The Best of Fritz Leiber

With a
special introduction
by POUL ANDERSON

NELSON DOUBLEDAY, Inc.

Garden City, New York

Ballantine Books

Division of Random House, Inc.

201 East 50th Street

New York, NY 10022

WHEN I was first asked to write an introduction to a volume of Fritz Leiber stories—the most important of such collections at that—my reaction was inappropriately inelegant: “Huh?” I still think it had a fundamental tightness. How can anybody properly comment on the work of one who is not only his senior in the profession by a good many years, but is universally acknowledged to be among its three or four all-time titans?

Yet this was an honor I could not decline. It was like being in a physics department back around 1935 and invited to introduce a series of guest lectures by Einstein. A person in that position realizes the audience hasn’t come to hear, or read, him. But he’ll try to avoid boring platitudes. If he’s lucky, he’ll even convey a slight extra insight, which will help that audience appreciate the visitor and what he’ll say a little bit more than they might otherwise have done. Maybe I’ll luck out.

Let’s first make a few remarks about the man himself, before going on to his writing. They will be only a few—despite the keyhole school of criticism, the facts of a creator’s life are not required for an understanding of his or her work; or if they are, then that person has to that extent failed as an artist. Fritz Leiber does employ a certain amount of autobiography in his work, perhaps more than any other maker of science fiction or fantasy. But he’s far too skillful for you to need to know what the personal element is. Besides, he lets you in on some of it himself, for your pleasure, in his afterword to the present volume.

And I can’t claim deep knowledge of him in any event. We have been friends for a long time, guests in each other’s homes, and so on; but until recently, geographical separation prevented frequent encounters, and we never happened to strike up one of his extended correspondences which have delighted a number of people. Therefore, a mere scattering of reminiscences and data:

I first met Fritz Leiber at the 1949 world science fiction convention in Cincinnati. The author of such cornerstone tales as
Gather, Darkness
! and
Conjure Wife
seemed even more awe-inspiring In person, towering, classically handsome, altogether theatrical. The last of these qualities was not deliberate—rather, he was conventionally clad and soft-spoken—but he couldn’t help it; personality will come through. He talked to me, a beginner with half a dozen stories in print, as graciously as he did to the biggest-name writer or editor present, or the humblest fan. Here “graciously” is used in an exact sense which is best defined by an example.

From time to time we are all afflicted with bores or boors. Some of us give them the brutal brush-off; most of us suffer them for a short while, then escape on a mumbled excuse. Fritz Leiber has repeatedly been seen to
listen
to such characters,
respond
to them, actively, sympathetically, and patiently enough that they never suspect the toleration. He cannot have an enemy in the world; instead, there is a worldful of people who all hope to be worthy of his friendship.

It is etymologically wrong but psychologically right to define a gentleman as one who is gentle, yet very much a man. Leiber has been a championship fencer and a chess player rated “expert.” To see and hear him recite Chesterton’s bravura “Lepanto” is an unforgettable experience. And, of course, in his writing he has stared down— or laughed down—death, horror, human absurdity, with guts worthy of a Tetters, Kafka, or Cervantes.

Born in Chicago near the end of 1910, his father a famous Shakespearean actor for whom Fritz was named, he grew up in the atmosphere of the stage, which doubtless has a great deal to do with the highly visual and dramatic quality of his work. But he took his degree in psychology, which also shows. Variously a lay preacher, actor, college teacher of drama, and staff writer for an encyclopedia, he tried free-lancing sporadically. His first published story appeared in 1939, in that lustrous and mourned magazine
Unknown
. During World War II he reached a painful decision—that the struggle against fascism was more important than the pacifist convictions which he had long held, and still does—and he accepted a job in aircraft production. Afterward, he was on the staff of
Science Digest
for a dozen years. During all this time he acquired a wife and son and, between dry spells which readers regretted, wrote a lot of the best science fiction and fantasy in the business. Eventually he moved from Chicago to southern California and started writing full time. Since his wife’s death (everybody who knew her misses Jonquil) he has lived in San Francisco.

‘ So now Fritz Leiber is in his sixties, an age when most artists have either retired or are sterilely repeating themselves. The years show on him a bit—but not too much, and only physically. Inside, while possessing all the wisdom of a lifetime, he’s younger than the average man of thirty. To give a small personal illustration: not long ago, in his rambles around his newly adopted city, he discovered a walking tour that will take you to every place where action occurs in Dashiell Hammett’s
The Maltese Falcon
. Or… recently my wife gave an elaborate dinner to honor the memory of E. R. Eddison, upon the date of Lessingham’s translation into Zimiamvia. Only those who would understand what that means were invited, and they were expected to come in costume. Fritz graced the party as the oldest, most sharply humorous, and best-dressed man present.

