Melnibonean Golden Battle Barge

SETTING: Antediluvian Lost Realm (Pleistocene Indonesia???)

LOCATION: Rendered Monarch Beach, California in 1982. Michael Moorcock's Melnibone is a lost antediluvian island.

INSPIRATION: Being able to meet the late, great Ray Bradbury. Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of modes, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction.

INSPIRATION: Michael John Moorcock is an English writer and musician, primarily of science fiction and fantasy, who has also published literary novels. He is best known for his novels about the character Elric of Melniboné, a seminal influence on the field of fantasy since the 1960s and '70s.

ZOOM-IN: This "Photo Close-Up of Cetacean Escorts" shows the details of the three whales escorting the Melnibonean Battle Barge from Antediluvian Indonesia in the primitive ice-age times of Michael Moorcock's Emperor Elric of Melnibone. This image remained in the possession of eminant science fiction author Ray Bradbury from 1982 until the end of his days here on our good Earth.

INSPIRATIONS: If you are a reader of Michael Moorcock then you've heard of the Dreaming City of Imyrr on the prehistoric lost island of Melnibone ruled by a single inbred line of stuporously drugged emperors the last of whom was Lord Emperor Elric, an albino, who replaced his regimen of drugs and potions for the energy and strength fed to him by the primordial hellsword "Stormbringer," as gifted to Emperor Elric by the Daemon Arioch who hungered and commanded for blood and souls.

The sword literally "Drank" the living human souls of its victims, feeding itself, the daemon and Elric. Melnibone's sea power was projected through a massive volcanic sea maze from which massive pyramidal battle barges sailed along with warrior riders on the backs of dragons spitting flaming green venom. This battle barge was escorted by one allied sperm whale and a mated pair of orcas.

Completed in 1982, I gifted this illustration to one of the founding fathers of American science fiction, Ray Bradbury, at a rare book signing and lecture event at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, California in May of 1982. Ray's "The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the "Electric Grandmother," inspired me long before I discovered Philip K. Dick and Michael Moorcock.