The Best of Fritz Leiber [Hardcover]

Fritz Leiber (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1974

22 msaterful tales by the sorcerer of science fiction. With an introduction by Poul Anderson

Product Details

• Hardcover: 301 pages
• Publisher: Nelson Doubleday; Book Club (BCE/BOMC) edition (1974)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B000BP30K6
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,504,837 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Catch this book!, April 22, 2010

By 

Art Henderson (Virginia) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber (Hardcover)

None of the earliest reviews of this book are about "Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories". Two are apparently of the 1970's "Best of Fritz Leiber". The third claims to be a review of "Selected Stories", but the contents are wrong. The contents of this book are:

Smoke Ghost
The Girl with the Hungry Eyes
Coming Attraction
A Pail of Air
A Deskful of Girls
Space Time for Springers
Ill Met in Lankhmar
Four Ghosts in Hamlet
Gonna Roll the Bones
The Inner Circles (aka The Winter Flies)
America the Beautiful
Bazaar of the Bizarre
Midnight by the Morphy Watch
Belsen Express
Catch That Zeppelin!
Horrible Imaginings
The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars

These are all good stories and well representative of Leiber's short fiction output. I've read and enjoyed at least 13 of the 17 stories included. They range from SF to fantasy to horror and virtually all are among the best the field has to offer. Night Shade is a relatively small press and there were probably not a lot of copies printed. Get this book while you can.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Caveat emptor and serendipity in two books under one listing, August 17, 2010

By 

Jack Of Alltrades "Just another soul" (Loth Ethtadoth Unidoth) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber (Hardcover)

There are two anthologies listed under this one title. As is usual, when mining SF's golden age with amazon, confusion rains (sic) so buyer beware.

One book is the book available new here new and the other (available used here) is an anthology from the 1970's with the stories listed in an earlier review. The good news is you can buy both and only have three stories overlap.

And yes, this dude can write---and how. What a genius. The tone is dark, and considering the evolution of reality in the intervening half century since they were written it seems he was prescient. If you love cats you'll enjoy Space-Time for Springers. Leiber was a genius who knew how to please his readers---an uncommon thing today.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Introduction to a Fading Legend, September 3, 2010

By 

Randy Stafford (St. Paul, MN USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

It's the centennial of Fritz Leiber's birth. Unfortunately, Leiber, winner of numerous awards, writer of many styles, adept in horror, fantasy, and science fiction, is something of a forgotten author. Or, more accurately, remembered for little more than a sword-and-sorcery series.

There are no stories from that series about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser here unlike the recent Night Shade Books Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber. That collection, though, is a retrospective of Leiber's entire career. This book collects Leiber's favorite stories from about two-thirds of the way into a career that covered more than 50 years. Still, the collections share six stories.

Writer's favorites are not always reader favorites. I personally wasn't excited by "The Night He Cried", an attack on what Leiber feared would be Mickey Spillane's pernicious influence on fantasy. "Little Old Miss Macbeth", sort of a science fantasy in a post-apocalypse America, didn't strike me as more than an exercise in mood.

"Gonna Roll the Bones" is science fantasy too but successfully blends dicing against the Devil in a spaceport with marital discord. "The Man Who Never Grew Young" follows the life of an immortal of our time in a universe where time now runs backward, Egyptian monuments devolving back to quarried stone, nomads leaving the Nile for the desert.

Other works are successful retoolings of mainstream stories. "The Ship Sails at Midnight" outlines the effect of a woman who becomes a muse, crutch, and inspiration to a group of men. The sexual and psychological rewards and pitfalls of the situation are well depicted. "The Foxholes of Mars" deals metaphorically with Hitler and World War One.

Political satire and suspicion of centralized technocracies is a theme in a surprising number of stories. "Sanity" and "The Enchanted Forest" all take a dim view of trying to build "normal" societies with no room for the eccentric and aberrant. "Poor Superman" is not only an attack on the grandiose promises of Scientology and Dianetics but the totalitarian faiths of the 20th century.

"Coming Attraction" and "America the Beautiful" are both stories of Brits coming to America and learning, through relations with women, of hidden sexual fetishes and social neuroses. In the first story, it's a post-nuclear war America with a mania for masked women and female wrestling. In the second, a story from 1970, America's relentless quest for perfection and a clean environment has fetishized catastrophe.

Sheer pageantry is on hand with "The Big Trek", where a man joins a bizarre calvacade of aliens leaving man to his nuked out Earth and going to the stars, and "The Big Holiday", about an American holiday of the future. Disaster on a grand scale is here in "A Pail of Air" where a wandering comet has knocked Earth out of its orbit and the atmosphere has condensed into vast drifts of frozen gas.

"Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-Tah-Tee" is about the ultimate earwig, a rhythm which threatens to so compulsively grip the human mind as to destroy human civilization. It struck me as a very Alfred Bester type story. So did "The Good New Days" to a lesser degree. It's a satire on Beatniks and set in a polluted, over automated society where having a job is the ultimate status symbol. "Mariana" treads some of the same solipsistic ground that Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint does from almost the same time.

"The Man Who Made Friends with Electricity" has been an influential story with many writers taking up the notion of intelligences haunting the technological infrastructures of man. The original is still charming.

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser may be missing but there are stories from two other Leiber series. "Space-Time for Springers" is the first installment about hyper-intelligent super-kitten Gummitch. There are two Change War stories. "Try and Change the Past" shows, with a man's attempt to avoid being fatally shot by his wife, to what lengths the universe will go to preserve historical reality. "A Deskful of Girls" is kind of tangential to the series, a high tech vampirism used to steal, in a ghostly, faintly sentient, ectoplasmic form, the sexual charisma of would-be starlets and "sex goddesses". A tale that's both erotic and social criticism.

Leiber contributes notes to all his stories, and Poul Anderson's introduction reveals Leiber the man and artist.

Leiber's sheer versatility means that large numbers of stories may not be the reader's thing, but this is definitely a place to start in appreciating a fading legend.