Fritz Leiber

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Fritz Leiber 1978

Fritz Leiber (junior) (born December 24, 1910 in Chicago , Illinois , † September 5, 1992 in San Francisco , California ; actually Fritz Reuter Leiber junior ) was an American actor and writer of science fiction , fantasy and Horror stories and novels . Leiber occasionally used the pseudonym Francis Lathrop .

Life

Fritz Reuter Leiber jr. was born to Fritz Leiber senior and his wife Virginia (née Bronson) on Christmas Eve 1910. Leiber had German roots - his grandfather Albrecht Leiber came from Baden-Baden . His parents were both Shakespeare actors who toured with Robert Mantell's Shakespearean Repertory Company , and Fritz Leiber, Sr., starred in over 60 Hollywood films. The early contact with the theater stage shaped Leiber's use of language, as he later explained: “In my earliest youth, it was fortunate to hear the language of a dozen Shakespeare plays again and again while my parents were on stage stood and rehearsed. I was told that I learned my father's part in Hamlet by heart when I was four years old. And I can still recite a large part of 'Macbeth' off the cuff ” ( Lit .: Walker, p. 182).

Leiber later studied philosophy and psychology at the University of Chicago , where he graduated summa cum laude in psychology. From 1934 he was an actor in his parents' company, but left the show after marrying the Welsh poet Jonquil Stephens in January 1936 . The Leibers moved to Hollywood , where Fritz Leiber hoped to find work in film and began writing horror stories to sell. His wife drew Leiber's attention to the Weird Tales author HP Lovecraft , with whom he then corresponded intensively for eight months until his death in March 1937, while at the same time looking for his own writing. Lovecraft encouraged him and "... hammered into me that one has to pay attention to honesty, conviction, care, perfection and scientificity in writing" ( Lit .: Walker, p. 182).

Using his experience as an actor in his parents' drama troupe, he also appeared in supporting roles in several Hollywood films - mostly without mentioning them in the credits - such as Louis Pasteur by William Dieterle in 1935 and Escape from Paris by Jack Conway in 1936 in George Cukor's Camille with Greta Garbo , and - together with his father - in 1937 in James Whale's The Great Garrick , in 1940 with Bette Davis in Hell, where is your victory or with Claude Rains in Phantom of the Opera (1943) and in 1945 with Maureen O 'Hara and Paul Henreid in the pirate film Die Seeteufel von Cartagena and with Merle Oberon and again Claude Rains in the film drama The love of our life .

In 1938 their son Justin was born, who was also to write some SF and fantasy novels in the 1980s, and the Leibers returned to Chicago. Between 1937 and 1956 Leiber worked at Consolidated Book Publishers in Chicago as an editor for the Standard American Encyclopedia , as a language teacher at Occidental College in Los Angeles , as a quality inspector at Douglas Flugzeugwerke and from 1944 as an editor at Science Digest Magazine , before joining in 1956 became a freelance writer . Until 1947, his stories appeared exclusively in magazines such as Weird Tales , Unknown , Galaxy , Astounding Science Fiction and others.

Since around the mid-1950s, Leiber enjoyed a good reputation, especially in the USA and among his fellow SF writers, as the author of idiosyncratic, detailed weird fiction, which could be very different in style and mood, depending on whether the author was in the respective one Story turned to fantasy motifs, horror, science fiction or a mixed form. In 1967 Leibers general appreciation in SF circles to the fact that his short story Gonna Roll the Bones (dt. I must go back to roll the dice , 1980), in which a man with the death of a macabre game of dice plays in Harlan Ellison's influential SF anthology Dangerous Visions was recorded. At this point in time, Leiber was approaching sixty, while in the anthology the majority represented much younger authors such as Delany , Spinrad , Sladek and Aldiss .

