Seekers of Tomorrow (39 page)

in 1960 was an artistic triumph, one of the finest fantasy hours ever shown on television. A film released by American Inter-national in 1963, using A. Merritt's old title,
Burn Witch Burn,
starred Janet Blair and Peter Wyngarde, changed the setting to England, and altered the characteristics of some of the lead characters, and proved to be much inferior to the television production.

Leiber had no way of knowing how successful that story would eventually be. For the moment, its sale effectively but prosaically merely helped to pay the rent. He decided to abandon fantasy and make a more concerted effort to suc-ceed in science fiction.

The only previously published science fiction of Leiber's was a long novelette titled
They Never Come
Back
(future fiction, August, 1941), whose major merit was in the notion that gravitational stresses as well as radio waves travel in circumscribed channels or "warps" and that all spaceships would have to route themselves accordingly, not only to utilize the concentrated power traveling along the "warp" but to maintain radio communication. Now Leiber sent Campbell several ideas for a science-fiction novel, including a variation of Robert Heinlein's
Sixth Column,
in which the military sets up a religion for the purpose of overthrowing America's Asiat-ic conquerors. "Oh, boy," Leiber said to himself, "let those scientists or military men set up a fine religion and seize power and they'll never let it go, they'll hang on to that power." In the outline for
Gather, Darkness!
Leiber suggested an underground using witchcraft and holding up Satan as its idol to overthrow the despotic scientific religion. Campbell told him to go ahead with it. Leiber was far from the first to attempt to bend the supernatural to science fiction. H. P. Lovecraft had done it with singular effectiveness, inventing an entire new mythos in the process. In more recent science fiction, Jack Williamson attempted to explain the supernatural genetically in
Darker Than You Think
(unknown, De-cember, 1940) and Heinlein used high-flying broomsticks in
Waldo
(astounding science-fiction, August, 1942).

Perhaps Leiber was the better merchandiser of such ideas, possibly he was convincing where the others were not, but whatever the reason, and erroneously or not, in the minds of readers he came to be regarded as
the
transitional author who tied well-known elements of superstition to science in fiction. Before the appearance of
Gather, Darkness!
Leiber was regarded as an important writer. That one story placed him among the "big names." Yet, its techniques and stylistic flow are clearly devices taken from Edgar Rice Burroughs; the author keeps two or more situations going simultaneously, carrying them along in alternating chapters. The chase scene in which the hero, Jarles, is rescued from the mob by the old

"witch" Mother Jujy is obviously indebted to A. E. van Vogt's treatment in
Slan,
where Jommy Cross is saved from the mob by Granny. The personality changer used on Jarles is reminiscent of Stanley G. Weinbaum's "attitudinizer" in
Point of View.
From Leiber's own acrobatic tower in
Two Sought
Adventure
comes the notion of the flexible "haunted" house. But these were merely ingredients that Leiber ob-tained for the literary stew; the spice he added to flavor it no one could lend him. There is the satire, pitiless in its excoria-tion of religion, satire deriving from Leiber's own personal observations. There is the cynicism regarding the scientists' ability to do any better than the politicians. There is the humor, mature, not light, not raucous, blending into the story. And there is the gift for characterization, effectively evidenced in Brother Chulian, Jarles, Mother Jujy, and the Familiar.

This "triumph" was followed by a short story,
The Mu-tant's Brother,
which contains the seeds of a powerful emo-tional situation that no author has yet properly developed in science fiction. Two brothers, both mutants with special men-tal powers, come into conflict as one, a proponent of good, hunts down and then destroys the other, who is using his superior attributes for evil.

Pacifism obsessed Leiber following Pearl Harbor. The "witchcraft" movement in
Gather, Darkness!

reflected this, as did
Taboo
(analog science fact & fiction, February, 1963) in which pacifists maintain a sanctuary for involuntary expatriates of a warring world, as well as
Sanity
(astound-ing science-fiction, April, 1944) where the entire popula-tion is maniacal and the "sane" leader is led off to the booby hatch because he does not conform to the norm, which is nonconformity. The preoccupation with pacifism so interfered with his writing that during the latter part of 1943 and early 1944 he decided he might as well take a job as an inspector at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica because it might help him "to stay out of the army."

