Fritz Leiber

This article is about the science fiction writer. For his father, the actor, see Fritz Leiber (Sr.).
Fritz Leiber

Leiber portrait by Ed Emshwiller (July 1969)
Born Fritz Reuter Leiber, Jr.
(1910-12-24)December 24, 1910
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Died September 5, 1992(1992-09-05) (aged 81)
San Francisco, California, United States
Occupation Writer
Nationality American
Period 1934–1992[lower-alpha 1]
Genre Fantasy, horror, science fiction
Notable works Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
Relatives Fritz Leiber (Sr.) (father)
Virginia Bronson Leiber (mother)
Leiber's novelette "They Never Come Back" was cover-featured on the August 1941 issue of Future
Leiber's short novel "You're All Alone" was the cover story in the July 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures

Fritz Reuter Leiber, Jr. (December 24, 1910 – September 5, 1992) was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theater and films, playwright and chess expert.[lower-alpha 2] With writers such as Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, Leiber can be regarded as one of the fathers of sword and sorcery fantasy, having in fact created the term. Moreover, he excelled in all fields of speculative fiction, writing award-winning work in fantasy, horror, and science fiction.

Life

Leiber was born December 24, 1910, in Chicago, Illinois, to the actors Fritz Leiber, Sr., and Virginia Bronson Leiber and, for a time, he seemed inclined to follow in his parents' footsteps. (Theater and actors are prominently featured in his fiction.) He spent 1928 touring with his parents' Shakespeare company before studying philosophy at the University of Chicago, where he graduated with honors (1928–32). In 1932, he studied at the Anglican-affiliated General Theological Seminary and worked for a time as a lay preacher. In 1934, he toured with his parents' acting company, Fritz Leiber & Co. Six short stories in the 2010 collection Strange Wonders: A Collection of Rare Fritz Leiber Works carry 1934 and 1935 dates.[lower-alpha 1]

As well as being an actor and lay preacher, Leiber worked variously as a college teacher of drama, and a staff writer for an encyclopedia, and he tried free-lancing sporadically. He introduced Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in the August 1939 number of Unknown magazine, edited by John W. Campbell.[3][4]

He married Jonquil Stephens on January 16, 1936, and their son, Justin Leiber, was born in 1938. During World War II, he decided that the struggle against fascism was more important than his long-held pacifist convictions, and he accepted a job in aircraft production.[4] After working on the staff of Science Digest for a dozen years, he wrote what Poul Anderson called "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.[4]

In 1941 the family moved back to California, and Leiber began working as a speech and drama instructor at Occidental College in Los Angeles. After 1947, a year which marked his first hardcover publication with his collection Night's Black Agents (Arkham House), the family moved back to Chicago, where Leiber became editor of Science Digest. In 1958 they returned to Los Angeles, where Leiber became a full-time writer.

Jonquil's death in 1969 precipitated a move to San Francisco, and three years as a drunk, but he returned to his original form with a fantasy novel set in modern-day San Francisco, Our Lady of Darkness, which is about a writer of weird tales who must deal with the death of his wife and his recovery from alcoholism. Leiber seems to have suffered periods of penury in the 1970s; Harlan Ellison has written of his anger at finding that the much-awarded Leiber had to write his novels on a manual typewriter that was propped up over the sink in his apartment, and Marc Laidlaw wrote that, when visiting Leiber as a fan in 1976, he "was shocked to find him occupying one small room of a seedy San Francisco residence hotel, its squalor relieved mainly by walls of books".[5] But other reports suggest 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.

In 1992, the last year of his life, Leiber married his second wife, Margo Skinner, a journalist and poet with whom he had been friends for many years. 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 100-page-plus autobiography, Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex, which can be found in The Ghost Light (1984).[6]

Leiber's own literary criticism, including several essays on Lovecraft, was collected in the volume Fafhrd and Me (1990).[7]

Theater

Leiber's novlette "Scylla's Daughter", featuring series protagonists Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, was the cover story for the May 1961 issue of Fantastic

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. Judith Merril (in the July 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction) remarks on Leiber's acting skills when the writer won a science fiction 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."

Films

He can be seen as an actor in several movies.

He appears briefly with his father, the actor Fritz Leiber, Sr. in two films: the wedding-feast scene of Garbo's film Camille (1936) and in Warner Bros.' The Great Garrick (1937). Fritz Leiber, Jr. had a small uncredited speaking part in the The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) in which his father Fritz Leiber, Sr. had a credited part.

