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Leiber's death occurred a few weeks after a physical collapse while traveling from a science-fiction convention in London, Ontario with Skinner. The cause of his death was given as "organic brain disease."
Leiber's death occurred a few weeks after a physical collapse while traveling from a science-fiction convention in London, Ontario with Skinner. The cause of his death was given as "organic brain disease."


He wrote a short [[autobiography]], "Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex," which can be found in the collection ''The Ghost Light'' (1984). A critical biography, ''Witches of the Mind'' by Bruce Byfield, is available from [[Necronomicon Press]], and an essay examining his literary relationship with Lovecraft appears in [[S. T. Joshi]]'s ''The Evolution of the Weird Tale'' (2004). In 2007, Benjamin Szumskyj edited ''Fritz Leiber: Critical Essays' ', a collection of essays on various aspects of Leiber's work. Leiber's own literary criticism, including several ground-breaking essays on Lovecraft, was collected in the volume ''Fafhrd and Me'' (1990), published by [[Wildside Press]].
He wrote a short [[autobiography]], "Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex," which can be found in the collection ''The Ghost Light'' (1984). A critical biography, ''Witches of the Mind'' by Bruce Byfield, is available from [[Necronomicon Press]], and an essay examining his literary relationship with Lovecraft appears in [[S. T. Joshi]]'s ''The Evolution of the Weird Tale'' (2004). In2007, Benjamin Szumskyj edited ''Fritz Leiber: Critical Essays'', a collection of essays on various aspects of Leiber's work. Leiber's own literary criticism, including several ground-breaking essays on Lovecraft, was collected in the volume ''Fafhrd and Me'' (1990), published by [[Wildside Press]].


== Leiber and the theater ==
== Leiber and the theater ==

Revision as of 04:27, 16 March 2008

This article refers to the science fiction writer. For the actor, see Fritz Leiber, Sr.
Fritz Leiber
Occupationwriter
NationalityAmerican
Genrefantasy, horror and science fiction

Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. (December 24, 1910–September 5, 1992) was an influential American writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction. He was also an expert chess player and a champion fencer.

Leiber (pronounced Lie-ber) married Jonquil Stephens on January 16, 1936, and their son Justin Leiber was born in 1938. Jonquil's death in 1969 precipitated a three-year bout of alcoholism, but he returned to his original form with a fantasy novel set in modern-day San Francisco, Our Lady of Darkness — serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as "The Pale Brown Thing" (1977) — in which cities were the breeding grounds for new types of elementals called paramentals, summonable by the dark art of megapolisomancy, with such activities centering around the Transamerica Pyramid. Our Lady of Darkness won the World Fantasy Award.

In the last years of his life, Leiber married his second wife, Margo Skinner, a journalist and poet with whom he had been friends for many years. Many people believed that Leiber was living in poverty on skid row, but the truth of the matter was that Leiber preferred to live simply in the city, spending his money on dining, movies and travel. In the last years of his life, royalty checks from TSR, the makers of Dungeons and Dragons, who had licensed the mythos of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series, were enough in themselves to ensure that he lived comfortably.

Leiber's death occurred a few weeks after a physical collapse while traveling from a science-fiction convention in London, Ontario with Skinner. The cause of his death was given as "organic brain disease."

He wrote a short autobiography, "Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex," which can be found in the collection The Ghost Light (1984). A critical biography, Witches of the Mind by Bruce Byfield, is available from Necronomicon Press, and an essay examining his literary relationship with Lovecraft appears in S. T. Joshi's The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004). In2007, Benjamin Szumskyj edited Fritz Leiber: Critical Essays, a collection of essays on various aspects of Leiber's work. Leiber's own literary criticism, including several ground-breaking essays on Lovecraft, was collected in the volume Fafhrd and Me (1990), published by Wildside Press.

Leiber and the theater

As the child of two Shakespearean actors—Fritz, Sr. and Virginia (née Bronson)—Leiber was fascinated with the stage, describing itinerant Shakespearean companies in stories like "No Great Magic" and "Four Ghosts in Hamlet," and creating an actor/producer protagonist for his novel A Specter is Haunting Texas.

Although his Change War novel, The Big Time, is about a war between two factions, the "Snakes" and the "Spiders", changing and rechanging history throughout the universe, all the action takes place in a small bubble of isolated space-time about the size of a theatrical stage, with only a handful of characters. The Big Time contains an apparent numerical typo; in one chapter-head quotation it is stated that 100,000 metres equals 5.6 miles. (It should be about 60 miles.) No American or British editor has ever corrected this.

