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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 With writers such as Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, Leiber can be regarded as one of the fathers of sword and sorcery fantasy. Moreover, he excelled in all fields of speculative fiction, writing award-winning work in fantasy, horror, and science fiction.
Leiber (first syllable sounds like "lye" 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 were 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 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.
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.[clarification needed] He introduced Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in the August 1939 number of Unknown magazine, edited by John W. Campbell.
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. 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.
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.
In 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. Many people believed that Leiber was living in poverty on skid row. He seems to have suffered periods of penury; 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. 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.
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).
Leiber's own literary criticism, including several essays on Lovecraft, was collected in the volume Fafhrd and Me (1990).
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."
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, Sr. was the evil Inquisitor in the Errol Flynn adventure film The Sea Hawk (1940).
In the cult horror film Equinox (1970), he 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 below).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), 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.
Leiber published many further books in the 1960s. His novel The Wanderer (1964) won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. 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/Novellette: 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).
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 around 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.
Leiber also did the 1966 novelization of the Clair Huffaker screenplay of Tarzan and the Valley of Gold.
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" (aka "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.) 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."
The short parallel worlds story "Catch That Zeppelin!" (1975) added yet another Nebula and Hugo award to his collection. 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. Next year he won won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. 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; the Horror Writers Association made him an inaugural winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1988 (named in 1987); and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him in 2001, its sixth class of two deceased and two living writers.
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 sub-genre 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 to fill an issue; the magazine came out with a big black headline across its cover — Leiber Is Back!
More information:
Code:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/23001.Fritz_Leiber |
Fafhrd And The Gray Mouser series
Fritz Leiber - Swords And Deviltry (read by Neil Gaiman)
Fritz Leiber - Swords Against Death (read by Neil Gaiman)
Fritz Leiber - Swords In The Mist (read by Neil Gaiman)
Fritz Leiber - Swords Against Wizardry (read by Neil Gaiman)
Fritz Leiber - The Swords Of Lankhmar (read by Neil Gaiman)
Fritz Leiber - Swords And Ice Magic (read by Jonathan Davis)
Fritz Leiber - The Knight And Knave Of Swords (read by Neil Gaiman)
Other
Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer (read by Norman Deitz)
Fritz Leiber - The Big Time (read by Suzanne Toren)
Fritz Leiber - Conjure Wife (read by Victor Bevine)
Fritz Leiber - Our Lady Of Darkness (read by Charles Busch)
Fritz Leiber - Gather, Darkness (read by Jonathan Davis)
Fritz Leiber - A Spectre Is Haunting Texas (read by Phil Regensdorf)
Fritz Leiber - The Night Of The Long Knives (read by Phil Chenevert)
Fritz Leiber - The Green Millennium (read by William Coon)
Fritz Leiber - The Ghost Light (Robin Bloodworth, Nicholas Tecosky, Daniel May, Kevin Stillwell, Bernard Clark, Fleet Cooper, Gregory St. John, Trivette Alpha, Rod Tienken, Chris Kayser)
Code:
Fafhrd And The Gray Mouser series
http://rapidgator.net/file/1af2881b680fde4a16edbc5c1837dd46/Swords_And_Deviltry.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/83c44562dd5eb23f212f5ba52e244ca5/Swords_Against_Death.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/2090ecc6541baa9a98aa1a6f21d177d6/Swords_In_The_Mist.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/eb0ed5558a05893e566c7bbf9c6b9426/Swords_Against_Wizardry.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/2ccaf0efce2a6c2ead72f9f036994751/The_Swords_Of_Lankhmar.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/84a3fc471fbf096e1fb143ee16d17fb1/Swords_And_Ice_Magic.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/745cf05043a76bc61ef07b9dbb8f1b8b/The_Knight_And_Knave_Of_Swords.rar.html
Other
http://rapidgator.net/file/bdb1c967a9d8ff0a208d2ba8494c5e5c/The_Wanderer.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/2ec3237f807244f6e3ad99a216551a54/The_Big_Time.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/f8b67575f699572b31867c0acda8805a/Conjure_Wife.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/b49c1e2ef90fcb9f3c98e7fd5dd81c35/Our_Lady_Of_Darkness.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/f13ef443406777c3c0fd00d0b73a7c88/Gather_Darkness.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/adf126c55169b4a9249c217d2bfc691c/A_Spectre_Is_Haunting_Texas.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/c236e66eabddada15a990ab746c1ee8b/The_Night_Of_The_Long_Knives.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/344d090040003af908da7f90077f2bd6/The_Green_Millennium.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/971601b072b8a8176d0b1359e12e3ded/The_Ghost_Light.rar.html |
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