of I don't know the 60s I got overall decade I Think I'm willing to bet part of that is me reading the 60s is an overall decade. But the the mod subculture ran on some on substances there was there as I mentioned briefly kind of in passing on the last episode, um, amphetamines were a thing. Oh, within the mod subculture. Um, and there were there, there was drug use amongst all the other groups, the rockers and the teddies and, uh, everybody really. Um, so yeah. Um, But so, so, Ellric shows this, this, he follows the archetype of attic behavior.

He is, he was so feeble, he spent his childhood studying about the rest of the world outside of Melnibune. And because of that, he, unlike the rest of the Melnibuneans, developed a conscience. This is taken directly from Morkhawks writing. So he has some level of empathy and he has a conscience whereas other Mel Nibonans are utterly given away to their own superiority and their own decadence. And at one time, El Nibone ruled the rest of the world, but they've become so insular and so focused on their own pleasures that they've just ignored the rest of the world and their empire has kind of collapsed without them really caring. So he sets out into the world because he wants to try to rescue his people from their own

decadence. So this sounds very fresh, but yeah, this sounds like Morkark read some, oh God, I don't remember the author's name because I'm me. But the book I Claudius, the one that the movie ends up being or the TV series ends up being made on, but this sounds like he grew up reading that because I know that the series or the movie came out in 76 or 77, but it was based on a book that was like 40 years prior. So sometime in the 30s, sounds like he grew up reading that or he'd been exposed to that because what he was describing is the popular account of Claudius, lame footed, yeah, and historian who has a really

good understanding of the people that he then sends the Roman army to slaughter. Yeah. Yeah. And so we'll fuck up, by the way, like he's, yeah, Claudius is found hiding behind if you believe the story he's found hiding behind a curtain trembling and the Praetorians are like, you, yeah, you'll do. Yeah, you know, so you can push you around. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so L. Rick is a conscious and intentional response to Tolkien. Elric is a conscious and intentional response to Tolkien. Tolkien's universe is fundamentally a just and benevolent one threatened by a corrupting force. The young kingdoms of Morcox imagination are a battleground between the forces of chaos and law.

But opinion that we're going to come back to it later. And their inhabitants are a lot more realistically imagined. As a character, Elric is a fun house mirror of Tolkien's idealized king, Erigorn. Erigorn is not quite human because he's one of the dune of dine and thus just a little bit elvish, arrogant as wise, empathetic, noble of heart, physically vital and selfless. Elric importantly, he gets things right. Yes, he is the, he is the competent man. Yes, Elric is also not quite human because the male nibbeneans are just a little bit

fiend touched and they've been warped over generations by their isolation from the rest of the world and their dabbling and sorcery. Elric is short-sighted, selfish, morally ambiguous on a good day, and physically feeble without a supply of special vitalizing herbs or storm bringers unnatural life force. a life force. Before Elric, fantasy had not seen an antihero like him. Rose, like the gray mouse, or in QL existed, but mouse, or has a heart under his mercenary exterior that pushes him to being a good guy. And QVL, as I mentioned, always winds up, he's always to himself on his own petard. Right. Is she and he's always wind up with him trapped in a pocket dimension or naked and running away from a crowd of townsfolk or something.

So like Mal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and and Q. He'll get away with everything because of his charm. Um, L is ability is weasened to tight spaces. Yes. Yeah.

Lric is charismatic. He's, he's able to get people to follow him. He's really good at getting people to be able to follow him, but he's not. Yeah, he he he fucks it up. He he screws it up in the fourth quarter and and you know, fades in the stretch. And and then he's not charming. Like nobody nobody likes him. People follow him. People develop intensity too., but he's not liked. Like he doesn't have friends. He's a psychologically complicated figure whose deep seated self-loathing and where he mentioned his literal addiction, push him to inevitably do awful things to his friends and his loved ones. It is more cock looking at Tolkien and looking at every other heroic fantasy hero and saying, uh, no, let's let's talk about the kind of person who would actually wind up doing this shit. Like, you know, right. Who's who's actually going to go looking for a magic sword? Like,

why would you go doing that? What would really be your motive for that? Um, and, and, and, you know, does most of his stories, because you mentioned the other guys, the story ends up hung up by his own batards and this fucked up stupid way. This guy ends up like, you know, wanted to do, like do most of his have him end up just kind of abandoned and and wandering about looking for meaning. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. No, there's yes, absurdism, nihilism. I was going to say nihilism doesn't sound absurd. Yeah. Honestly, it does sound nihilistic and it does sound at the end of the day like, you know, it sounds like, and this starts in 61. How often does this character show up? Is he kind of the only one that Warcock writes about or is he kind of here today going to well, he he he continues showing up for.

Let's see, he starts in the 60s, he keeps showing up for over 30 years, but Warcock, Warcock winds up creating a literal multiverse with a number of other protagonists who are not who there are themes that reappear in the other protagonists' stories like they all have some kind of magic weapon. There is always the conflict between chaos and law, but and there's always some level of moral ambiguity, but few of them are as pathetic as, as Elric. Because the thing is, Elric, Elric is that figure on a heavy metal album cover, right? He is this, you know, big tall, spiky black helmet with the black ruin sword and the flowing bone white hair. And, you know, he, he is that, you know, amazing badass. Man, a guy looks so cool and edgy character. But that part of the point for Morkock is that yes, he looks like a badass, but if you actually

step back and examine him, he is pathetic. So what I was going to say is that like this fits with the evolution of various philosophies going from existentialism of creating your own meaning, but honestly, this doesn't fit with that. Yes, it has elements of abandonment and anguish, but that's, it doesn't seem like there is a moral and that's why we must act. Like he keeps fucking it up like you say. This does sound like deconstructionism.

