The Best of Fritz Leiber Part 26

The Fourth of July was a quiet day. Emily took me on a repeat of our first scooter jaunt, but although I relished the wind on my face and our conversation was pa.s.sably jolly and tender, the magic was gone. I could hardly see America's beauty for the shadows my mind projected on it.

Our fireside conversation that night was as brightly ba.n.a.l. Midway we all went outside to watch the fireworks. It was a starry night, very clear of course, and the fireworks seemed vastly remote-transitory extra starfields of pink and green and amber. Their faint cracks and booms sounded infinitely distant, and needless to say, there was not a ribbon or whiff of chemical smoke. I was reminded of my last night in Leningrad with the Rosanovs after the Pushkin Lectures. We'd all strolled down the Kirovskiy Prospekt to the Bolshaya Neva, and across its glimmering waters watched the Vladivostok mail rocket take off from the Field of Mars up its ringed electric catapult taller far than the Eiffel Tower. That had been on a May Day.

Later that night I went for the first time by myself to Emily's door and pressed its light-b.u.t.ton. I was afraid she wouldn't stop by for me and I needed her. She was in a taut and high-strung mood, unwilling to talk in much more than monosyllables, yet unable to keep still, pacing like a restless feline. She wanted to play in the view window the tape of a real battle in Bolivia with the original sounds too, muted down. I vetoed that and we settled for an authentic forest fire recorded in Alaska.

s.e.x and catastrophe fit. With the wild red light pulsing and flaring in the bedroom, casting huge wild shadows, and with the fire's muted roar and hurricane crackle and explosions filling our ears, we made love with a fierce and desperate urgency that seemed almost-I am eternally grateful for the memory- as if it would last forever. s.e.x and a psychedelic trip also have their meeting point.

Afterward I slept like a sated tiger. Emily waited until dawn to wake me and shoo me back to my bedroom.

Next day all the Grissims saw me off. As we strolled from the silver station wagon to the landing area, Emily and I dropped a little behind. She stopped, hooked her arms around me, and kissed me with a devouring ferocity. The others walked on, too well bred ever to look back. The next moment she was her cool self again, sipping a reefer.

Now the rockets.h.i.+p is arching down. The stars are paling. There is a faint whistling as the air molecules of the stratosphere begin to carom off the t.i.tanium skin. We had only one flap, midway of freefall section of the trip, when we briefly accelerated and then decelerated to match, perhaps in order to miss a spy satellite or one of the atomic-headed watchdog rockets eternally circling the globe. The direction comes, "Secure seat harnesses."

I just don't know. Maybe I should have gone to America drunk as Dylan Thomas, but purposefully, bellowing my beliefs like the word or the thunderbolts of G.o.d. Maybe then I could have fought the shadows. No...

I hope Emily makes it to London. Perhaps there, against a very different background, with shadows of a different sort...

In a few more seconds the great jet will begin to brake, thrusting its hygienic, aseptic exhaust of helium down into the filthy cancerous London smog, and I will be home.

Afterword.

All I ever try to write is a good story with a good measure of strangeness in it. The supreme G.o.ddess of the universe is Mystery, and being well entertained is the highest joy.

I write my stories against backgrounds of science, history and fantasy worlds of swords and sorcery. I write about the intensely strange everyday human mind and the weird and occult-about which I am a skeptic yet which interest me vastly. I always try to be meticulously accurate in handling these backgrounds, to be sure of my facts no matter what fantastic stories I build from them.

The tales in this volume are predominantly science fantasy. They are arranged in the order in which they were first published, all except "Gonna Roll the Bones." It seemed best to lead off with a story that displayed to advantage all my talents, such as they are. It was actually written next to the last of the twenty-two stories in this book.

I'm sure you'll agree that authors' remarks are egotistical effusions at best, so I'll devote this s.p.a.ce to telling a bit of the history of the stories-and to effusing egotistically.

"Gonna Roll the Bones" was written to a dull anticlimax and set aside for six months. After this fortuitous opportunity for subconscious growth, it was rewritten under pressure to meet the deadline of Harlan Ellison's monumental anthology Dangerous Visions. The story luckily won the Hugo and Nebula novelette awards for 1967. Theodore Sturgeon said of it in a review, "Fritz Leiber is at his cadenced, ringing best in a completely successful blend of science fiction and myth, adventure and horror."

"Sanity" and "Wanted-An Enemy" were done for Astounding Stories (now a.n.a.log) and its master editor John W. Campbell, Jr., who taught me more about plotting and motivation than any other individual. These two stories reflect my wry worries about war, pacifism, and world government.

"The Man Who Never Grew Young" seemed to write itself (Ray Bradbury told me he wished he'd written it. Do all his stories write themselves? I doubt it) for my first hardcover book, published by Arkham House and the ever-helpful August Derleth.

"The s.h.i.+p Sails at Midnight" is the romantic tale of a love that was unconventional, at least then. The G.o.ddess Mystery makes an appearance, perhaps. I picked it as my best single story for a Derleth anthology.

"The Enchanted Forest" was another story for Campbell-and for another Derleth anthology-done after a dry period of some five years.

