Check out this nihilistic tidbit from his short story “The Foxholes of Mars,” as a soldier in a futuristic galactic war remembers back to antebellum times: But he is a demanding read, though exquisitely rewarding.

I don’t mean to intimate that Leiber is a hard read, not at all. If you tune out, even for a sentence or two, you’re usually lost. But usually I can tune back in, and though I may have cognitively missed a paragraph or two, I can still usually follow what’s happening. Sometimes when I read fiction (or anything for that matter) I can sort of tune out - not the best reading habit. Whereas Weinbaum was a fun, pulpy story-teller, Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) was a sheer wordsmith, something akin to a sci-fi Shakespeare. I doubt that Del Rey could have selected a second author in this series so strikingly different from Stanley Weinbaum. But it was interesting to read a book dedicated completely to Leiber’s science fiction (though there are one or two stories that I’m not sure fit this moniker).

He also produced some of the most well-loved horror tales of the twentieth century, such as “Smoke Ghost” and “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes.” I’ve read some of his science fiction in The Book of Fritz Leiber (Daw, 1974) and Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories (Night Shade Books, 2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan and Charles N. At least, that was my introduction to him. The cover was by Dean Ellis (1920-2009), though a later 1979 printing (see below) has a cover by Michael Herring (1947-).įritz Leiber is probably best known for his Fafhrd and Grey Mouser sword and sorcery tales. The introduction was done by the excellent sci-fi/fantasy author Poul Anderson (1926-2001). In this one I’ll review the second in the series, The Best of Fritz Leiber (1974). In my last post I reviewed The Best of Stanley Weinbaum, the first volume in Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction Series.

The best of fritz leiber