This does sound like, here is a hero, here is his truth and watch it flicker on the flame. This does sound like, you know, at the end of the day, all we have is ourselves, which last episode I said sounded like an optimistic version of Iron Rand, but it sounds like maybe it's less optimistic actually, because the only optimism is that he survives, which seems as much curse as it is a blessing. It's it's pretty cynical. Yeah. Okay. So so, so

Elric Elric shows up as this character in 1961. And Drist Doe Erden needs to write Elric of Milnibane a check. So does Vlad Teltos. The, the first one you mentioned, that's the yeah, drow. Okay. Mm hmm. Okay. Okay. Drist Doe Erden needs to write Elric a check. So does Vlad Teltos. So do all the members of the black company. I'm saying all of these names and I have in my notes here. I know you're going to maybe recognize one of them. Yeah, one. Yeah, but my point is that every edgy, morally gray fantasy protagonist since 1960s owes a debt to Ellric and Morecock for their existence.

Okay. It's only after Ellric that we see the burgeoning, burgeoning of low fantasy as a genre, subgenre known for moral ambiguity, anti-hero protagonists, social commentary, and frequently, though not always, a lower level of ambient magic in their settings. That's not, again, that's sometimes, but not always. In 1979, Robert Asperin and Lynn Abbey started publishing the Thieves World anthologies. And that series focuses on, yeah, that series focuses on the Dregs of Society, the lowest run of society, in a city on the edge of a crumbling empire. The characters are desperate, often violent, and they make moral compromises on a daily basis to survive.

In 1977, Steven Ardonaldson published the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the unbeliever. And the main character of that series is a leper, who is summoned into another dimension. He thinks that his whole adventure is a delusion and thinking that he's suffering from a delusion, he's essentially gonna die because leprosy's gotten to his brain. He sexually assaults the woman who heals him on his arrival.

And at the end of the first novel, um, he defeats the big bad and then finds himself back on earth and a leopard again. Antihiro. Yeah. You know, go on, finish that, but I want to bounce back to a couple of things. Okay. He's an antihero. He's physically feeble.

You see the parallel here. I do. It just occurs to me that there were two things that were just kind of pinging for me with the L-Rick in 61. One, just a couple of years later, you start to have spaghetti westerns. Yes. And I'm thinking of like ultimately of like a fistful of dollars. I'm thinking of later on the the outlaw Josie Wales.

Good to back down. Yeah. And that of course made me think Samurai films. Yeah. Yojimbo came out in 61. Mm hmm. And so he's literally about unreliable narrators and more ambiguity. Yeah. Wait, is that you Jimbo or is that? Oh, I'm sorry, I'm thinking of Rochemone. Rochemone. Yeah. But yeah, you Jimbo is. You've got the wander and Ronan.

You've got Jedi Gecky. You've got. It's a dark and shitty place. And here we go. Yeah. And you, you have that again, the shits fucked up kind of vibe and the isolation at the end of it. You know, like if you look at how the hidden fortress begins and ends,

it's, you know, the two of them, they only have each other. And so it's this constant refrain. So that's why I guess I was tripping on the, does he end up wandering the earth kind of thing? Because then I was thinking, and then you told me, yeah, he comes out in the 70s as well. And I think, oh, what TV series starts with a guy wandering the earth and ends with him wandering the earth like king and kung fu exactly the TV series he's not Chinese um but but

But David Caradine's kung fu is is very much a western It is very much a Western, an Eastern Western, but it's still pulling on those same threads. That's no longer about the wagon train, it's no longer about the family in Bonanza, it's about this one guy going town to town. Yeah, that makes sense. And all these shitty people,

all the shitty people here he encounters on the way. And it takes the crap out of. Yeah. The difference is, I guess, like he he's not enffeebled. He's not, like there are differences, but there is this sense of isolation that everybody seems to be pulling on in that period. Mm-hmm. So across Shond. And so. Yeah, well, and in the post-war world, what you said, I think it was toward the end of our, it was either toward the end of our last episode or just a little bit ago, about the conscious construction of identity for this generation. There is something about the conscious, yeah, There is something about the conscious construction of identity there's a level of separation from the forces

that there's a consciousness of the forces that made you or the reasons that you chose what you chose. Right. Does that make sense? I don't know. Yeah, no, it kind of comes back. It kind of comes back to motorcycle culture on some level. Like, yes, you're all room, rooming in the same area together or whatnot. But your vehicle is a solitary one. You know, and it's, you know, on some level. So, yeah, those things all kind of track for me. They all make sense. Yeah.

Do we know? Yeah. Was there a baby boom in England? There was there was. Okay. So we're not having there was actually there was actually a kind of a two phase. There was actually kind of a two phase baby boom. Okay. There was there was an immediate peak in 45 46. 4546. And there was another one, the smaller crest of the wave in or 49. I'm trying to remember when the date was, but yeah. So in 1983, so still moving forward, but we still keep coming back to these tropes. Right. Jeregg by Stephen Brust has a main character who is an underworld boss, assassin, and practitioner of dark magic, named Vlad Talatos, who I mentioned above.

The books in the series frequently highlight the gulf between the nobility and commoners and the poorest of the poor. There is a significant fantastical racism involved against humans, Talatos, who is a human, as you might expect, is morally very flexible. The books are all written in first person. Vlad speaks with almost charming warmth about what it takes sometimes to, like, you know, when you're going to sneak up behind somebody to strangle them, there are three things you got to keep in mind. You know, it's like, oh, okay, got it. Yeah, like the banal practical, yeah, of the horrible. Like, of the, of the, oh my God, you're a murderer.