"Coming Attraction," which Judith Merril calls "satire at its most terrifyingly prophetic," was denounced by a minority of its first readers as Unamerican (I don't know why-it's Unrussian too) and praised by quite a few fellow writers. Isaac Asimov said, "Can times become even more neurotic than they are now? Well, read 'Coming Attraction' by Fritz Leiber on our neurotic future." It and the novelette "Poor Superman" mirror the intense concern of 1950 with Mc-Carthyism, computerization and, above all, the bomb. Damon Knight said about the novelette, "Fritz Leiber is at his brilliant best when sticking pins into some prominent member of the American Paranoids' a.s.sociation-e.g., Mickey Spillane in "The Night He Cried," or, in the present case, our old friend Alfred van Vogt." (Wrong on the second count, Damon. In "Poor Superman" I had in mind L. Ron Hubbard and Campbell himself, the latter a very helpful but very well-intentioned innocent bystander at the monstrous birth of dianetics, mother of Scientology.) "A Pail of Air" pictures a struggle against another sort of world doom. All three stories were published hi Horace Gold's then new (1950), stimulatingly modern magazine, Galaxy.

"The Big Holiday" was my second sale (1953) to the other new, stimulatingly modern-and highly literate-magazine, Fantasy and Science Fiction. Its editor, the brilliant Anthony Boucher, helped me more than any other person-but perhaps for H. P. Lovecraft and Harry Fischer-to give my stories style and literary polish. Boucher called my story "the finest conception we have yet of the fun of the future-a Breughel-like canvas of merriment."

As Damon Knight noted, I wrote "The Night He Cried" because I was distantly angry at Mickey Spillane for the self-satisfied violence and loveless s.e.x and anti-feminism he was introducing into detective fiction and because he had the temerity to publish a couple of stories in the fantasy field, about which I have a parental concern. My rage seems remote now, yet the point was valid.

"The Big Trek" got me a gorgeous magazine-cover ill.u.s.tration by Emsh. Like "Foxholes," it was first written with a modern setting and sold only when I gave it a colorful futurian one.

"s.p.a.ce-Time for Springers" was my first story about the self-sufficient and subtle aristocrats of the animal world. Frederik Pohl wrote of it extravagantly, "Fritz Leiber was not born with a caul-believe it if you can! For his greatest gift is the knack of second sight, the talent that sees beneath the outer garments of flesh and blood into the heart of things, and people-and of cats."

"Try and Change the Past" was my first short story in the Change-War or Big-Time series. The novel The Big Time, published simultaneously, went on to win me my first Hugo.

The novelette "A Deskful of Girls" got me another colorful magazine cover, this one by Kelly Freas. The story is about the s.e.xual hangups and love G.o.ddesses of the 1950s, written for fun and chills.

"Rump-t.i.tty-t.i.tty-Tum-Tah-Tee" takes a humorous look at arty intellectuals and advertisers. Anthony Boucher remarked of it, "An editor finds himself fascinated and a little frightened when he publishes a story which evokes such disproportionately intense response as to make it obvious that the author has unconsciously hit upon some basic and deeply communicative symbol."

"Little Old Miss Macbeth" caused Robert P. Mills, then editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction, to observe, "Surely Fritz Leiber is the most vividly visual of all science-fantasy writers." This seems extreme, yet for me vision is "worth all the rest" of the senses, as Macbeth put it. It may be due to my youth as an actor and the child of actors. I visualize most of my stories and set many of them on an imaginary stage. Some, like The Big Time, have only one set.

"Mariana" was another story that seemed to write itself-a gift from the G.o.ddesses after I had unremittingly toiled word by word through four tales for the all-Leiber issue of the magazine Fantastic, the last one of which hung me up so that the only way I could finish it was to write it backwards from the end to the middle, scene by laborious scene. "Mariana" was selected by Judith Merril for The Year's Best SF.

So was "The Man Who Made Friends With Electricity," a supernatural horror story stemming from the California environment of my last decade and a half. Before that, Chicago was my place.

"The Good New Days" looks at the Beat Generation and our slum planet, but aims at entertainment first.

"America the Beautiful" might be thought of as "Coming Attraction" revisited. Another Britisher encounters a different, but equally disturbing future America. Low-key and heavy on the atmosphere, but as always I've tried to make the story the thing.

So there you have them, the best of my science-fantasy stories, fa my estimation. Three from the 1940s, no less than fourteen from the 1950s, four from the 1960s, one from the 1970s. 1958 was my peak year by this numerical and egocentric criterion, with five stories. 1950 was second, with three, while 1951 and 1952 had two apiece. I seem to have had four chief bursts of creativity, triggered off by the Second World War, the nuclear bomb, the sputniks, and the war in Vietnam. I'm glad I've been able to react to those dreadful stimuli with laughter as well as fears. Edmund Cooper wrote in The Sunday Times of London, "Fritz Leiber has a wicked imagination. Wicked enough to make us laugh at an impossible future containing nightmarish aspects of our own times."

So, as I say, there you have them, the best of my science-fantasy stories. But I hope to write better ones. I'll never stop writing. It's one occupation in which being crazy, even senile, might help.

-FRITZ LEIBER.