Neil Gaiman recently wrote a charmingly roundabout thank-you note to Michael Moorcock for a lifetime worth of inspiration. Is this why Morpheus the King of Dreams is a dead ringer for Elric of Melniboné?
Via Tor.com:
Dear Mike,
I started reading your work thirty years ago. I was nine, and the book was Stormbringer.
At the time it was a little like having the top of my head ripped off and magnificent multicoloured ideas poured in.
I read everything I could find you’d written as it was published-several feet of books rapidly appearing on my bookshelves over the next couple of years. I even read everything I could find by people you mentioned, discovering authors like Mervyn Peake in the process.
I took it for granted that a good author could and should be able to write anything and write anything well in any genre or way, and bend and break genres and rules at will-after all, you did it.
Looking back now, the things that stick are the strange ones that don’t fit, from the Sex Pistols’ novel-newspaper (Irene Handl as Mrs Cornelius?) to the mysterious newspaper-wrapped packages of The Chinese Agent…
You’ve been an inspiration. Or to put it another way, I’m probably mostly your fault.
It’s good finally to have someone to blame-
Neil Gaiman