Yeah. When, when planting a toilet bomb, one must first remember. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and so then in 1984, 1984, Glenn Cook published the first book of the Black Company, which follows the titular band of elite mercenaries. Spoiler alert, they work for the bad guy, they work for an evil sorceress queen, and their job is putting down rebellions.

Okay. At least at first, the story starts out as dark gray to black morality. It is very, very immediately and obviously a response to Vietnam. And part of the eventual motivation for the protagonist is finding a way to achieve a kind of redemption. Which is also kind of part of LRICS whole thing. The difference here is in all of these cases, there is a level of earnestness. Well, maybe not Thomas Kevin at the unbeliever, but with the rest of these characters, none of the rest of these protagonists, dris or any of the rest of them, are being pointed at by the author as, look at this fucking loser. And that is an undercurrent. That's never what he

says. And everything in in Morkhawks prose is written in this amazingly evocative, almost baroque kind of way. And, you know, Elric and a lot of the other characters talk like, you know, characters in opera. You know, I mean, it's all done, it's all done to the 9s in this elevated emotional pitch and you know it drips with mood and gloom and doom and all this kind of stuff. But at the end of the day at the end of the day, it winds up being a fuckup. And the rest of these characters are clearly in the same vein, but the element of being a fuckup isn't there. And I kind of feel like this is a case of satire dying. You know, like everybody saw that,

oh, hey, man, look, Markock created this, this, this badass character who's, you know, he's, he's doomed, you know, he's, you know, it's got this, this whole, you know, right of the Volcaries, you know, Sturman Drung going onto it and, you know, look at the emotional pitch and all this and it's so angsty. and it's like you're, you're kind of missing the point. You, um, strong, strong, yeah, strong, strong, yeah, strong stress. Okay. So I'm missing the point. I want to put a pin in that real quick. Like you said, you're kind of missing.

So these authors, they, they love the angst, but they're missing the point of him being a fuck up there. Yeah. Or are they just like, well, this shit seems really cool. And because I'm thinking about like when, when this is going to sound weird, so there's two threads here that I got a pull on. One, okay. Wolverine goes to Japan for the first time in like 82 or 83.

Yeah. And he's a failed Samurai trying to get his honor back. He's a fuck up on some level. And he's vulnerable over there because they have the what you call it, metal that keeps him from healing, that the silver samurai. Yeah. Yeah. So you have, you know, like you said, one of those authors in the 80s, but Wolverines doing that in 80, two or 83 as well.

Yeah. I just, I just kind of interesting that comic books are doing the same thing. Hey, we've got an hero and he's going alone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's going to end poorly for him and on and on, right? I think his wife dies or tries to kill him. I, I don't like Wolverine that much. I think it's yes. Um, yeah, I'm trying to remember. I know she went up being murdered. Right. But whether at some point they read Con something where she got forced to try to kill him,

I don't remember. I'd have to look all of them. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I like you. I might have been Eurico. Anyway, I like Wolverine a lot more than you do, but I'm tired. I've Wolverine a lot more than you do, but well, I'm times never been that fuck you. But no, let's be real.

One of the reasons really attractive is because he's short and he bounces back from everything. Yeah, well, yes. And these are things that are true. The past that that's, yeah. And I think my height privilege keeps me from giving a shit. Okay. Okay. That's fair. Yeah. And I think my height privilege keeps me from giving a shit. Okay. Okay. That's fair. Yeah. But he's alone. He's a stranger in a strange land. He's, you know, and yet he, you know, I think he'd been there like during World War Two, but he doesn't remember it now. Yeah. Other people do. Like there's all kinds of shit

that unpacks there. Yeah. Yeah. yeah, but it seems to follow that thread that you were mentioning of these authors in the 80s that are that are basing off of the workock. So we could add more people that need to write a check to check. Yeah. So, and then the other thing you meant you just mentioned these words and it absolutely pinged. So remember Talon card from the Thrawn trilogy? Yes, man, you talk about a character that they missed out on him. And like, I think I still have a theory

that they are trying to find a way to bring Mara Jade in. I think they're trying to do it. I think in many ways, Asoka is probably their attempt to do that. Because very often they'll, they'll pattern characters. Whether they do it well or not, I think that's what they're going. All right. Maybe Sabine. Um, but, uh, Talon card is a character that they absolutely have not brought in in any

cool way or anything like that. He's like a, and they need to. They do. And and I think one of the reasons why is because they don't want to touch Lando while Billy D Williams is still alive. And he and Lando are similar enough that I could see people being like, oh, you're whitewashing Lando. Yeah, okay. You're right. I can see that. But more importantly, I think talent-guard, fantastic, very fascinating character, could be played by an older Jonathan Freaks, quite honestly. But got that charm.

Yeah. So, but I would pay the money to see that. So do you remember the two, the creatures that hunt using the force on Mika, that the ones that make the Yisalamari necessary? Yes. You remember they, I mean, they look like the way that they're described, they sound like the, the dogs that become gozer, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anyway, his dogs names are, I'm going to call them dogs. I forget what they're called. Their names are strong and dry. Yeah. And it just pinged for me. Just pinged for me. So, yeah, anyway, total sidebar. Sorry, but yeah, but yeah, but back to Wolverine in the 80s, I'm gonna say, yeah, but yeah, but back to Wolverine in the 80s, very similar to the shit that you were just describing there. And again, we saw in the 60s, we saw Yojimbo. And then in the 70s, we see, you know, quite chain-kang. And we also see several other Westerns.

