Fritz Leiber

[galanx]

Have come across a few references to the gray Mouser and Fafhrd- my favorite fantasy- but nothing on the rest of his work.

The Wanderer, of course (Tigerishka!), but also loved A Spectre Is Haunting Texas (political/social satire SF) and The Big Time ( the Change War series), which someone should absolutely produce as a play - "As surely as the Fuhrer rules Chicago".

Still, his best are his short stories:Coming Attraction, Gonna Roll the Bones, Space-Time For Springers ( a must for cat-lovers), Catch That Zeppelin, and A Pail of Air, one of the best SF stories ever.

Lieber moves between SF, fantasy, horror, and weird fiction ( often with a dose of kinky sex). Great stufff.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

The man had style.

It's hard for me to add much to what you have listed. I might mention Conjure Wife, a fine modern horror novel. The Silver Eggheads is another good satire, and The Green Millennium is a charming comedy.

Among his many excellent stories I must mention "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes," which is a knockout.

 

[BAYLOR]

The man had style.

It's hard for me to add much to what you have listed. I might mention Conjure Wife, a fine modern horror novel. The Silver Eggheads is another good satire, and The Green Millennium is a charming comedy.

Among his many excellent stories I must mention "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes," which is a knockout.

Conjure Wife was adapted to the film Burn Witch Burn in the 1960's and The Girl With the hungry yes was adapted for Night Gallery

 

[Bick]

Is there a 'best of' collection of his short stories that is particularly recommended? It should contain classics like A Pail of Air (as I've not read it). Doesn't matter if your recommendation is out of print as I can trawl eBay and Abe. No e-books please. I can't deterimine which is the book to look out for, but I'm sure there will be many who can point the way. Cheers.

 

[J-Sun]

The best Best of that I know of is, oddly enough, The Best of Fritz Leiber by Ballantine. (It does include "A Pail of Air" and you're in for a treat.) The Worlds of Fritz Leiber is another that had a lot of good stuff. The Book of Fritz Leiber by DAW (and there's a Second Book I haven't read) is not all that great. I'm not sure any of these is a literal "best of" in the sense of being drawn exclusively from earlier collections - I think they're all a mix of previously collected and uncollected material to varying degrees - but all are significantly previously collected books that try to cover a broad scope of subject and time and all hail from the 70s, which means they cover the vast bulk of his career.

There may be other later/posthumous ones but I don't know about those.

I'd add that you might want to check out the Changewar stories which, aside from his Fafhrd & Grey Mouser tales, are probably his most significant series (and contain one of my favorites in "The Oldest Soldier"). I forget which is in what of the "bests" but they don't account for all of them. You can get most in some versions of The Mind Spider and Other Stories or all in Changewar. And of the handful of "original" collections of his that I've read, his first, Night's Black Agents is the best, in its 1978 Berkley expanded edition, though it's basically fantasy/light horror with little or no strict science fiction.

 

[psikeyhackr]

Books by Leiber, Fritz (sorted by release date)
Books by Leiber, Fritz (sorted by popularity)

 

[Alex The G and T]

I hold in my hands, here: The Ghost Light "His New Novella. His Finest Stories. His Autobiography. (Berkley 1984)

I haven't read it for 10 or 15 years; amazing how quickly it came to hand.

The Ghost Light is, presumably, the "new" Novella. or maybe Coming Attraction. (I don't really remember that one)

The rest of the TOC reads like the best of the best: A Deskful of Girls, Space-Time for Springers, Four Ghosts in Hamlet, Gonna Roll the Bones (my personal, all time fav for imagery); Bazaar of the Bizarre (One of the best Lankhmar stories) Midnight by the Morphy Watch, Black Glass.

The autobio section is, IIRC, quite amusing; but probably moreso for a Fan.

And it's illustrated.

 

[Bick]

Thanks for the suggestions. I found the Ballantine on eBay, J-Sun, but it was £12 + £16 postage, which comes to about $50 New Zealand money - i.e. a bit much for a used paperback! I will keep an eye out though, as a cheaper copy will no doubt surface at some point.

 

[Randy M.]

Here's the contents of the Ballantine The Best of Fritz Leiber:
Publication Listing

And here's the contents of the later Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories from Nightshade Press:
Publication Listing

The Ballantine concentrates on his science fiction -- fitting since it was a series of sf "best of"s -- while the Nightshade has fewer stories but a broader range of his writing. From the dark fantasy/horror side of his work I'd urge tracking down a copy of Night's Black Agents; The Ghost Light also looks good, though I think that can be expensive. Last year I read Fritz Leiber & H. P. Lovecraft: Writers of the Dark which is still more specialized, but a good overview of Lieber's debt to Lovecraft as a writer and a thinker.

There's a lot to Leiber and his work. I don't think he's really fully received his due, yet, although The Library of America did select one of his sf novels (The Big Time) for a collection of important sf novels from the 1950s.


Randy M.

 

[Bick]

Thanks Randy. The Nightshade has appeal due to its current availability, too. I shall have to see what I can achieve and I'll post once I obtain a collection. You've also reminded me I have a copy of The Big Time, unread as yet, so I should perhaps give that a read first off.