Since the late 1950s, Leiber was increasingly influenced by the work of the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung , in particular by his concepts of the anima and the shadow . Leiber used the concept of the anima in particular in several stories in order to explore the fascination, but also the uncertainty, that women and the feminine in general had on him. Perhaps one can see here the reason for the many ambivalent cat shapes that Leiber has so lovingly portrayed in his novels and stories. He also had a great affinity for these animals in everyday life: “Oh yes, I've had a lot of cats. Once even two […] . Though I swore I would never take in a cat again. But one day I found a starved cat among the dumpsters. He stood on a dead comrade and growled at the world. It has been immortalized in literature in 'Space-Time for Springers'. And then, until recently, there was 'Psycho', which I found after a group of children tormented them insane with 'scientific experiments'. Milk, vitamins and a safe environment cured her of her psychosis within thirty-six hours ” ( Lit .: Walker, p. 189).

In September 1969 Leiber's wife Jonquil died of a mixture of sleeping pills and alcohol. As a result, Leiber suffered greatly from the death of his wife, with whom he had shared many interests, wrote little for years and until about 1972 increasingly had to struggle with an alcohol problem that had bothered him sporadically for twenty years. During this time he moved to San Francisco, which would also be his last place of residence. In the mid-1970s he had finally overcome his alcohol addiction - also by returning to writing. His last great novel Our Lady of Darkness came into being, in which he partly dealt with his own situation as a widowed and no longer very young writer. In an earlier and shorter version, the work appeared from January 1977 in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as a novella under the title The Pale Brown Thing .

On May 15, 1992, four months before his death, Leiber married his long-time friend Margo Skinner. Leiber, who in addition to his literary work dealt with history, astronomy and metaphysics, was an excellent chess player. He died on September 5, 1992 in San Francisco.

plant

Leiber's work is characterized by diversity. He understood, to express themselves with the same artistic energy and quality in different genres or genres - such horror with science fiction in the history of The Oldest Soldier , 1960 (dt. Rearguard to blend effortlessly - 1974). Leiber saw science fiction, horror and fantasy not as independent genres, but rather as freely combinable narrative possibilities. Nonetheless, when he wrote within an established genre, he did take to heart its conventions. Leiber's greatest achievement was the author of more than 200 short stories, although he also wrote several successful - and award-winning - novels. One of the reasons why his short stories were more popular than his novels was that it was very difficult “... to maintain the mood of supernatural horror over the length of a novel. [...] And since the SF is interested in ideas, opinions and speculations (and makes what seems impossible, possible), it is also more suitable for short stories - but probably not to the same extent as the horror genre "( Lit .: Walker, pp. 186-187).

Leiber's fantasy and horror texts in particular exude an (in a good sense) old-fashioned solidity and reveal how seriously and carefully he went about the construction of the plot, details and characters. But stylistically groundbreaking texts that anticipate the New Wave in science fiction of the 1960s , for example , come from him. Humor, satire and eroticism tend to come into play in Leiber's SF and Fantasy, while his horror stories tend to be dark and pessimistic, according to the genre.

Leiber has successfully adopted already existing topics from the fund of science fiction (such as the motif of time travel as the basis of a series of stories about the "Change War", which also includes the novel The Big Time ), and himself as an innovator wrought by genres. Today he can be regarded as one of the founders of modern urban horror and urban fantasy, which is no longer dependent on Victorian haunted houses, cobwebs and fluttering robes, and one can ascribe to him the co-development of the genre of sword and sorcery , with which he among other things became a model for several younger writers. Leiber has combined the catastrophe novel with melancholy, cross-racial sex between humans and extraterrestrial feline creatures, and a depiction of the swinging sixties in California ( The Wanderer , 1964), and he has managed to take the story of a time travel novel into a single small room with just one To concentrate a handful of characters that act within a short period of time, which makes the text look like a stage play ( The Big Time , 1958 in two parts in Galaxy magazine , book edition 1961; German first in 1974 as a great time , then in 1982 as a great one Time ). In fact, the novel was adapted for the stage in November 1982 by the Babcock Theater in Salt Lake City .