And then in the 80s, you got in the comic books. It's just I don't know. It's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and so my part of my thesis here is the more car opened the door for this sub-genre by giving us L-Rick and Melody but Dan's. At some point somebody would have done it. I mean, inevitably, social forces being what they are. Somebody would have written an anti-heroic hero in fantasy. But Murkak is the one who did it. And so so many of the tropes that we associate with it were codified by him. And up until the present day with authors like Joe Abercrombie's The Blade itself, and George R.R. Martin's a song of ice and fire, we now have whole shelves of works in the bookstore in the library that involve cynical flawed bloody and dirty characters and happening morally gray worlds much more like our own than Middle

Earth. Okay. And you know, it is, it is the anti-hero that is L. Rick and it is the world view that is more cocks that kicks the door open for all of this. And I'm kind of going to be repeating myself here, and that's the next point in my notes, but an important element of Eric that gets left out of a lot of these characters is that self-loathing. You can see the complexity of his character, the fundamental pathos of his condition. He is grim looking and misunderstood, and a powerful warrior and a swordsman, but unlike,

say, Conan, at the end of everything, he is a slave to fate and kind of a wishy washy dilatant. He is an addict who ultimately always crumbles into his own worst self. It's a key part of what makes him a commentary on what came before. His empire, and now now I want you to start listening to this and thinking about everything we talked about in the last episode, his empire, Elric's empire, Melnibune is a crumbling wreck. Its inhabitants are lost to decadence and self-involvement. They once ruled the world. Now they're isolated and irrelevant, and they don't care. The commentary this reflects, and it is conscious satire, because

Morkock set out to blow up genre conventions is pretty obvious and pretty scathing. because Warcox set out to blow up genre conventions is pretty obvious and pretty scathing. I didn't gotten to the cosmology of his multiverse yet. But, you know, the empire is crumbling around us and we, the kids in the street, we don't care. Now, he would not be as judgmental of the kids in the street in the UK as he is of the Melna Benaans, but the Melna Benaans are more reflection, I think, of his view of the generations that had come before because the Melna Benaans keep talking about the grandeur of their empire and how they are the greatest thing in the world. You know, when in fact they're they're ruling an island and the dragons they are the greatest thing in the world, you know, when in fact they're they're ruling

an island and the dragons that are the key to their power have fallen asleep and keep sleeping for longer and longer periods of time and are harder to wake and to go out and do anything. Which like let's talk about the symbolism of that shall we? Right. Which like let's talk about the symbolism of that shall we right? Our dreadnoughts are in dry dock. I don't know what you tell you We're gonna attack we're gonna attack a few penguins and then we're gonna call it Yeah, yeah, like there you go

But the tropes that he uses to tell this they get reused over and over again. Oh, Oh, yeah. With that self-awareness and the social satire stripped away. And they're everywhere. The drow. The drow are Melodymbeans. They're an ancient imperialist racial supremacist non-human race, ruling a corrupt decadent empire. They worship a demon goddess, Lulf, in the same way that the Melnibedans serve Ariac duke of hell. Are they really worshiping her on like on the serious, or they just kind of doing it for the Lulfs? Good one. And oddly, not even mad. And my daughter will punch me when she hears this Annual deserve it, but I'm not oh yeah. I'll certainly have it coming

Certainly have it coming. Yes their matriarchal Which is mostly Gary guy guy actually is mommy King showing itself But the subtext is that their matriarchal society is part of their decadence and corruption Because it's fucking Gary, right? Drizzed the lone misunderstood outcast who launched a million edgy RPG characters is a less complex and less cynically designed version of Elric. Sure.

Where Elric hates himself, Drizzed is hated and feared by the people of the forgotten realms, despite his inherent nobility and courage. But he's unironically the one good one out of a race of racist demon worshiping assholes, white haired and self-pitting. Oh, don't get black, so inventory so much. Well, yes, there's, yeah. And doesn't the absolute spell that hides his blackness from everyone for a while. I haven't followed enough of that whole saga of of middling pros. Like I cannot stand our a salventory. Like I understand there are probably people listening to our podcast who are going to lose some semblance of respect for me because like I love him so much. But like I have

not a specific friend who I am thinking of right now and she knows who she is because she's being mentioned not quite my name. And she'll be mad that I'm too dumb to be able to defend Dris. So because I just don't know. Yeah. If you were smarter, you'd know this. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, and, and, and okay, here's the deal. Mm-hmm. I don't, I don't hate drizzed. Mm-hmm. I hate our a self-atory.

Sure. Um, because, you know, I just, I just, I find a lot of its stuff lazy. It is what it mostly comes down to at the end of the day. I just, it's like, and I know, I know, well, you know, if you're so good, well, you get a fantasy novel published. Yeah, I know. I understand. But like being published doesn't prove that you're like a great writer. Okay. So anyway, moving on. The dark elves and dark L.D.R. in Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Fantasy are Melnibanans. They are ghost pale, fey beings with impossibly long lifespans,

ruling over sadistic and corrupt civilizations. Fantasy Dark Elves worship the God of murder as the Melnibanans and the supplicants of Ariac doke of hell, and dark elder are literal soul vampires who feed on the suffering of others. Both have a dark spiky, baroque, aesthetic ode to the visual representations of Elric on book covers and illustrations. Both of them operate in dark cities full of scheming nobles, and both are the descendants of once powerful empires now relegated to a shadow of their former selves. I mean, like, yeah, it's two on the nose to be I'm waiting for you to make the most obvious of the references. And so far, like, what was he going to do it? But no, so I'm still waiting. So if you don't get to it, I will.

