Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. ( ; December 24, 1910 – September 5, 1992) was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction.
Life
Fritz Leiber was born December 24, 1910, in Chicago, Illinois, to the actors Fritz Leiber and Virginia Bronson Leiber. For a time, he seemed inclined to follow in his parents' footsteps; the theater and actors feature in his fiction. He spent 1928 touring with his parents' Shakespeare company (Fritz Leiber & Co.) before entering the University of Chicago, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and received an undergraduate Ph.B. degree in psychology and physiology or biology with honors in 1932. From 1932 to 1933, he worked as a lay reader and studied as a candidate for the ministry, without taking a degree, at the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea, Manhattan, an affiliate of the Episcopal Church.
After pursuing graduate studies in philosophy at the University of Chicago from 1933 to 1934 and again not taking a degree, he remained in Chicago while touring under the stage name of "Francis Lathrop" intermittently with his parents' company and pursuing a literary career. Six short stories later included in the 2010 collection Strange Wonders: A Collection of Rare Fritz Leiber Works carry 1934 and 1935 dates. He also appeared alongside his father in uncredited parts in George Cukor's Camille (1936), James Whale's The Great Garrick (1937), and William Dieterle's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939).
In 1936, he initiated a brief, intense correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft, who "encouraged and influenced [Leiber's] literary development" before Lovecraft died in March 1937. Leiber introduced Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in "Two Sought Adventure", his first professionally published short story in the August 1939 edition of Unknown, edited by John W. Campbell.Anderson, Poul (1974), "The Wizard of Nehwon", The Best of Fritz Leiber, NY: Doubleday, pp. vii–xv.
Leiber married Jonquil Stephens on January 16, 1936. Their only child, philosopher and science fiction writer Justin Leiber, was born in 1938. From 1937 to 1941, Fritz Leiber was employed by Consolidated Book Publishing as a staff writer for the Standard American Encyclopedia. In 1941, the family moved to California, where Leiber served as a speech and drama instructor at Occidental College during the 1941–1942 academic year.
Unable to conceal his disdain for academic politics as the United States entered World War II, he decided that the struggle against fascism mattered more than his long-held pacifist convictions. He accepted a position with Douglas Aircraft in quality inspection, primarily working on the C-47 Skytrain. Throughout the war, he continued to regularly publish fiction.
Thereafter, the family returned to Chicago, where Leiber served as associate editor of Science Digest from 1945 to 1956. During this decade (forestalled by a fallow interregnum from 1954 to 1956), his output (including the 1947 Arkham House anthology Night's Black Agents) was characterized by Poul Anderson as "a lot of the best science fiction and fantasy in the business". In 1958, the Leibers returned to Los Angeles. By then, he could afford to relinquish his journalistic career and support his family as a full-time fiction writer.
Jonquil's death in 1969 precipitated Leiber's permanent relocation to San Francisco and exacerbated his longstanding alcoholism after twelve years of fellowship in Alcoholics Anonymous. He gradually regained sobriety, an effort impeded by comorbid barbiturate abuse, over the next two decades. Perhaps as a result of his substance abuse, Leiber seems to have suffered periods of penury in the 1970s; Harlan Ellison wrote of his anger at finding that the much-awarded Leiber had to write his novels on a manual typewriter propped up over the sink in his apartment. Visiting Leiber as a fan in 1976, Marc Laidlaw wrote that 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".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. 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, Inc. (the makers of Dungeons & Dragons, who had licensed the mythos of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series) were enough in themselves to ensure that he lived comfortably. In 1977, 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.
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 years. Leiber died a few weeks after a physical collapse while traveling from a science fiction convention in London, Ontario, with Skinner. The cause of death was a stroke.
He wrote a 100-page-plus memoir, 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).
Theater
As the child of two Shakespearean actors, 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 the size of a theatrical stage, and 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
Due to having the same name as his father, Leiber Jr. was incorrectly attributed to some roles which were in fact played by his father. Fritz Leiber Sr. was the evil Inquisitor in the Errol Flynn adventure film The Sea Hawk (1940) and many other movies from 1917 to the late 1950s. It is the elder Leiber, not the younger, who appears in Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and the Vincent Price vehicle The Web (1947).
The younger Leiber can be seen briefly as Valentin in the 1936 film version of Camille starring Greta Garbo. In the cult horror film Equinox (1970) directed by Dennis Muren and Jack Woods, Leiber has a cameo appearance as a geologist, Dr. Watermann. In the edited second version of the movie, Leiber has no spoken dialogue but appears 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 were cut from the re-release.
He also appears as Chavez in the 1979 Schick Sunn Classics documentary The Bermuda Triangle, based on the book by Charles Berlitz.
Writing career Leiber was heavily influenced by H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Graves, John Webster, and Shakespeare 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. In the mid-1960s, he began incorporating elements of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. These concepts are often 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 are featured 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 in the 1930s and 40s were inspired by Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. A notable critic and historian of the wider Mythos, S. T. Joshi, has singled out Leiber's "The Sunken Land" (Unknown Worlds, February 1942) as the most accomplished of the early stories based on Lovecraft's Mythos.S. T. Joshi, "Cthulhu's Empire: H. P. Lovecraft's Influence on His Contemporaries and Successors", Critical Insights: Pulp Fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, Salem Press, 2013. Leiber also later wrote several essays on Lovecraft the man, such as "A Literary Copernicus" (1949), the publication of which formed a key moment in the emergence of a serious critical appreciation of Lovecraft's life and work.Reprinted and discussed in Fritz Leiber and H. P. Lovecraft, Writers of the Dark (Rockville MD: Wildside Press, 2005).
Leiber's first professional sale was "Two Sought Adventure" (Unknown, August 1939), which introduced his most famous characters, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. In 1943, his first two novels were serialized in Unknown (the supernatural horror-oriented Conjure Wife, inspired by his experiences on the faculty of Occidental College) and Astounding Science Fiction (Gather, Darkness).
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.
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 Honor 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 continued to publish in the 1960s. His novel The Wanderer (1964) also won the Hugo for Best Novel. In the novel, an artificial planet 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 earthquakes, tsunamis, and tidal phenomena. The multi-threaded plot follows the exploits of an ensemble cast as they struggle to survive the global disaster.
In the same period, Leiber published "Black Gondolier", a short story in which a protagonist uncovers a cosmic conspiracy in which oil from ancient fossils preys upon human beings and human civilizations.Thacker, Eugene. "Black Infinity, or Oil Discovers Humans ." Pages Magazine (October 23, 2013). Leiber received the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1970 and 1971 for "Ship of Shadows" (1969) and "Ill Met in Lankhmar" (1970). "Gonna Roll the Bones" (1967), his contribution to Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology, won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 1968.