Fritz Leiber - Fritz Leiber: selected stories

Introduction by Neil Gaiman
edited by Jonathan Strahan and Charles N. Brown
Night Shade Books San Francisco

Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories 2010 by the estate of Fritz Leiber This edition of Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories 2010 by Night Shade Books

Introduction 2010 by Neil Gaiman
Jacket art and design by Claudia Noble Author photo courtesy of the Locus magazine archive Interior layout and design by Ross E. Lockhart

All rights reserved

Smoke Ghost, first published in Unknown Worlds, October 1941.

The Girl with the Hungry Eyes,first published in The Girl with the Hungry Eyes and Other Stories, Avon, 1949.

Coming Attraction, first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1950.

A Pail of Air, first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1951.

A Deskful of Girls, first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1958.

Space-Time for Springers, first published in Star Science Fiction Stories No.4, Frederick Pohl. ed., Ballantine, 1958.

Bazaar of the Bizarre, first published in Fantastic Stories of Imagination, August 1963.

Four Ghosts in Hamlet, first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1965.

Gonna Roll the Bones, first published in Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison, ed., Doubleday, 1967.

The Inner Circles (AKA The Winter Flies), first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1967.

America the Beautiful, first published in The Year 2000, Harry Harrison, ed., Doubleday, 1970.

Ill Met in Lankhmar, first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1970.

Midnight by the Morphy Watch, first published in Worlds of If, July-August 1974.

Belsen Express, first published in The Second Book of Fritz Leiber, DAW Books, 1975.

Catch That Zeppelin! first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1975.

Horrible Imaginings, first published in Death, Stuart David Schiff, ed., Playboy Paperbacks, 1982.

The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars, first published in Heroic Visions, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, ed.,

Ace, 1983.
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-59780-180-5
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Neil Gaiman

I MET FRITZ LEIBER (its pronounced Lie-ber, and not, as I had mispronounced it all my life until I met him, Lee-ber) shortly before his death. This was twenty years ago. We were sitting next to each other at a banquet at the World Fantasy Convention. He seemed so old: a tall, serious, distinguished man with white hair, who reminded me of a thinner, better looking Boris Karloff. He said nothing, during the dinner, not that I can remember. Our mutual friend Harlan Ellison had sent him a copy of Sandman #18, A Dream of 1000 Cats, which was my own small tribute to Leibers cat stories, and I told him he had been an inspiration, and he said something more or less inaudible in return, and I was happy. We rarely get to thank those who shaped us.

My first Leiber short story: I was nine. The story,The Winter Flies, was in Judith Merrils huge anthology SF12 . It was the most important book I read when I was nine, with the possible exception of Michael Moorcocks Stormbringer , for it was the place I discovered a host of authors who would become important to me, and dozens of stories I would read so often that I could have recited them: Chip Delanys The Star Pit and R. A. Laffertys Primary Education of the Camiroi and Narrow Valley and William BurroughsThey Do Not Always Remember, J. G. Ballards The Cloud-sculptors of Coral D not to mention Tuli Kupferbergs poems, Carol Emshwiller and Sonya Dorman and Kit Reed and the rest. It did not matter that I was much too young for the stories: I knew that they were beyond me, and was not even slightly troubled by this. The stories made sense to me, a sense that was beyond what they literally meant. It was in SF12 I encountered concepts and people that did not exist in the childrens books I was familiar with, and this delighted me.

What did I make of the The Winter Flies then? The last time I read it I saw it as semi-autobiographical fiction, about a man who philanders and drinks when he is on the road, whose marriage is breaking down, and who interrupts a masturbatory reverie to talk a child having a panic attack back to reality, an action that, for a moment, brings a family, fragmenting in alcohol and lack of communication, together. When I read it as a nine-year-old it was about a man beset by demons, talking his son, lost among the stars, home again. And both ways of reading it were, I suspect, as right as they could be.

I knew I liked Fritz Leiber from that story on. He was someone I read. When I was eleven I bought Conjure Wife , and learned that all women were witches, and found out what a hand of glory was (and yes, there is sexism and misogyny in the book and in the concept, but there is, if you are a twelve-year-old boy trying to make sense of something that might as well be an alien species, also the kind of paranoid what-if-its-true? that makes reading books such a dangerous occupation at any age). I read a 1972 issue of Wonder Woman written by Samuel R. Delany, featuring Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and was disappointed that it felt nothing like a Chip Delany story, but had now encountered our two adventurers, and, from the magic of comics, knew what they looked like. I read Sword of Sorcery, the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser comics that DC comics brought out in 1973, and finally found a copy of The Swords of Lankhmar at the age of thirteen, in the cupboard at the back of Mr. Wrights English class, its cover (I would later discover) a bad English copy of the Jeff Jones painting on the cover of the US edition; and I read it, learned what the tall barbarian and the little thief were like in Leibers glittering, half-amused prose, and I loved it, and I was content.

I couldnt enjoy Conan the Barbarian after that. Not really. I missed the wit.
Shortly after I found a copy of The Big Time, Leibers novel of the Change War, a war across time and space being fought by two incomprehensible groups of antagonists who use human beings as pawns, and I read it, convinced it was a stage-play cunningly disguised as a novella, and when I reread it twenty years on I enjoyed it almost as much (aspects of how Leiber treated the narrator bothered me) and was still just as convinced it was a stage-play. Some of Leibers better SF tales were Change War stories.