Okay. Geralt of Rivia is an L-Rick XP, the Witcher. He uses drugs for magical effects. He's alone swordsman magician. He's morally ambiguous. And he's an albino with red eyes. Okay. Oh, wait.

Like, is, is, did you mention that L-Rick is an albino with red eyes. Okay. Oh, wait. Is, is, did you mention that Elrich is an albino with red eyes or something? I, I, I should have. I know that he was one of his, he was purple. There's no, I know. Okay. Yeah. He is an albino. He's described as having skin, the color of a bleached skull.

Oh, wow. And, and his hair is milk white and and and his eyes are red. Yeah, that's a pretty out bio should have. Yeah, it's yeah. So those those are those are the the examples of that kind that I have listed here. What's the obvious one that I have not mentioned? Oh, yeah, you haven't. Raven's flock in WCW um obviously is led by Raven who is a leader that no one likes uh he's disaffected loses most of the time falls over backward into the US championship but then loses that to DDP and then gains it back but then loses it to Goldberg never to get it again. The flock are the castoffs who are essentially

shadows of who they used to be. Stevie Richards joins the flock and then gets beaten out of it. But several other guys join the flock and to no good effect, they lose their shine. And in a lot of ways, Billy Kidman being a really good example, although, and Kidman kind of represents the addiction part of it, because he's always scratching. I don't have to tell you this, you know. But, yeah. That's the funniest part of this so far. I don't have to tell you.

I got a little surprised you didn't mention Ravens flock. Yeah. And they're mostly relegated to the start me up feud, to build the next guy to move into the mid card And then to see if he's got what it takes to get into the main card So they're kind of low Low mid card jobbers for the most part Okay, first I was like oh, okay. This guy's Mikey Whipwreck from ECW, but like you know, you would have said that so yeah

Yeah, and he's not I mean obviously. Yeah, I would have it and clearly he's not homie dream like, you know, you would have said that. So yeah. Um, and he's not, I mean, obviously, I would have. And clearly he's not how many dreamer, you know, but, uh, but Raven and Raven's flock, this, this absolutely tracks, yeah. All right. So there you go. I, I would, you know, which by the way, I kind of want to mention. Raven was, is Scott Levy, the guy who is known as Raven, also did a character in WWE or WWE, for the time called Johnny Polo walked around with a polo queue or a polo stick. What are those called polo mallet? But he used it as a cane, you know, so there's that kind of handicap part too. Okay, well, there you go. All right. So part two. Okay, well, there you go. All right. So, um, I want to get wrestling. Yeah, I, I was, yes, I was on

Tedterhux. I was like, how is Damien gonna manage to tie professional wrestling into this? Yes, it was, it was a source of great worry. And I'm glad you, you pulled it out. Came through at the end. Yeah. So unlike Eric, so I said earlier to put a pin in the cosmology of more Cox multiverse. Yes. Now I've taken the pin out of more cock. Yeah.

There you go. So we're, yes. So out of the L. Rick, grew the Eternal Champion series. Elric, Dorian Hawkmoon, Eric Jose, Korum, and Jerry Cornelius are all protagonists of Morcox who live parallel lives within the multiverse. Each of them is a facet or reincarnation of the eternal champion, a hero whose role is to protect the balance between cosmic law and chaos. Shock of shocks, Elric ultimately fails and his will gets consumed by chaos in the end. It's ugly, he's pathetic. And in that series of

stories, that's the point. Right. But in the other series, other champions fare better, although each of them winds up having to compromise one set of principles for another or pick a side. So none of them ever get to have an unalloyed victory. Because again, we're coming from a post-war UK anarchist point of view. You know, you, the two parties are basically the same. You know, they, they, they squabble with each other, but, you know, but they both underdeveloped deliver to the people who need it. Yeah. Yeah. So, deliver to the people who need it. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, and, and so he's writing these stories from that kind of point of view, and usually very consciously and even self-referentially. Um, notice there is no good and evil. Mm-hmm. There are chaos and law. Yeah. This is in, in multiple universes of the multiverse various factions are aligned to or serve or worship one side or the other

in the young kingdoms which is the the setting for Elric the Melnibonans and the sorcerers of Pantang are both open and conscious Servants of chaos. Other factions are allied to law. Now in Morcox characterization, neither one should be trusted or idealized. Absolute chaos would mean the dissolution of reality into eternally shifting madness, while absolute law would mean a calcification of reality into a static uniform existence without imagination, possibility or identity. Now note that he's writing this as a citizen of the UK in the 1960s. Right. NATO was founded in 1949 with the UK as a founding member allied with the US against the USSR.

Right. The earliest stationing of US nuclear weapons in the United Kingdom started in 1949. The Korean War started in 1950 with the United States leading an international coalition against the Communist North. Right. an international coalition against the Communist North. The Warsaw Pact was formed in 1955 as a block to defend against NATO by the Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia, the... The world national states, yeah. The Soviets invaded Hungary in 1959. Castro allied with the USSR in 1959. There's a whole lot involved in that, but for my point, I'm simplifying the save time. This is after Kennedy tried to oust him via the Bay of

Pigs. 1964 was the Tonkin Gulf incident, and in 1965, we see the beginnings of large scale US troop deployment to Vietnam. Right. The cultural revolution starts in China in 1966, which is a resurgence or re-dedication to communist revolutionary ideals. Now, bringing all of the stuff up here is because the theme is the whole world is being pushed into taking sides. And the empire is crumbling at the same time. The mow mow motion is happening from like 52 to 60. And both sides objectively suck unless you are a partisan of one of them. suck unless you are a partisan of one of them. And if you are a partisan of one of them, then purity of ideology is paramount because this is an existential crisis. Right. If you're an inhabitant of the young kingdoms, the situation is shockingly familiar. Because again, Maricop is making a political and philosophical point.