He also acted in a few films, once with his father in Warner Bros.' The Great Garrick (1937).

Judith Merril (in her July 1969 F&SF appreciation — see below) remarks on Leiber's acting skills when the writer won a sci-fi convention costume ball. Leiber's costume consisted of a cardboard military collar over turned-up jacket lapels, cardboard insignia, an armband, and a spider pencilled large in black on his forehead, thus turning him into an officer of the Spiders, one of the combatants in his Change War stories. "The only other component," Merril writes, "was the Leiber instinct for theatre."

Writing career

File:FSF 0769.jpg
Fritz Leiber portrait by Ed Emshwiller on July 1969 special issue devoted to Leiber.

Leiber was heavily influenced by H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Graves in the first two decades of his career. From the late 1950s onwards, he was increasingly influenced by the works of Carl Jung, particularly by the concepts of the anima and the shadow. From about 1965 onwards, he also began incorporating elements of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. These concepts are often openly mentioned in his stories, especially the anima, which becomes a method of exploring his fascination with but estrangement from the female.

Leiber had a lifelong love affair with cats, which feature prominently in many of his stories. Tigerishka, for example, is a cat-like alien who is sexually attractive to the human protagonist yet repelled by human customs in the novel The Wanderer. Leiber's "Gummitch" stories feature a kitten with an I.Q. of 160, just waiting for his ritual cup of coffee so that he can become human, too.

His popularity amongst both fans and his fellow writers was considerable, and his science fiction novels The Big Time (1958) and The Wanderer (1964), along with the short stories "Gonna Roll the Bones" (1967), about a gambler dicing with Death, and "Ship of Shadows" (1970), all won Hugo Awards. "Bones" also won a Nebula Award.

Many of Leiber's most-acclaimed works are short stories, especially in the horror genre. In such stories as "The Girl With the Hungry Eyes", and "You're All Alone" (AKA "The Sinful Ones"), he is widely regarded as one of the forerunners of the modern urban horror story. (Ramsey Campbell cites him as his single biggest influence.[1]) In his later years, Leiber returned to short story horror in such works as "Horrible Imaginings", "Black Has Its Charms" and the award-winning "The Button Moulder."

The short parallel worlds story "Catch That Zeppelin!" (1975) added yet another Nebula and Hugo award to his collection. This story shows a plausible alternate reality that is much better than our own, whereas the typical parallel universe story depicts a world that is much worse than our own. "Belsen Express" (1975) won him another World Fantasy Award. Both stories reflect Leiber's uneasy fascination with Nazism -- an uneasiness compounded by his mixed feelings about his German ancestry and his philosophical pacifism during World War II.

Fans awarded him the Gandalf (Grand Master) award at the World Science Fiction Convention in 1975, and in 1981 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America voted him the recipient of their Grand Master award.

He was also a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loose-knit group of Heroic Fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies.

In an appreciation in the July 1969 "Special Fritz Leiber Issue" of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Merril writes of Leiber's connection with his readers:

That this kind of personal response... is shared by thousands of other readers, has been made clear on several occasions. The November 1959 issue of Fantastic, for instance: Leiber had just come out of one of his recurrent dry spells, and editor Cele Lalli bought up all his new material until there was enough [five stories] to fill an issue; the magazine came out with a big black headline across its cover — LEIBER IS BACK!

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser

Main article: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser

His legacy appears to have been consolidated by the most famous of his creations, the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, written over a span of 50 years. The first of these, "Two Sought Adventure", appeared in Unknown in 1939. They are concerned with an unlikely pair of heroes found in and around the city of Lankhmar. (Fafhrd was based on Leiber himself and the Mouser on his friend Harry Otto Fischer, and the two characters created in a series of letters exchanged by the two in the mid-1930s) These stories were among the progenitors of many of the tropes of the sword and sorcery genre (a term coined by Leiber). They are also notable among sword and sorcery stories in that, over the course of the stories, his two heroes mature, take on more responsibilities, and eventually settle down into marriage.

Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories were also award winners and nominees: "Scylla's Daughter" was nominated for a Hugo (1961), and the Hugo and Nebula awards were awarded to "Ill Met in Lankhmar" (1970). Fittingly, Leiber's last major work, "The Knight and Knave of Swords" (1991) brought the series to a satisfactory close while leaving room for possible sequels. In the last year of his life, Leiber was considering allowing the series to be completed by another writer, but his sudden death put an end to the idea.