The author has written snappy SF satires such as the novels The Silver Eggheads (1962, German as The Programmed Muses , 1972) and A Specter is Haunting Texas (1969), as well as horror stories with elusive supernatural that are unusual for the genre Entities come up, for example the novel Our Lady of Darkness , 1977, or the short story A Bit of the Dark World , 1962 (German encounter with the shadow world , 1974). Last but not least, several literary theoretical texts come from his pen, including two essays about his early mentor HP Lovecraft: “The Whisperer” Re-examined and Through Hyperspace with Brown Jenkin . Finally, in 1984, his long autobiographical text Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex appeared in the story collection The Ghost Light .

In 2001, Leiber was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

Horror and science fiction

Leiber's first published story appeared in Unknown magazine in August 1939 . Since serial novels were not popular in magazines during the Second World War , Leiber shortened some of his texts considerably in order to be able to continue publishing. He also repeatedly took his own short stories as an opportunity to develop them into novels years later. In 1947 Arkham House , a publisher specializing in the publication of the works of HP Lovecraft, published the book Night's Black Agents, a first selection of Leiber's short stories, which had previously only been published in pulp magazines .

1950 came with Gather, Darkness! Leiber's first novel in book form (first published in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1943 ); it is about the overcoming of a dictatorial theocracy in the USA by rebels who disguise their super-technology as magic. Which also in 1943 serialized in the magazine Unknown printed, but only in 1953 published a book novel Conjure Wife (dt. Plaything of witches , 1976) discovered Professor Norman Saylor that not only his wife but all women practicing around him witches are - which has benefited the protagonist so far, without his knowing it, because his wife has protected him from the magic of the other women with her magic since he married. The rational Saylor persuades his wife to destroy her magic paraphernalia and from then on is haunted by bad luck. This story was filmed three times, first in 1944 as Weird Woman with Lon Chaney Jr. as Norman Saylor, then in 1962 as Hypno ( Night of the Eagle , also Burn Witch, Burn ), with Peter Wyngarde , and finally in 1980 as Witches' Brew (also Which Witch is Which? ). In 1960 NBC produced a television adaptation for the series Moments of Fear . None of the film adaptations could adequately implement Leiber's template, only Hypno gained recognition from critics and those interested in the genre.

In the novel The Green Millennium (dt. 1953 The Green Millennium , 1978), whose plot is set in a near future, playing for the first time in Leiber's work Aliens in the shape of cats a central role: A cat with green coat walking one morning in Phil Gish's life and immediately lifts his somewhat gloomy mood. As it turns out, the secret service, a power-hungry psychiatrist, and members of a strange get -in-contact-with-the-good-aliens- sect are behind this happiness - inducing wondercat , which Phil baptizes Lucky . In The Wanderer , 1964 (dt. Hikers in the Universe , 1979), Leiber's longest and ambitioniertesten novel, for which he was doing tedious research is a controlled earth by the arrival of intelligent beings in the universe back and herspringenden hiking planet from earthquakes , Floods and storms rocked. Alternately, the story takes on the perspective of several protagonists in different parts of the world, in nearby space and on the wanderer , and with the female, feline alien Tigerishka, there is again a prominent cat figure who is also traveling in a sophisticated flying saucer . Leiber's best story, in which cats play a role, is for many Space-Time for Springers (1958).

As a final horror novel Leibers appeared in 1977 Our Lady of Darkness (dt. Mistress of the Dark , 1980), considered one of the most successful and striking works of the author. Our Lady of Darkness appears like a dark echo of Conjure Wife and is clearly shaped by the time after the death of Leiber's wife Jonquil, when the author struggled with alcoholism and feelings of guilt for three years until he resolved his problems in the work that began in 1974 to Our Lady of Darkness . The novel is set in contemporary San Francisco, in which the writer Franz Westen is threatened by a supernatural being - a so-called paramental - who appears to be the manifestation of a Jungian anima . The title is derived from a passage - also preceded by the novel - from Thomas de Quincey's short text Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow (1845), which lists three sinister sisters who break into our lives as symbols for the oppression of the human spirit. when and where they like: Mater Lachrymarum (Our Lady of Tears), Mater Suspiriorum (Our Lady of Sighs) and - as the youngest of the sisters, who moves unpredictably with a veiled face, like leaping tiger leaps - Mater Tenebrarum (Our Lady of Darkness). The creature that pursues the protagonist also moves unpredictably: “From the window of his tiny apartment he can see Corona Heights, the gloomy mountain ridge in the middle of the city. One morning he sees a dancing pale brown figure on the summit. Is it a hippie, a weirdo, a strange saint? Franz Westen decides to investigate the matter. He doesn't find anyone when he's on top of Corona Heights. When he searches for the window of his apartment with the binoculars, his breath catches. He sees the pale brown figure in the window - and she waves to him ” (blurb of the German edition).

