I think the issue with Fritz Leiber is that he was a functional productive writer who never wrote a book that people outside of the SF ghetto ended up reading. He brought a huge amount of joy to people who read the pulps and paperbacks, but didn't do something like Foundation or Dune that everyone had to read if they were going to get into SF, and he didn't treat writing as a means of working out his weird personal demons like Lovecraft or Dick.
It's easier to see this with Fafhrd & Gray Mouser, which are great stories that had the misfortune of not being Conan the Barbarian, or written by Tolkien or Moorcock. Popular culture tends to benefit from a personality that is more bent than Leiber seems to have had.
I binged the Fafhrd & Gray Mouser stories a year or two ago. I bought the yellowed old trade paperbacks that had the stories reorganized into "chronological" order, rather than order of publication. I have five of them here on my desk still, but for some reason I can't find the "first" - _Swords against Deviltry_. I got the (perhaps incorrect) sense that Lieber recognized at some point he wasn't writing women in the series very well, and went "back" to fix some of that later. The result was that "The Snow Women" from 1970 ends up in the front of all this other older material, and it stood out as being a lot better in some respects than the earlier stories that followed in the next couple of volumes.
I have a lot of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories I haven't read (almost all of them, really) but I BELIEVE there's one where he borrows Russ's character Alyx and I'm looking forward to reading it.
looking forward to reading this essay; the only Leiber i've read is The Big Time and it's both obviously influential and not very good in several ways as a story
to me The Big Time is one of the works where you can really see his theater background bc it's basically a play that all takes place on one set and everybody is sort of rotating taking center stage.
When I was a baby SF reader, Leiber was most well known for his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, but I think now it's more for Conjure Wife. The beauty of being prolific and diverse!
yes it was kind of amazing to me that there basically wasn't any place to mention Fafhrd and Gray Mouser in the article (I tried in an early draft) because his body of work is so huge lol
I think the issue with Fritz Leiber is that he was a functional productive writer who never wrote a book that people outside of the SF ghetto ended up reading. He brought a huge amount of joy to people who read the pulps and paperbacks, but didn't do something like Foundation or Dune that everyone had to read if they were going to get into SF, and he didn't treat writing as a means of working out his weird personal demons like Lovecraft or Dick.
It's easier to see this with Fafhrd & Gray Mouser, which are great stories that had the misfortune of not being Conan the Barbarian, or written by Tolkien or Moorcock. Popular culture tends to benefit from a personality that is more bent than Leiber seems to have had.
Fafhrd and Gray Mouser do have an interesting afterlife in D&D! Though… I guess if you play D&D you're in pretty deep already. (I have never played.)
I binged the Fafhrd & Gray Mouser stories a year or two ago. I bought the yellowed old trade paperbacks that had the stories reorganized into "chronological" order, rather than order of publication. I have five of them here on my desk still, but for some reason I can't find the "first" - _Swords against Deviltry_. I got the (perhaps incorrect) sense that Lieber recognized at some point he wasn't writing women in the series very well, and went "back" to fix some of that later. The result was that "The Snow Women" from 1970 ends up in the front of all this other older material, and it stood out as being a lot better in some respects than the earlier stories that followed in the next couple of volumes.
I have a lot of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories I haven't read (almost all of them, really) but I BELIEVE there's one where he borrows Russ's character Alyx and I'm looking forward to reading it.
looking forward to reading this essay; the only Leiber i've read is The Big Time and it's both obviously influential and not very good in several ways as a story
to me The Big Time is one of the works where you can really see his theater background bc it's basically a play that all takes place on one set and everybody is sort of rotating taking center stage.
oooh, that's interesting. i do think a sharper modern director could make a pretty cool movie out of it
When I was a baby SF reader, Leiber was most well known for his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, but I think now it's more for Conjure Wife. The beauty of being prolific and diverse!
yes it was kind of amazing to me that there basically wasn't any place to mention Fafhrd and Gray Mouser in the article (I tried in an early draft) because his body of work is so huge lol