The stories were influential in shaping the genre, and also directly influential on other works. Joanna Russ' stories about thief and assassin Alyx (collected in 1976 in The Adventures of Alyx) were in part inspired by Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and Alyx in fact made guest appearances in two of Leiber's stories. Numerous writers have paid homage to the stories. For instance, Terry Pratchett's city of Ankh-Morpork bears something more than a passing resemblance to Lankhmar (wittily acknowledged by Pratchett by the placing of the swordsman-thief "The Weasel" and his giant barbarian comrade "Bravd" in the opening scenes of the first Discworld novel).

Bibliography

Novels

File:Best fritz.JPG
The Best of Fritz Leiber (1974), 1974 Sphere paperback edition. 368 pages

Collections

  • Night's Black Agents (1947)
  • Two Sought Adventure (1957)
  • Shadows With Eyes (1962)
  • Night Monsters (1969)
  • The Best of Fritz Leiber (1974). Collection of 22 short stories.
  • The Book of Fritz Leiber (1974)
  • The Second Book of Fritz Leiber (1975)
  • The Leiber Chronicles (1990)

Short stories

1939
"Two Sought Adventure" aka "The Jewels in the Forest" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
1940
"The Automatic Pistol"
"The Bleak Shore" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
1941
"The Howling Tower" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"The Power of the Puppets"
"Smoke Ghost"
"They Never Come Back"
1942
"The Hill and the Hole"
"The Hound"
"The Phantom Slayer" aka "The Inheritance"
"Spider Mansion"
"The Sunken Land" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
1943
"Conjure Wife" (novel)
"Gather, Darkness! (novel)
"The Mutant's Brother"
"Thieves' House" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"To Make a Roman Holiday"
1944
"Business of Killing"
"Sanity" aka "Crazy Wolf"
"Taboo"
"Thought"
1945
"Destiny Times Three" (novella)
"The Dreams of Albert Moreland"
"Wanted — An Enemy"
1946
"Alice and the Allergy"
"Mr. Bauer and the Atoms"
1947
"Adept's Gambit" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"Diary in the Snow"
"The Man Who Never Grew Young"
1949
"The Girl with the Hungry Eyes"
"In the X-Ray"
1950
"The Black Ewe"
"Coming Attraction"
"The Dead Man"
"The Enchanted Forest"
"Later Than You Think"
"Let Freedom Ring" aka "The Wolf Pack"
"The Lion and the Lamb"
"Martians, Keep Out!"
"The Ship Sails at Midnight"
"You're All Alone"
1951
"Appointment in Tomorrow" aka "Poor Superman"
"Cry Witch!"
"Dark Vengeance" aka "Claws from the Night" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"Nice Girl with Five Husbands"
"A Pail of Air"
"When the Last Gods Die"
1952
"Dr. Kometevsky's Day"
"The Foxholes of Mars" — appeared in the 1969 anthology The War Book, edited by James Sallis.
"I'm Looking for "Jeff""
"The Moon Is Green"
"Yesterday House"
1953
"A Bad Day for Sales"
"The Big Holiday"
"The Night He Cried" — a notable sf pastiche of Mickey Spillane
"The Seven Black Priests" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
1954
"The Mechanical Bride" (play)
"The Silence Game"
1957
"The Big Trek"
"Femmequin 973"
"Friends and Enemies"
"Last"
"Time Fighter"
"Time in the Round"
"What's He Doing in There?"
1958
"The Big Time" (short novel) — Change War story
"Bread Overhead"
"Bullet With His Name"
"A Deskful of Girls" — Change War story
"The Last Letter"
"Little Old Miss Macbeth"
"The Number of the Beast" — Change War story
"Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee"
"Space-Time for Springers" — Gummitch story
"Try and Change the Past" — Change War story
1959
"Damnation Morning" — Change War story
"The House of Mrs. Delgado"
"The Improper Authorities"
"Lean Times in Lankhmar" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"The Mind Spider" — Change War story
"MS Found in a Maelstrom"
"Our Saucer Vacation"
"Pipe Dream"
"Psychosis from Space"
"The Reward"
"The Silver Eggheads" (novella, later expanded to book-length)
"Tranquility, Or Else!" aka "The Haunted Future" — Change War story
1960
"Deadly Moon"
"Mariana"
"The Night of the Long Knives" aka "The Wolf Pair"
"The Oldest Soldier" — Change War story
"Rats of Limbo"
"Schizo Jimmie"
"When the Sea-King's Away" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
1961
"All the Weed in the World"
"The Beat Cluster"
"The Goggles of Dr. Dragonet"
"Hatchery of Dreams"
"Kreativity for Kats" — Gummitch story
"Scream Wolf"