Conjure Wife as an early example and Our Lady of Darkness as a “late work” thus form the framework for Leiber's work in the horror area. Other of his horror stories, which have been written since the mid-1970s, such as The Glove (1975), The Button Moulder (1979) and The Ghost Light (1984), have a strong thematic focus on Our Lady of Darkness .

Ramsey Campbell called Fritz Leiber "the greatest living author of horror literature" .

Fantasy

Leiber next horror and science fiction stories published in a span of 50 years, more than 30 short stories of varying length to the heroes and Schurkenduo Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (dt. Fafhrd and Gray Mouse Ling ) that within the fantasy genre founded the subgenre of Sword and Sorcery. Leiber invented the two long-lived characters, their world Nehwon and their largest city Lankhmar in the 1930s together with his fellow student Harry Fischer, whereby the two were inspired by the Edda , Peer Gynt and probably also Robert E. Howard's Conan stories while Martha Fischer, Harry's wife and visual artist, drew maps of the imaginary land of Newhon . The first story written by Leiber about Fafhrd and the gray mouse , Adept's Gambit , was rejected in 1935 by the then editor-in-chief of Weird Tales , Farnsworth Wright, but Leiber returned after 1939 in Unknown with Two Sought Adventure (later titled The Jewels in the Forest ) a first Fafhrd story was published, in new stories again and again to his characters, developed and deepened their characters little by little and finally put in 1988 with The Knight and Knave of Swords a final collection of three stories and one Short novel from the series now known as the "Swords" saga. Leiber himself has stated that the figure of the gray mouse was a portrait of his friend Harry Fischer, while Fafhrd was a self-portrait.

Cats

In 1992, Gummitch & Friends, the most extensive collection of Leiber's cat stories to date , was published in the USA . These stories include Space-Time for Springers (1958), Kreativity for Kats (1961), Cats Cradle (1974, with an appearance by Tigerishka from The Wanderer ), and The Cat Hotel (1983).

Awards

Fritz Leiber received many awards and honors, including Hugo , Nebula , Locus and World Fantasy Awards :

Hugo Award
  • 1958: Best novel for The Big Time
  • 1965: Best novel for The Wanderer
  • 1968: Best Novelette for Gonna Roll the Bones
  • 1970: Best Novelette for Ship of Shadows
  • 1971: Best novel for Ill Met in Lankhmar
  • 1976: Best short story for Catch That Zeppelin!
  • 2019: Retro-Hugo Best Novel 1944 for Conjure Wife (witches' plaything)
Nebula Award
  • 1967: Best Novelette for Gonna Roll The Bones
  • 1970: Best novel for Ill Met in Lankhmar
  • 1975: Best short story for Catch the Zeppelin!
Locus Award
  • 1975: Best collection for The Best of Fritz Leiber
  • 1985: Best Collection for The Ghost Light
  • 2011: Best collection (shorter works) for Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories
World Fantasy Award
  • 1976: Best short story for Belsen Express
  • 1976: for his life's work
  • 1978: Best novel for Our Lady of Darkness

Other awards:

Bibliography (selection)

Series

Change War
  • The Big Time (1958)
    • German: a great time / a great time. Bastei Lübbe 1974, translator Thomas Schlück, DNB 740551353
  • The Mind Spider (1961)
  • Changewar (1983)
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser / Fafhrd and Grauer Mausling

sorted according to the internal chronology. All translated by Thomas Schlück. All volumes are short story collections.