This polar conflict is eternal and universal across the entire multiverse and there is no way of escaping it. Now, according to Wikipedia, the first popular fiction representation of the idea of a multiverse is in flash issue 123 in September 1961. is in flash issue 123 in September 1961. Wow. Yeah. But I'm going to say that more cock because the trope codifier here. Sure. If you look at the way the trope has been used in genre fiction since the 1970s, it owes a lot to the ideas of the eternal champion. There's the whole spider verse idea of

spider man being connected to a totemic spider archetype, which is like, I'm sorry, cut more carcachack. That's, I mean, eternal shape. Hi. You doing eternal champion right there. And there's vampires that are hunting the spider folk through the spider verse. Yeah. So, and the idea from across the spider verse of canon events, sounds to me like an

eternal champion who has allied himself with law and is now trying to enforce that on the rest of the multiverse at once. Yeah, I mean, they talk about that very specifically in that in that. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, and, and the, the last and biggest point I want to make in, in terms of, of specific things that we can look at in, uh, uh, science fiction and fantasy media is chaos, specifically chaos out of out of these two sides. And the universe of Warhammer 40,000 owes so much to why the back. Yeah. Yeah. I already mentioned the dark elder. The emperor being entombed on the golden throne of Terra is a really clear homage or theft of the amniotic throne that in one of the other eternal champion series,

the Hawkmoon series, the emperor of Gran Britann, who is like the big bad in that series, the Grand Britann or the bad guys, but the Emperor of Gran Britann is trapped inside an amniotic throne that makes him immortal, but he can't, he's stuck in his throne room forever. It's like, I golden throne, I how you doing. So but by far the biggest element of the Warhammer universe that I got swipes from Warcock is the concept of chaos. In the multiverse as I described before chaos and law are absolute forces that operate above concepts like good and evil. Right. Right. concepts like good and evil. Right. Right. There are and chaos and law can both coalesce for lack of a better word into various figures that would beke of hell. There are lords of law. And there are chaos lords in Morkhawks multiverse that are agents of freedom and personal liberty. And we might call those those avatars of chaos.

We might call chaotic good alongside and they exist alongside and they're allied to because it's the wars between chaos and law They're allied to figures like ariok who is unabashedly cruel and feeds on literal suffering You know, they use a Duke of hell at the same time lawful evil. Yeah, or actually chaotic evil. At the same time, there was a duke. So he's a, he's a, well, long story. The idea of the, the, the hell's being lawful and, and the abyss being chaotic is that's all that's Gary, Gary, Gary, Gary, that's, yeah. And he's, he's, it is a response to it certainly, but it's not the same, it's not a straight theft in the way that the four gods of chaos in Warhammer are. Right. It's a theft of an idea in the same way that our podcast is a theft of an idea of like

the dollop where you have two guys where one teaches the other. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, yeah, it is worth noting that in the earliest iterations of Dungeons and Dragons, the only alignments that were available were lawful, neutral and chaotic. Right. In a very Midwestern American twist, lawful and good were largely synonymous, and chaotic and evil were largely synonymous. Yeah, because you had those Germans who were trying to keep their shit clean during it, you know, like when there's a lot of dust everywhere. Yeah. Yeah.

So, um, and so what we, what we see in Warhammer 40,000 is, uh, if, if the, if the alignment chart of Dungeons and Dragons is a very American adaptation of, well, hey, I'm going to take this idea. I'm going to roll with it. The British adaptation of it is, no, I'm just, I'm totally going to steal chaos as an idea because that's metal as fuck. And it's a ubiquitous companion to a empire that is crumbling. And it's kind of okay.

Like, yes, very much. You know, it's like, yeah, it is crumbling. And like, like you said, chaos is also personal liberty, you know. Yeah. And very, very useful. Like there. Yeah. Yeah. And so in 1988,

slaves to darkness gets published by Games Workshop. And it is the very first appearance of chaos as a faction within Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer fantasy. and we're hemophantasy. And in that volume, we are introduced to the four gods of chaos, corn, God of war and murder, zinch, God of magic change and literal chaos, also scheming wheels within wheels, plotting, all that kind of stuff.

Slonech, the dark prince, who is very reminiscent of Ariach. Ariach is always described in Morkach stories as being, it possibly beautiful, kind of endrogginess, although clearly masculine and very blonde, very Aryan Nordic looking figure, a very Aryan Nordic-looking figure. The Prince of Pleasure, as he's referred to in Warhammer, is also somewhat androgynous, which later gets turned into full on, no, no, they are, she is is utterly gender fluid and just reeks of unholy, unnatural attractiveness. But and then, finally, Nurgle, God of disease, decay, and entropy. And in Warhammer, in Warhammer 40,000, these gods are evil. Like there is no... But everything for evil in Warhammer, like...

Well, yes, yes. And the other thing is it should be noted, if someone were to pan far enough out, or zoom far enough out from the Warhammer 40,000 cosmology. What you would probably find is that all of humanity under the Imperium has allied itself to the forces of law. Okay. If we were to superimpose more Cox cosmology onto it in full, we see the Imperium from the point of view of the Imperium. We see the galaxy from their lens. And they are a fascist religious dictatorship, which is, which is about as lawful, as you can get in the more cocked sense of it.