"Scylla's Daughter" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"A Visitor from Back East"
1962
"The 64-Square Madhouse"
"The Big Engine" (shortened revision of "You're All Alone")
"A Bit of the Dark World"
"The Creature from Cleveland Depths" aka "The Lone Wolf"
"The Man Who Made Friends with Electricity"
"Mirror"
"The Moriarty Gambit"
"The Secret Songs"
"The Snowbank Orbit"
"The Thirteenth Step"
"The Unholy Grail" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
1963
"237 Talking Statues, Etc."
"Bazaar of the Bizarre" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"The Casket-Demon"
"The Cloud of Hate" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"Crimes Against Passion"
"Dr. Adams' Garden of Evil"
"Game for Motel Room"
"A Hitch in Space"
"Kindergarten"
"Myths My Great-Granddaughter Taught Me"
"No Great Magic" — Change War story
"The Spider"
"Success"
"X Marks the Pedwalk"
1964
"Be of Good Cheer"
"The Black Gondolier"
"Lie Still, Snow White"
"The Lords of Quarmall" (with Harry O. Fischer) — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"Midnight in the Mirror World"
"When the Change-Winds Blow" — Change War story
1965
"Cyclops"
"Far Reach to Cygnus"
"Four Ghosts in Hamlet"
"The Good New Days"
"Knight's Move" aka "Knight to Move" — Change War story
"Moon Duel"
"Stardock" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
1966
"The Crystal Prison"
"Sunk Without Trace"
"To Arkham and the Stars" — a Cthulhu Mythos story
1967
"Answering Service"
"Black Corridor" — Change War story
"Gonna Roll the Bones" - winner of Hugo and Nebula awards.
"The Inner Circles" aka "The Winter Flies"
1968
"Crazy Annaoj"
"In the Witch's Tent" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"One Station of the Way"
"A Specter is Haunting Texas"
"The Square Root of Brain"
"Their Mistress, the Sea" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"The Turned-off Heads"
"The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"When Brahma Wakes"
"The Wrong Branch" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
1969
"Endfray of the Ofay"
"Richmond, Late September, 1849"
"Ship of Shadows"
"When They Openly Walk"
1970
"America the Beautiful"
"The Circle Curse" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"Ill Met in Lankhmar" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"The Price of Pain-Ease" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"The Snow Women" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
1971
"Gold, Black, and Silver"
1972
"Another Cask of Wine"
"The Bump"
"Day Dark, Night Bright"
"The Lotus Eaters"
1973
"The Bait" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"Cat Three"
"The Sadness of the Executioner" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"Trapped in the Shadowland" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
1974
"Beauty and the Beasts" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"Cat's Cradle" — Gummitch story
"Do You Know Dave Wenzel?"
"Midnight by the Morphy Watch"
"Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum"
"WaIF"
1975
"Belsen Express"
"Catch That Zeppelin!"
"The Glove"
"Night Passage"
"Trapped in the Sea of Stars" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"Under the Thumbs of the Gods" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
1976
"Dark Wings"
"The Death of Princes"
"The Eeriest Ruined Dawn World"
"The Frost Monstreme" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"The Terror from the Depths" — a Cthulhu Mythos story
1977
"The Princess in the Tower 250,000 Miles High"
"Rime Isle" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"A Rite of Spring"
"Sea Magic" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
1978
"Black Glass"
"The Mer She" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
1979
"The Button Molder"
"The Man Who Was Married to Space and Time"
1980
"The Repair People"
1981
"The Great San Francisco Glacier"
1982
"Horrible Imaginings"
"The Moon Porthole"
1983
"The Cat Hotel" — Gummitch story
"The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
1984
"Black Has Its Charms"
"The Ghost Light"
1988
"The Mouser Goes Below" — Fafhrd & Gray Mouser story
"Slack Lankhmar Afternoon Featuring Hisvet" — excerpt from "The Mouser Goes Below"
1990
"Replacement for Wilmer: A Ghost Story"
1993
"Thrice the Brinded Cat"
2002
"The Enormous Bedroom"

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