Due to the similarity of the names of the father and the son, some filmographies incorrectly attribute to Fritz, Jr roles which were in fact played by his father, Fritz Leiber, Sr. Fritz, Sr. was the evil Inquisitor in the Errol Flynn adventure film The Sea Hawk (1940) and had played in many other movies from 1917 onwards until the late 1950s. It is to be noted that it is the elder Leiber, not the younger, who appears in the Vincent Price vehicle The Web (1947) and in Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947).

In the cult horror film Equinox (1970) (a.k.a. The Beast; video title), directed by Jack Woods, Fritz, Jr. has a cameo appearance as the geologist Dr Watermann. In the edited second version of the movie Leiber has no spoken dialogue in the film but features in a few scenes. The original version of the movie has a longer appearance by Leiber recounting the ancient book and a brief speaking role, all of which was cut from the re-release of the film.

He also appears in the 1979 Schick Sunn Classics documentary The Bermuda Triangle, based on the book by Charles Berlitz, as Chavez. Director: Richard Friedenberg; Writers: Stephen Lord; Stars: Brad Crandall, Donald Albee and Lin Berlitz.

Surprisingly, Leiber's acting talents were not utilised for any of the movie versions of his novel Conjure Wife or for other screen adaptations of his work (see § Screen adaptations).

Writing career

Leiber's Hugo Award-winning novel The Big Time was serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1958
The November 1959 issue of Fantastic was devoted exclusively to Leiber's fiction, publishing five original sf and fantasy stories
Leiber's "Pipe Dream" was the cover story for the February 1959 issue of If, illustrated by Kelly Freas
Leiber's novella "The Night of the Long Knives" took the cover of the January 1960 issue of Amazing Stories
Leiber's novelette "Deadly Moon" was cover-featured on the November 1960 issue of Fantastic
Leiber's "The Beat Cluster" took the cover of the October 1961 Galaxy Science Fiction
Leiber's "Hatchery of Dreams" was the cover story on the November 1961 issue of Fantastic
Leiber's novelette "A Bit of the Dark World" took the cover of the February 1962 issue of Fantastic
Leiber's "The Snowbank Orbit" was the cover story for the September 1962 issue of If
Leiber's only solo Grey Mouser tale, "The Unholy Grail", was the cover story for the October 1962 issue of Fantastic
Leiber's "Dr. Adams' Garden of Evil" took the cover of the February 1963 issue of Fantastic
Leiber's novelette "Bazaar of the Bizarre" was the cover story for the August 1963 issue of Fantastic

Leiber was heavily influenced by H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Graves in the first two decades of his career. Beginning in the late 1950s, he was increasingly influenced by the works of Carl Jung, particularly by the concepts of the anima and the shadow. From the mid-1960s onwards, he 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 liked 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 first stories were inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and it seems that a letter of encouragement from Lovecraft during 1936 spurred his decision to pursue a literary career. Leiber later wrote several essays on Lovecraft such as "A Literary Copernicus" which formed key moments in the serious critical appreciation of Lovecraft's life and work.

Leiber's first professional sale was Two Sought Adventure (Unknown, August 1939),[8] which introduced his most famous characters, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. His work as a writer earned much praise but little money, a problem exacerbated by bouts of alcoholism and an addiction to downers. In 1943, he sold his first novels, Conjure Wife to Unknown and Gather, Darkness to Astounding. From 1945–56 Leiber was associate editor of Science Digest.

1947 marked the publication of his first book, Night's Black Agents, a short story collection containing seven stories grouped as 'Modern Horrors', one as a 'Transition', and two grouped as 'Ancient Adventures': "The Sunken Land" and "Adept's Gambit", which are both stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

Book publication of the science fiction novel Gather, Darkness followed in 1950. It deals with a futuristic world that follows the Second Atomic Age which is ruled by scientists, until in the throes of a new Dark Age, the witches revolt.

In 1951 Leiber was Guest of Honour at the World Science Fiction Convention in New Orleans. Further novels followed during the 1950s, and in 1958 The Big Time won the Hugo Award for Best Novel.[9]

Leiber published many further books in the 1960s. His novel The Wanderer (1964) won the Hugo Award for Best Novel.[9] In the novel, an artificial planet, quickly nicknamed the Wanderer, materializes from hyperspace within earth's orbit. The Wanderer's gravitational field captures the moon and shatters it into something like one of Saturn's rings. On earth, the Wanderer's gravity well triggers massive earthquakes, tsunamis, and tidal phenomena. The multi-threaded plot follows the exploits of a large ensemble cast as they struggle to survive the global disaster.

