leiber is one of my favourite writers, but I don't have a lot of insight into the man himself and his thoughts. What sets it apart from the other three or four such anthologies I have is that Leiber chose the stories himself, and at the end of the book he places an Afterword where he writes a paragraph or two about each one. This is a great collection of Leiber short stories spanning from the 1940s to the 1970s. Used These Alternate Names: Maurice Breçon, Fric Lajber, Fritz Leiber, Jr., Fritz R.

Leiber's capacity for endless self-reinvention and productive self-examination kept him, until his death, one of the most modern of his sf generation. Leiber's late short fiction, and the fine horror novel Our Lady of Darkness, combine autobiographical issues like his struggle with depression and alcoholism with meditations on the emotional content of the fantastic genres.

Leiber's science fiction includes the planet-smashing The Wanderer in which a large cast mostly survive flood, fire, and the sexual attentions of feline aliens, and the satirical A Spectre is Haunting Texas in which a gangling, exo-skeleton-clad actor from the Moon leads a revolution and finds his true love.

He found his mature voice early in the first of the sword-and-sorcery adventures featuring the large sensitive barbarian Fafhrd and the small street-smart-ish Gray Mouser he returned to this series at various points in his career, using it sometimes for farce and sometimes for gloomy mood pieces-The Swords of Lankhmar is perhaps the best single volume of their adventures. was one of the more interesting of the young writers who came into HP Lovecraft's orbit, and some of his best early short fiction is horror rather than sf or fantasy.

The best of fritz leiber