After agonizing mental reappraisal, he gradually came to the conclusion that right and reason had been on the side of the anti-fascist forces. This mental reconciliation temporarily enabled him to write and the results were auspicious.
Wanted
—
An Enemy
(astounding science-fiction, Febru-ary, 1945) was a brilliant little story. A pacifist, with special scientific powers, exhorts the Martians to make a token attack on Earth so that humans will band together against the common menace and thereby end war. The Martians, who had their fill of war thousands of years earlier, had made a peace pact with the Venusians promising to confine themselves to their own planet. Convinced that the Earthmen are potentially dangerous, the Martians vow to sterilize this planet. Appalled at his excessive success, the pacifist hies off to Venus to tell them the Martians are about to break their ancient pact. When the Venusian leader eyed him wondering-ly and asked: "What are you?" a sudden surge of woeful honesty compelled Mr. Whitlow to reply, "
I
suppose

. . .
I suppose you'd call me a warmonger"

Only slightly less successful than
Gather, Darkness!
was
Destiny Times Three
(astounding science-fiction, March-April, 1945) to which
Business of Killing
(astounding science-fiction,' September, 1944), a short story of the con-templated exploitation of simultaneous worlds, was a prelude. A machine built by an Olaf Stapledonian intelligence acciden-tally fragments the time stream of our planet into a number of "worlds of if," three of which, at least, have duplicated individuals on them leading different lives. One, an Orwellian world, decides to take over the original earth. The interplay of three alternate situations is again handled in the Edgar Rice Burroughs technique. Nightmares are explained as con-tacts with our duplicates on alternate worlds, as are many of our superstitions. Influences of H. P. Lovecraft are stronger here than in any other major Leiber story. Fundamentally, the novel is a fantastic allegory, splendidly readable, with fast-moving action, and thoroughly polished.

When the war ended, Leiber returned to Chicago, where he was tipped off that there would be an associate editor's position on science digest by a friend, George Mann, whose resignation was creating the opening. The magazine, pub-lished by the owners of popular mechanics, required many of the same skills that Leiber had employed in his ency-clopedia work for Consolidated. The position led nowhere, but Leiber was to retain it through to 1956, the longest stint under a single employer of his lifetime. Writing ceased; the first phase of his writing career had ended.

Early in 1949 Leiber began publishing an amateur mimeo-graphed publication titled new purposes as a creative out-let. Among the contributors were his good friends Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, and George Mann. The magazine petered out after sixteen issues, but filling its pages had started Leiber writing again. It contained chapters of what eventually would become his book
The Green Millennium
(Abelard Press, 1953). This novel was a discomfiting tale of government in league with crime, with the populace quieted by sex diversions. Fred Pohl became his agent, sold a few "dogs," and then was solicited by Campbell for
The
Lion and the Lamb
(astounding science-fiction, September, 1950). This was Leiber venturing out to the far reaches of the galaxy, to the "Coalsack" where a group of runaway colonists, after some hundreds of years, have set up a "primitive" culture, abhorring mechanical devices of all sorts. Witchcraft and pacifism were strong elements of this smoothly woven, completely modern novelette. The antimechanics aspect was new for Leiber, but the device of mentally projecting a frightening image was drawn from John W. Campbell's
Invad-ers of the Infinite
and the moving smoke images parallel strongly the Dream Makers' illusions in A. Merritt's
The Snake Mother.

Leiber had felt a lifelong dissatisfaction with the sexual patterns of Western culture, holding that unhealthy frustra-tions contributed to the "sick" aspects of our culture. His personal preference rested with the social mores of The Last Men in Olaf Stapledon's
Last and First Men
(1930), in which men and women live in groups "... but in most groups all the members of the male sex have intercourse with all the members of the female sex. Thus sex with us is essentially social." He regarded with admiration John Humphrey Noyes' Oneida Community which flourished between 1840 and 1900 and practiced what Stapledon presented as fiction. These ideas were incorporated in a number of his stories beginning with
The
Ship Sails at Midnight
(fantastic adventures, September, 1950) which was derivative of William Sloane's
To Walk the Night;
they were implied in
The Green Millen-nium,
and most successfully presented in
Nice Girl with Five Husbands
(galaxy science fiction, April, 1951), in which through a slip in time, a man wanders into an idyllic commu-nity of the year 2050 very similar to the Oneida Community. Leiber's ideas on sex were presented in such impeccable good taste that there was little reaction to them. The oppo-site was true of
Coming Attraction
(galaxy science fiction, November, 1951), which in every sense epitomized his sec-ond big successful period as a science-fiction writer.
Coming Attraction
introduces a British visitor to post-atomic-war life in New York City, where it is stylish for women to wear masks (since many of their faces were seared by atomic blasts) and where a warped culture has arisen which Leiber artistically unveils with magnificent indirection and almost psychiatric insight to produce one of the masterpieces of short science fiction.