Leiber was awarded three further Hugos for Best Novella/Novelette: for "Gonna Roll the Bones" (1967), (which also won the Nebula Award in the same category); "Ship of Shadows" (1969) and "Ill Met in Lankhmar" (1970).[9]

Our Lady of Darkness (1977)— originally serialized in short form in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction under the title "The Pale Brown Thing" (1977)— featured cities as the breeding grounds for new types of elementals called paramentals, summonable by the dark art of megapolisomancy, with such activities centering on the Transamerica Pyramid. Its main characters include Franz Westen, Jaime Donaldus Byers, and the magician Thibault de Castries. Our Lady of Darkness won the World Fantasy Award.[9]

Leiber also did the 1966 novelization of the Clair Huffaker screenplay of Tarzan and the Valley of Gold.[10]

Many of Leiber's most-acclaimed works are short stories, especially in the horror genre. Owing to such stories as "The Smoke Ghost," "The Girl With the Hungry Eyes" and "You're All Alone" (a.k.a. "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.) Leiber also challenged the conventions of science fiction through reflexive narratives such as "A Bad Day For Sales" (first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1953), in which the protagonist, Robie, "America’s only genuine mobile salesrobot,"[11] references the title character of Isaac Asimov’s idealistic robot story, "Robbie."[12] Questioning Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, Leiber imagines the futility of automatons in a post-apocalyptic New York City. 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."[13]

The short parallel worlds story "Catch That Zeppelin!" (1975) added yet another Nebula and Hugo award to his collection.[9] 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.

Leiber was named the second Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy by participants in the 1975 World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), after the posthumous inaugural award to J. R. R. Tolkien.[9] Next year he won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.[9] He was Guest of Honor at the 1979 Worldcon in Brighton, England (1979). The Science Fiction Writers of America made him its fifth SFWA Grand Master in 1981;[14] the Horror Writers Association made him an inaugural winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1988 (named in 1987);[15] and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him in 2001, its sixth class of two deceased and two living writers.[16]

Leiber was a founding member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, a loose-knit group of Heroic fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, led by Lin Carter, with entry by fantasy credentials alone. Some works by SAGA members were published in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies. Leiber himself is credited with inventing the term sword and sorcery for the particular subgenre of epic fantasy exemplified by his Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories.

In an appreciation in the July 1969 "Special Fritz Leiber Issue" of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Judith 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

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.[3] The first of them, "Two Sought Adventure", appeared in Unknown, August 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 were 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. 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.

Some Fafhrd and Mouser stories were recognized by annual genre awards: "Scylla's Daughter" (1961) was "Short Story" Hugo finalist and "Ill Met in Lankhmar" (1970) won the "Best Novella" Hugo and Nebula Awards.[9] 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 continued by other writers, but his sudden death made this more difficult. One new Fafhrd and the Mouser novel, Swords Against the Shadowland, by Robin Wayne Bailey, did appear in 1998, and according to the author's web site, a second volume is in the works.

The stories were influential in shaping the genre and were influential on other works. Joanna Russ' stories about thief-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 (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). More recently, playing off the visit of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser to our world in Adept's Gambit (set in second century B.C. Tyre), Steven Saylor's short story "Ill Seen in Tyre" takes his Roma Sub Rosa series hero Gordianus to the city of Tyre a hundred years later, where the two visitors from Nehwon are remembered as local legends.[17]

Fischer and Leiber contributed to the original game design of the wargame Lankhmar—published in 1976 by TSR.[18]

Selected works

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series

  1. Two Sought Adventure (1958). Collection of six short stories. Later expanded and retitled as Swords Against Death.
  2. Swords and Deviltry (1970). Collection of 3 short stories.
  3. Swords Against Death (1970). Collection of 10 short stories; an expanded edition of Two Sought Adventure
  4. Swords in the Mist (1968). Collection of 6 short stories.
  5. Swords Against Wizardry (1968). Collection of 4 short stories.
  6. The Swords of Lankhmar (1968). Expanded from "Scylla's Daughter" in Fantastic, 1963.
  7. Swords and Ice Magic (1977). Collection of 8 short stories. (Though see Rime Isle below.)
  8. The Knight and Knave of Swords (1988). Collection of 4 short stories. Retitled Farewell to Lankhmar (2000, UK).

Novels/Novellas

Collections

Plays

Essays

Poetry

Screen adaptations

Conjure Wife has been made into feature films three times under other titles:

A new film adaptation of Conjure Wife was announced in 2008, to be filmed by US director Billy Ray. It is slated to be a United Artists/Studio Canal co-production.[20]

"The Girl With the Hungry Eyes" was filmed under that title by Kastenbaum Films in 1995. The Girl with the Hungry Eyes. Director: Jon Jacobs; Writers:Christina Fulton (additional story and dialogue), Jon Jacobs; Stars:Christina Fulton, Isaac Turner and Leon Herbert. (This film is not to be confused with the 1967 William Rotsler film The Girl with the Hungry Eyes which is entirely unrelated to Leiber's story).

