The Elfin Ship

Written and submitted as The Man in the Moon about 1978, it was rewritten, and the second half expanded following the comments accompanying the rejection by editor Lester Del Rey. Del Rey published the reworked version as The Elfin Ship, in 1982.^[2] (The Man in the Moon was Blaylock's first novel written to completion.) According to Blaylock, The Man in the Moon was influenced almost entirely by Kenneth Grahame's 1908 children's book The Wind in the Willows,^[3] along with Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Brownies and the Goblins, and illustrations by Arthur Rackham.^[2]

The manuscript text for The Man in the Moon, with additional commentaries, was published in 2002 at the suggestion of Subterranean Press in limited editions signed by Blaylock and Tim Powers. The Man in the Moon has about 60 pages of material not incorporated in The Elfin Ship. On the other hand, The Elfin Ship novel deletes nearly all the events in The Man in the Moon's concluding 60 pages, replacing them with 200 pages taking the plot in a different direction. (Some sentences from the original appear in a reworked context in The Elfin Ship.)

The plot diverges where the heroes approach the ocean. In The Man in the Moon, they are taken by elfin airship to the Moon, and discover a treasure. There is no confrontation with Selznak. Blaylock intended The Man in the Moon to have a sequel, as the story reads, "What happened in the following months to the people of the high valley and to the elves and dwarves and link men is another tale and deserves, I think, a story of its own."