  • 1 Swords and Deviltry (1970)
  • 2 Swords against Death (1970)
  • 3 Swords in the Mist (1968)
    • English: Schwerter im Nebel / Schwerter im Kampf. Heyne 1973, DNB 740546392
  • 4 Swords Against Wizardry (1968)
  • 5 The Swords of Lankhmar (1968)
  • 6 Swords and Ice Magic (1977)
  • 7 The Knight and Knave of Swords (1988)

Collections:

  • Two Sought Adventure (1957)
  • Ships to the Stars (1964)
    • German: Tödlicher Mond ... and other utopia short stories , Pabel-Utopia-Zukunftsroman No. 445 1965, DNB 455199787
  • Rime Isle (1977)
  • Bazaar of the Bizarre (1978)
  • Heroes and Horrors (1978)
  • Swords' Masters (1989)
  • The Three of Swords (1989)
  • Ill Met in Lankhmar (1995)
  • Lean Times in Lankhmar (1996)
  • Return to Lankhmar (1997)
  • Farewell to Lankhmar (1998)
  • Swords Against Wizardry / Swords of Lankhmar: The Adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Books 4 & 5 (2004)
  • Swords in The Mist / Swords and Ice Magic: Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser, Books 3 and 6 (2005)

Novels

  • Conjure Wife (1943)
    • German: Spielball der Hexen / Hexenvolk. Pabel 1976, translator Christiane Nogly, DNB 770512690
  • Destiny Times Three (1945)
  • Gather, Darkness! (1950)
  • The Sinful Ones (1950)
  • The Green Millenium (1953)
  • The Silver Eggheads (1962)
    • German: The programmed muses. , Fischer 1972, translator Thomas Schlück, DNB 720104300
  • The Wanderer (1964)
  • Wanderer in the universe. Heyne 1967, translator Wulf H. Bergner, DNB 457397918 (abridged German version; newly translated and unabridged 1979)
  • Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966)
  • A Specter is Haunting Texas (1969)
    • English: A ghost haunts Texas. Heyne 1974, translator Birgit Reß-Bohusch, DNB 750048425
  • Our Lady of Darkness (1977)
    • German: Mistress of the Dark. Heyne 1980, translator Hans Maeter, DNB 810118378
  • The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich (1997)
    • German: The activities of Daniel Kesserich. Edition Phantasia 2005, translator Joachim Körber, ISBN 3-924-95970-6

Story collections

  • Night's Black Agents (1947)
  • Shadows with Eyes (1962)
  • A Pail of Air (1964)
  • Ships to the Stars (1964)
  • Night of the Wolf (1966)
  • The Secret Songs (1968)
  • Night Monsters (1969)
  • The Best of Fritz Leiber (1974)
  • The Book of Fritz Leiber (1974)
  • The Second Book of Fritz Leiber (1975)
  • The Worlds of Fritz Leiber (1976)
  • Heroes and Horrors (1978)
  • Ship of Shadows (1979)
  • In the Beginning (1983)
  • The Ghost Light (1984)
  • The Leiber Chronicles (1990)
  • Kreativity for Kats (1992)
  • Gummitch & Friends (1992)
  • Dark Ladies (1999)
  • Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions (2002)

editor

  • The World Fantasy Awards Volume Two (1980, with Stuart David Schiff)
  • Leiber Chronicles: Fifty Years of Fritz Leiber (1990, with Martin H. Greenberg)

literature

Web links

Commons : Fritz Leiber  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Fritz Leiber  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rudolf Leiber: Leiber Chronicle. History of a Swabian-Alemannic family. Volume II , 3rd edition, p. 266
  2. ↑ Fritz Leiber Sr. in the IMDB
  3. ^ University of Utah performing arts collection, 1933-1984 Archives West, Orbis Cascade Alliance, accessed on February 21, 2017.
  4. ↑ science fiction awards database - Fritz Leiber . Retrieved November 21, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Leiber, Fritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lathrop, Francis; Leiber, Fritz Reuter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American actor and writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 24, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago , Illinois
DATE OF DEATH 5th September 1992
Place of death San Francisco , California