 

[Randy M.]

[...]You've also reminded me I have a copy of The Big Time, unread as yet, so I should perhaps give that a read first off.

Now you mention it, me, too.


Randy M.

 

[J-Sun]

Thanks for the suggestions. I found the Ballantine on eBay, J-Sun, but it was £12 + £16 postage, which comes to about $50 New Zealand money - i.e. a bit much for a used paperback! I will keep an eye out though, as a cheaper copy will no doubt surface at some point.

Wow. That is just a little expensive. I don't know how accessing stuff like abebooks works from where you are, but they have it for 4-5 bucks.

Randy M does bring up a fair point: The Best of insufficiently represents fantasy/horror (though the Ballantine series wasn't pure SF, having titles like The Best of Robert Bloch). Maybe the Nightshade would be a more rounded, comprehensive selection. One thing I don't like about it, though, is that it picks a novelette and two novellas from the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series and, if you end up getting the series, those are just a lot of wasted pages. If they can't fully represent a series, Bests should really just pick one great (short, where possible) example, IMO. Night's Black Agents has a similar problem, printing a couple of F&GM stories (though that was their first collected appearance, before there were F&GM books) but it makes a good buy with The Best of, being fantasy/horror and having a lot of his early Unknown stuff and with the expanded edition grabbing up Victoria's "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" and so on. Still, maybe the Nightshade (or some late retrospective), if affordable, would be a simpler approach and maybe the best one-volume approach, anyway.

 

[Randy M.]

[...]Randy M does bring up a fair point: The Best of insufficiently represents fantasy/horror (though the Ballantine series wasn't pure SF, having titles like The Best of Robert Bloch).

As I recall Bloch's introduction to the volume, he seemed bemused that he was being included in the series and in the selection leaned toward his s.f. stories, though his work in that genre was not his strongest. Also as I recall, Ballantine at the time issued one or two other collections by him. I suspect his collections sold well, so they added him to the s.f. series.

Randy M.

 

[tylenol4000]

So what kind of stuff did Fritz Lieber write? I know I often see him mentioned in regards to SF or Fantasy, but I don't know what he writes. Was he one of those guys who wrote both science-fiction and fantasy? Or just fantasy?

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

So what kind of stuff did Fritz Lieber write? I know I often see him mentioned in regards to SF or Fantasy, but I don't know what he writes. Was he one of those guys who wrote both science-fiction and fantasy? Or just fantasy?

Everything in the field of speculative fiction from hard SF ("A Pail of Air") to sword-and-sorcery (the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser series) to satire (A Spectre is Haunting Texas) to supernatural horror (Conjure Wife) to time travel (The Big Time) to apocalyptic epics (The Wanderer) to light comedy ("Space-Time for Springers.")

You name it, he was the master of it.

 

[Bick]

Okay, returned from camping, starting The Big Time tonight. Will let you know how it goes, in due course.

 

[Bick]

Hmm, okay, is The Big Time typical? I started it, and, err... I kinda hated it. In twenty dense pages of poorly explained dialogue between unengaging characters that I don't care about, nothing whatsoever happened. There appears to be no plot currently, or in the offing. I flicked forward and the book seemed to continue the same tedious dialogue between the same strange characters whatever page I turned to. It's like a SF version of Waiting for Godot, but not literary. So, I've put that back on the shelf and will try something else instead.

 

[galanx]

There is an argument that it should actually be a stage play, but no, action-packed it isn't. It's more of a world-builder, and the interactions between the characters (some of whom are historical personages) is the main thing in setting the scene
Personally I loved it, but then I like sloooow. Different strokes.

 

[pambaddeley]

His short fiction includes some urban supernatural classics such as 'Smoke Ghost'.

 

[J-Sun]

Hmm, okay, is The Big Time typical? I started it, and, err... I kinda hated it. In twenty dense pages of poorly explained dialogue between unengaging characters that I don't care about, nothing whatsoever happened. There appears to be no plot currently, or in the offing. I flicked forward and the book seemed to continue the same tedious dialogue between the same strange characters whatever page I turned to. It's like a SF version of Waiting for Godot, but not literary. So, I've put that back on the shelf and will try something else instead.

There is an argument that it should actually be a stage play, but no, action-packed it isn't.

Leiber and his dad were both actors - Leiber has even been in a handful of films (all I could find was this rather odd clip from a later movie) but he was also a big theater guy and The Big Time is written almost like a stage play rather than a novel and is, indeed, a sort of tour de force and atypical in a structural sense, though not all that thematically atypical or anything (there are several Changewar stories, of which The Big Time is the novel-length one, and theaters, time, conflict, etc., recur throughout his work). I generally favor the action-packed, but really enjoyed The Big Time. Maybe give it another try someday (maybe especially after reading the shorter Changewar stories) and see if it doesn't sneak up on you and become compelling but, indeed, it may not work at all for you and I wouldn't force it. Leiber's written a lot of all kinds of stuff in all kinds of ways and some of the others might work much better for you.