Appointment in Tomorrow
(galaxy science fiction, July, 1952) is, in a sense, a sequel to
Coming
Attraction.
Originally titled
Poor Superman,
it tells of a cult which regales a United States that
wants
to be hoodwinked with fraudulent claims for "Maizie," a "thinking machine" that is "solving" the world's difficult problems, and falsities of un-manned space probes which presumably have already made contact with civilized life on Mars. When the promotion man of the movement tries to convert all this humbug into reality, he is effectively stopped. It was just an ordinary sort of story, but
The Moon Is Green
(galaxy science fiction, April, 1952) fell just a little short of greatness. In it, tender hopes and yearning for beauty of a woman closeted in the lead-lined radioactive world of tomorrow bring sorrow to her husband in a gamble, instinct with tragedy, based on illusion-ary hope.

That Leiber had become the poet of the world of post-atomic war was evident in
A Bad Day for Sales
(galaxy science fiction, July, 1953) in which he keeps his focus on a vending robot that maintains its selling pitch and its built-in reflexes after the bomb has dropped, an effective variant on
There Will Come Soft
Rains
by Ray Bradbury.

That he dropped his writing in 1953 before he solidified this second phase of his writing career was due to lack of psychological stamina. Working on science digest by day and writing in the evening and on weekends interfered with his creativity, he said. Instead of trying to reach an accom-modation, he took to drinking heavily, eventually leaving his job in 1956. Then as abruptly he quit drinking. Some alcoholics have a lost weekend to worry about, but Leiber had nearly four years, irreplaceable years, of writing to account for. He made his comeback with
Time in the Round
(galaxy science fiction, May, 1957). H. L. Gold, then editor of that magazine, exulted: "Leiber's back and galaxy's got 'im!" The result was a pleasant story built around tomorrow's theater, which is capable of bringing into being images of the past and future. When some primitive men and dogs unprecedently solidify and threaten the audi-ence, they find themselves frustrated by a child with some mechanical pets. The winner proved to be
The Big Time,
a two-part serial running in the March and April, 1958, issues of galaxy science fiction. This tale is of a war fought by changing the past and the future, and it is told in the vernacular of a party girl who is a hostess of The Place, a timeless night club suspended outside the cosmos. The philosophical upshot is the comprehension by mankind of a higher state of conscious-ness, and its evolution from time-binding (the unification of events through memory) to possibility binding (making all of what might be part of what is). It gained Fritz Leiber a Hugo as the best science-fiction novel of 1958

and catapulted him right back into the limelight, but then he decided that satire was being overdone and he would try farce.
The Silver Egg-Heads,
originally a novelette, was expanded to novel length for a Ballantine Books paperback. It was written in the broad, raucous tones of a Robert Bloch broadside, intend-ing to spoof writers, agents, publishers, and their associates scientifictionally. It fell with a dull thud when submitted to Gold for galaxy and eventually appeared in fantasy and science fiction, January, 1959. Leiber, a master at tasteful, subtle, balanced humor, was not suited to slapstick. This seemed to break Leiber's stride. He had started his comeback so auspiciously, now he felt he had to search for other markets. He was welcomed with open arms at fantas-tic, where an entire issue, November, 1959, was devoted to Leiber stories. The issue went over big and one short story,
The Mind
Spider,
involving a danger that terminated the practice of telepathy, was used as the basis of his first short story science-fiction collection by Ace. More significant, the issue led off with his first new Grey Mouser novelette since 1951,
Lean Times in Lankhmar,
and it hit the jackpot of reader approbation. Clubs devoted to the science and sorcery school of fantasy had come into existence and Leiber, through the Grey Mouser, suddenly became the leading liter-ary exponent of that literary form. So popular was he, in fact, that
Scylla's Daughter
(fantastic, May, 1961) was nominated for, but did not win, a Hugo at the 1962 World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago; exactly the same thing happened to
The Unholy Grail
(fantastic, November, 1962) in Washington, D.C., one year later.