You know, everybody has a role to fill the individual is less important than the whole, like it's a whole thing. There is no such thing as individual dignity where identity doesn't matter unless you're somebody important, like it's all there. And so, AOS is a central part of the entire setting. Part of what got built into the setting is if you travel from one star system to another, you have to enter the warp, which is the realm of chaos. Right. And these entities want to come into the universe and much like in more cocks, right? I think ultimately chaos wants to dissolve reality, wants to revert everything in reality back to primal, primal, everything it wants. I won't say nothingness. It's the incoherent madness of everything being everything it wants. You know, total dissolution

of anything static, nothing ever ever being fixed or put it. And that is what the chaos gods want. And the writers of Warhammer will freely admit, oh yeah, no, we totally stole this from Elric because like, black-roon swords, like how cool is that? It's just metal as hell, right? Right. Right.

And one of the things, and you've heard me lament this, one of the things that has bugged me for many years is the loss of understanding within 40K fandom of the fact that it all started out as satire. And as I think about this, I have to kind of admit that even from the moment the writers of 40K started, that process had already begun, because they took this idea out of Morkox universe, multiverse, that was law is not good and chaos is not evil. They are law and chaos. And these are the things they want to do. And we wound up taking that concept and took complexity out of it and turned it into, no, chaos is the bad guys. This is demons and hell, man. Like imagine, imagine a Judas Priest album and

that's this. As real estate. Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. And so, you know, it's, it's, they kind of started the process themselves. I have to admit, and they being the writers of 40K, Rick Priestley and all the rest of those guys. But they took this concept and turned it into something that has now become its own thing that is very clearly cribbed from more cocks writing, but is now its own thing and has now organically developed all of its own lore and background and we have the development of the cast gods, kind of as characters and we have the development of the cast gods, kind of as characters,

and the way that they've taken that and had an interplay with the stuff they stole from Dune and the stuff they stole from all of the other sources that they worked with. But ultimately, they still owe the debt of that idea to Morcoch. And everybody who's done anything Whether it's metal bands writing songs about Warhammer or about

40k All of the authors of all of the novels in the 40k universes All of them who are working with these tropes They are all working with stuff that came from Moorcock. And like I said in the first episode, the very, the very outset, Warhammer 40,000 has gone very close to mainstream. Dungeons and Dragons is absolutely is absolutely a hundred percent mainstream. Yeah Well, you just look at the amount of memes that are out there that have nine panels Everybody understands what lawful and chaotic mean

Yeah, like that has become memified. And yes, that is do somewhat in part two. I think the good neutral evil is do definitely in part two people's mainstreaming of D&D. But the lawful and the chaotic, those have become mainstream enough as well that people can hang with that too. Yeah. can hang with that too. Yeah. And there's one last bit that I was surprised, and then I thought about it for a second, and I wasn't really that surprised anymore to consider this. But when I ask you right now, somebody who is not a literary science fiction fantasy person. If I ask you to describe for me a chaos symbol, what is the symbol that comes, what is the icon that comes to your mind? Wow.

Without thinking, I can only describe. It looks kind of well, okay. It's coming directly from, I think his name is Rich Burlu, the guy who did order the stick, the great snarl. Oh, okay. Picture basically loony tunes animals fighting, and it's that that's that's that's that's that's tangle, okay.

That tends to be what comes to mind when I think of chaos. It's a frenetic moving cloud. Okay. Okay. That would be a really good one. However, if I were to tell you that in occult practice, the symbol of chaos is an eight-pointed star of arrows pointing outward from a central point. Imagine a compass rose with then four arrows at the diagonal. It's representing fours going in all directions at once. So have you seen that chaos symbol anywhere? I think I have. Yeah. Okay.

It's everywhere in Warhammer 40,000. Okay. Okay. It is used on anarchist banners in various places across the world. It has been adopted by different anarchist groups. It is utilized in occult practice as a symbol of chaos. Right. And you might think that a symbol like that, which is now recognized very easily by people everywhere. Anybody who's had any contact with Warhammer will recognize it.

And like I said, political groups have used it. And it's in a cult practice. You might think that a symbol like that for something like the concept of chaos would be really ancient. It's not Michael Morkock invented it. Yeah, I kind of don't doubt that considering like using arrows as symbols is a fairly recent to the world Yeah, icon, you know that kind of iconography requires I mean that takes design that can be reproduced

reliably so that's gonna be since we've improved printing press so I'm not surprised that that's going to be since we've improved the printing press. So I'm not surprised that that's an recent invention. But yeah, it speaks to the ubiquity of his work. Yeah, it's interesting how little I know about chaos in that it kind of just shows that my natural tendency is toward lawful. Oh, yeah, I just, you're inherently very, yeah. Yeah, like I, it's, it's with great practice and effort that I do not remain lawful. But like I was just talking with my partner today. Actually, she was pointing it out to me. She's like, you know, you you you plan out everything and it's good.

It's there's nothing wrong with that. You know, you plan out everything. Whereas I just kind of jump into things. And I thought about it. And one of the reasons I haven't gotten another dog is because I don't have the time to train improperly. That fits right in with what I'm talking about, you know, and like I think about how awesome my dog is. I think about how awesome my kids are. And both took a great deal of structure and effort toward a goal.