If anything, he keeps growing younger, more actively creative. His past unproductive periods seem to have been times during which, consciously or unconsciously, he was preparing himself to strike out in a different direction. The results were always surprising and consequential. Though ever aware of and sensitive to the great issues of the real world around him, he has never been a merely “relevant” writer. Instead, he has always been in the forefront in both themes and treatment. In these past several years we have been witnessing a new burst of pioneering, which looks as if it will continue while he lives. That makes especially appropriate the book, both retrospective and contemporary, which you are holding. And it brings up our real subject, Fritz Leiber’s achievement.

I do not propose to offer you a critique. For one thing, while mildly disagreeing with a few of her judgments, I couldn’t better the one by Judith Merril.
¹
Besides, I lay no claim to being a critic, simply a working writer.

To be sure, that distinction is far from absolute. Thus Merril published excellent fiction in earlier days, while Leiber has done a certain amount of criticism. The question to consider is where the emphasis of a life—in this case Leiber’s—has lain—or, at least, what an essayist is trying to do. I’ll say little about the stories in this volume. They speak for themselves; moreover, you have the author’s own notes. Rather, I’d like to consider in a very informal fashion, and from the viewpoint of a fellow practitioner, some of those items which are not on hand. You who already know them may enjoy a revival of memories. You who don’t may get a better idea of Leiber’s accomplishment and, I hope, will be led to read further.

It’s too bad that we have no tale of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser here. Not only did that charming pair of rogues—the tall Northern barbarian and the small city-bred trickster—launch the author’s career; they are still going strong, to the joy of everybody who appreciates a rattling good fantasy adventure. But by no means are these stories conventional “sword and sorcery.” The world of Nehwon is made real in wondrously imaginative detail, its human aspects as true as in any conscientious job of reporting. To visit the city of Lankhmar is to learn what decadence in fact means; to roam with our vulnerable vagabonds is to experience pity and terror as well as suspense, wry humor, and uproarious hilarity. Here Leiber in his way—like the late J. R. R. Tolkien in his, and not vastly different—has done, and is doing, for the heroic fantasy what Robert Louis Stevenson did for the pirate yarn: by originality and sheer writing genius, he revived an ossified genre and started it off on a fresh path.

I could likewise wish that this book held a sample or two of Leiber’s horror stories. In my opinion, which Fritz modestly does not share, Lovecraft and Poe himself never dealt out comparable chills. The typical Leiber frightener gains tremendous power by its economy, its evocative contemporary setting, and its bleak brilliance of concept—like “Smoke Ghost,” to name a single tale, whose phantom is in and of the corrupted air pervading a modern industrial city.

And you would have enjoyed “The Sixty-Four-Square Madhouse” and/or “The Moriarty Gambit,” both masterly chess stories, the latter also a grand Sherlock Holmes pastiche. Well, look them up. All the omissions I have mentioned are not the fault of author or editor, but merely due to lack of space. They would have crowded out equally vivid pieces that you do find here.

The novels were inevitably excluded. But any discussion of Leiber’s work, or of science fantasy as a whole, must consider them. They are few in number, but each is unique and, with two exceptions, of major significance in the development of present-day imaginative literature.

The first exception is
Tarzan and the City of Gold
, “only” a delightful continuation of Burroughs. Come to think of it, though, a scholar of English letters would find it most interesting to trace out how Leiber managed to convey the flavor of his model while avoiding all its crudities, outdoing Burroughs in every way that counts, and throwing occasional philosophical and moral issues into the bargain. Does anybody need material for a master’s thesis?

Doubtless many will argue with my assertion that
The Green Millennium
is not a landmark. It is, in the sense of being a fine book, highly recommended. But it carries further the world of “Coming Attraction” and “Poor Superman,” both in the present collection, and thus does not break new ground—by Leiber’s standards—however inventive and often astoundingly witty it is. All the rest of us, from Heinlein on down, would rank it among our own best, had we written it.

Heinlein offers a natural starting point for a few words about
Gather, Darkness
!, that prototype of the interplay of ideas which has always given vitality to science fiction. In 1940 appeared his serial //
This Goes On—
, wherein the United States has fallen under a totalitarian regime posing as the church of a new faith and using technological devices to work suitably impressive “miracles.” A year later, under his pseudonym “Anson MacDonald,” he brought forth
Sixth Column
. There, the United States has been invaded and occupied by a foreign power which allows the people freedom of religion but of nothing else. A small underground takes advantage of secret scientific knowledge—gathered just before the collapse, so that it was never brought to bear in the war—to give the priests of a stalking-horse faith similar capabilities.