Two Leiber stories were filmed for TV for Rod Serling's Night Gallery. These were "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" (1970) (adapted by Robert M. Young and directed by John Badham); and "The Dead Man" (adapted and directed by Douglas Heyes).

Quotations

Consider the age in which we live. It wants magicians…. A scientist tells people the truth. When times are good—that is, when the truth offers no threat—people don't mind.… A magician, on the other hand, tells people what they wish were true—that perpetual motion works, that cancer can be cured by colored lights, that a psychosis is no worse than a head cold, that they'll live forever. In good times magicians are laughed at. They're a luxury of the spoiled wealthy few. But in bad times people sell their souls for magic cures and buy perpetual-motion machines to power their war rockets.
—"Poor Superman" © 1951[21]
Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find.
—"Poor Superman" © 1951[22]
If you could sum up all you felt about life and crystallize it in one master insight, you would have said it all and you would be dead.[23]

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 Strange Wonders, pp. 173–99. ISFDB which reports that "Riches and Power" appeared in "The Churchman", December 1, 1934, and provides no such data for five with 1935 dates.[2]
  2. ↑ His greatest achievement at chess may be winning clear first in the 1958 Santa Monica Open.[1]

References

  1. ↑ The Web Novice. "California Chess Reminiscences". Chessdryad.com. Retrieved 2013-04-18.
  2. ↑ "Fritz Leiber – Summary Bibliography". ISFDB. Retrieved 2013-04-04.
  3. 1 2 Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB). Retrieved 2013-04-04. Select a title to see its linked publication history and general information. Select a particular edition (title) for more data at that level, such as a front cover image or linked contents.
  4. 1 2 3 Anderson, Poul (1974), "The Wizard of Nehwon", The Best of Fritz Leiber, NY: Doubleday, pp. vii–xv.
  5. ↑ Laidlaw, Marc, "On Our Lady of Darkness," in the anthology Horror: Another 100 Best Books, edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, Carroll & Graf, 2005.
  6. ↑ Leiber, Fritz (1984). The Ghost Light. New York: Berkley Books. ISBN 978-0-425-06812-0.
  7. ↑ Leiber, Fritz (1990). Fafhrd and Me. Newark NJ: Wildside Press.
  8. ↑ Ellison, Harlan (1967). Dangerous Visions - Introduction to: Gonna Roll the Bones. New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0-425-06176-0.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Leiber, Fritz". The Locus Index to SF Awards: Index to Literary Nominees. Locus Publications. Retrieved 2013-04-01.
  10. ↑ Bill and Sue-On Hillman. "ERBzine 0210: Tarzan and the Valley of Gold ~ ERB C.H.A.S.E.R". Erbzine.com. Retrieved 2013-04-18.
  11. ↑ Leiber, Fritz. "A Bad Day For Sales." Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction. Ed. 1. Leigh Ronald Grossman. Wildside Press, 2011. 422. Print.
  12. ↑ Grossman, Leigh R. Ed. Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction. 1. Wildside Press, 2011. 421. Print.
  13. ↑ Ramsey Campbell
  14. ↑ "Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master". Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). Retrieved 2013-04-01.
  15. ↑ "Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement". Horror Writers Association (HWA). Retrieved 2013-04-06.
  16. ↑ "Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame". Mid American Science Fiction and Fantasy Conventions, Inc. Retrieved 2013-04-01. This was the official website of the hall of fame to 2004.
  17. ↑ Saylor, Steven, "Ill Seen in Tyre," in the anthology Rogues, edited by Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin, Bantam, 2014.
  18. ↑ Shannon Appelcline (2011). Designers & Dragons. Mongoose Publishing. p. 9. ISBN 978-1-907702-58-7.
  19. ↑ Victor Gollancz [publisher] Dust Jacket bio.
  20. ↑ "Billy Ray to write, direct 'Conjure Wife'", UPI (upi.com), December 19, 2008. Retrieved 2010-07-17.
  21. ↑ Heinlein, Robert A., ed. (1952), Tomorrow, the Stars, NY: Doubleday, SBN 425-01426-6, p. 207.
  22. ↑ Heinlein, ed., p. 208.
  23. ↑ Adair, Gerald. "Illuminating the Ghost Light: Final Acts in the Theater of Fritz Leiber" (PDF). Jstor. International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. Retrieved 7 November 2015.

Further reading

Works about Fritz Leiber

Magazine issues devoted to Fritz Leiber

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Fritz Leiber
  1. ↑ Byfield, Bruce (1991). Witches of the Mind: A Critical Study of Fritz Leiber. West Warwick: Necronomicon Press. ISBN 0-940884-35-6.
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