That reinforcement. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's very, and not to say my kids are like my dog, you know, obviously he's better behave um, but and more affectionate But in all seriousness like there's there there is an inherent And my brother is pointed this out to my mom and discussions about me in the past like Damian is chaotic phobic like

and it's true there's there's an inherent aborance almost that I have toward chaos so it makes sense that I don't know fuck all about the iconography of what stands for chaos. And at the same time what is like one of the number one things that I've studied so that we avoid the dangers and pitfalls of it is an overabundance of order. Yes. You know, and so clearly, I don't, you know, I might be, I might tend to draw a lawful, but I damn sure don't like order. Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, it makes sense. I don't, I didn't, I didn't get that yeah, but yeah, so the the the shame of it to me is like I said earlier Michael Morkock gave the genre all of these ideas and all of these tropes and

more than that as much as him being the trope codifier for so much of this stuff that is now the background noise of so much of the genre Beyond that just the fact that the genre. Beyond that, just the fact that the stuff that has taken these ideas and run with them has gotten so much attention and has got such a broad mainstream kind of fan-based, and we haven't managed to get an ill-rick movie yet. We haven't managed to get a Hawkmoon movie. Hawkmoon might be easier to turn into something because the main character isn't a fuck-up. But my sense of his recognition is unless you are a Literary fantasy or literary science fiction nerd

Like a real hardcore niche one You don't know his name or you're not fully aware of exactly how much stuff owes him, owes him some credit. Do authors in the, in the field? Yeah. Oh, yeah. So it's right. Is it one of those, he's your favorite author's favorite author?

Kind of moments. Yeah, a lot of the time. Yeah. Okay. A lot of the time. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. You know, and I, I, I don't

even remember what it was I was musing on, but I was, you know, thinking as I was driving home from running errands, this is a couple of weeks ago, I got thinking about chaos for whatever reason in 40K. And then that got me thinking about Michael Morcock. And I went, you know what? Outside of a certain age range of 40k fans, and when people even know who the hell Michael Morcock is. Right. Uh, and I know that within 40k fandom, if I were to say that the dark Eldar are XBs of this society of Melonibonans, and if I were to say that chaos is just straight up stolen from Michael Borkhark's work, percentage of the fan base younger than me, who would who would violently revolt, who would

just be absolutely pissed and consider me a heretic, because they don't know the history of the hobby. And that and that bugs me on a really deep level because I'm a history nerd and the meta development of the lore is fascinating to me as much as just the lore, which I'm also hooked on. So, yeah, that's, that's, that's what I have. Michael Morkock is a critically important figure in fantasy and I wish more people understood that. Nice. I like this because, and I'm gonna jump right into what I believe.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like this because very rarely do we just do like where we feature the history of a thing. And so I like that it's good to touch down and kind of like recognize things or people or authors who have contributions, just give the history of it, you know, and you know, let's just of it, so I like that.

Yeah. Do you think the reason why there is no Elric movie is because we've had so many movies of characters that are in that same vein that that's kind of saturated the market to the point where it would not differentiate enough anymore. I think that that could be part of it. They're and it's not even so much that we've had so many movies of characters in that vein as the genre has had so many stories that if you made a movie of it now, people would be like,

well, I mean, this whole story is just ripping off Thomas Covenant, like, you know, because of its age is another one that a lot of younger science fiction fans probably aren't familiar with. But you get what I'm saying. Yeah. You know, so yeah, I think it is a problem of other authors and other writers got a hold of these ideas and went, oh my god, wait, I could do this thing and then went on and did those things. And yeah, so he's been overtaken by his own influence So Yeah, so what what have you got to recommend to people this evening? Oh, let's see

I am going to speaking of empires that are falling and falling away. I am going to recommend a book by Noam Chomsky. Yes, called Who Rules the World? This is a part of the American Empire project. If I recall correctly, this one came out in, I want to say 2016. Okay. Something like that. So it's one of his more recent books. Much more accessible than some of the other ones that came earlier in the late 90s and

in the run up to the Persian Gulf War. But the second one. But yeah, Noem Chomsky's who rules the world, I think, since we're talking about empires falling apart and the deleterious effect of them, I figured that's not a bad place to go. All right. How about you? What are you reading? That's not a bad place to go. All right. How about you? What are you reading? I'm going to recommend the Elric Stormbringer comic

book series from Dark Horse Comics. Started in 1997. It's a seven issue run. And the art manages to, I think, do one of the best jobs anybody has done of really capturing the feeling of Morkhawks pros, which is kind of hard to verbalize, but that's the best way I can describe it. It is almost kind of art deco meets Baroque. There's, yeah, I, you just find it, read it. It's amazing.

Your work is incredible. The color work is wonderful. So I think it is sadly, you know, like I've said, adaptations of Mark Axe work have not gotten as much attention as I would like, but this is one that I think is one of the best adaptations I've seen. Okay. So again, Elric Stormbringer comic book series from Bear Corps Comics.

All right, cool. Let's see, I know you don't wanna be found. I wanna be found on March 1st at the comedy spot because capital punishment will be back baby. So go vote up the comedy spot in Sacramento on Google and then go to their webpage and then find the part where it says upcoming shows and you'll see capital punishment and start saving up your

money now and go enjoy that. Where can they find our podcast? Our podcast can be found on the internet at woblewoblewoble.geekhistorytime.com. You can also find us on the Apple Podcast app or on Spotify. Wherever you've found us, please hit the subscribe button and give us the five star review that you know we deserve. Oh yeah, look at all the work the Ed did to bring you guys more cock. Yeah, I should have seen that one. Coming way. I did. Yeah, I'd see I didn't I didn't want to I didn't want to hand that one to you.

Um, or fall or fall fall onto that one. Um, you know, just no. Yeah. The things that fall out of your mouth on this and just nice. Nice. Yeah, we'll do. We'll do. Yep.

But yes, give Ed the five stars that he earned by having the balls to take on more cock. I really, you know, I mean, he was at least four fingers into this one. It really just may hate you so much. I mean, he got up to his elbow on this one. He really, but cool. Well, I got nothing in response to that. Yeah. All right. Well, while Ed is in refractory for a geek history of time, I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Blalock. And until next time, souls, blood and souls for my Lord, Ariarch.