Seekers of Tomorrow

by Sam Moskowitz

  "witch" Mother Jujy is obviously indebted to A. E. van Vogt's treatment in Slan, where Jommy Cross is saved from the mob by Granny. The personality changer used on Jarles is reminiscent of Stanley G. Weinbaum's "attitudinizer" in Point of View. From Leiber's own acrobatic tower in Two Sought Adventure comes the notion of the flexible "haunted" house. But these were merely ingredients that Leiber ob-tained for the literary stew; the spice he added to flavor it no one could lend him. There is the satire, pitiless in its excoria-tion of religion, satire deriving from Leiber's own personal observations. There is the cynicism regarding the scientists' ability to do any better than the politicians. There is the humor, mature, not light, not raucous, blending into the story. And there is the gift for characterization, effectively evidenced in Brother Chulian, Jarles, Mother Jujy, and the Familiar.

  This "triumph" was followed by a short story, The Mu-tant's Brother, which contains the seeds of a powerful emo-tional situation that no author has yet properly developed in science fiction. Two brothers, both mutants with special men-tal powers, come into conflict as one, a proponent of good, hunts down and then destroys the other, who is using his superior attributes for evil.

  Pacifism obsessed Leiber following Pearl Harbor. The "witchcraft" movement in Gather, Darkness!

  reflected this, as did Taboo (analog science fact & fiction, February, 1963) in which pacifists maintain a sanctuary for involuntary expatriates of a warring world, as well as Sanity (astound-ing science-fiction, April, 1944) where the entire popula-tion is maniacal and the "sane" leader is led off to the booby hatch because he does not conform to the norm, which is nonconformity. The preoccupation with pacifism so interfered with his writing that during the latter part of 1943 and early 1944 he decided he might as well take a job as an inspector at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica because it might help him "to stay out of the army."

  After agonizing mental reappraisal, he gradually came to the conclusion that right and reason had been on the side of the anti-fascist forces. This mental reconciliation temporarily enabled him to write and the results were auspicious. Wanted— An Enemy (astounding science-fiction, Febru-ary, 1945) was a brilliant little story. A pacifist, with special scientific powers, exhorts the Martians to make a token attack on Earth so that humans will band together against the common menace and thereby end war. The Martians, who had their fill of war thousands of years earlier, had made a peace pact with the Venusians promising to confine themselves to their own planet. Convinced that the Earthmen are potentially dangerous, the Martians vow to sterilize this planet. Appalled at his excessive success, the pacifist hies off to Venus to tell them the Martians are about to break their ancient pact. When the Venusian leader eyed him wondering-ly and asked: "What are you?" a sudden surge of woeful honesty compelled Mr. Whitlow to reply, " I suppose

  . . . I suppose you'd call me a warmonger"

  Only slightly less successful than Gather, Darkness! was Destiny Times Three (astounding science-fiction, March-April, 1945) to which Business of Killing (astounding science-fiction,' September, 1944), a short story of the con-templated exploitation of simultaneous worlds, was a prelude. A machine built by an Olaf Stapledonian intelligence acciden-tally fragments the time stream of our planet into a number of "worlds of if," three of which, at least, have duplicated individuals on them leading different lives. One, an Orwellian world, decides to take over the original earth. The interplay of three alternate situations is again handled in the Edgar Rice Burroughs technique. Nightmares are explained as con-tacts with our duplicates on alternate worlds, as are many of our superstitions. Influences of H. P. Lovecraft are stronger here than in any other major Leiber story. Fundamentally, the novel is a fantastic allegory, splendidly readable, with fast-moving action, and thoroughly polished.

  When the war ended, Leiber returned to Chicago, where he was tipped off that there would be an associate editor's position on science digest by a friend, George Mann, whose resignation was creating the opening. The magazine, pub-lished by the owners of popular mechanics, required many of the same skills that Leiber had employed in his ency-clopedia work for Consolidated. The position led nowhere, but Leiber was to retain it through to 1956, the longest stint under a single employer of his lifetime. Writing ceased; the first phase of his writing career had ended.

  Early in 1949 Leiber began publishing an amateur mimeo-graphed publication titled new purposes as a creative out-let. Among the contributors were his good friends Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, and George Mann. The magazine petered out after sixteen issues, but filling its pages had started Leiber writing again. It contained chapters of what eventually would become his book The Green Millennium (Abelard Press, 1953). This novel was a discomfiting tale of government in league with crime, with the populace quieted by sex diversions. Fred Pohl became his agent, sold a few "dogs," and then was solicited by Campbell for The Lion and the Lamb (astounding science-fiction, September, 1950). This was Leiber venturing out to the far reaches of the galaxy, to the "Coalsack" where a group of runaway colonists, after some hundreds of years, have set up a "primitive" culture, abhorring mechanical devices of all sorts. Witchcraft and pacifism were strong elements of this smoothly woven, completely modern novelette. The antimechanics aspect was new for Leiber, but the device of mentally projecting a frightening image was drawn from John W. Campbell's Invad-ers of the Infinite and the moving smoke images parallel strongly the Dream Makers' illusions in A. Merritt's The Snake Mother.

  Leiber had felt a lifelong dissatisfaction with the sexual patterns of Western culture, holding that unhealthy frustra-tions contributed to the "sick" aspects of our culture. His personal preference rested with the social mores of The Last Men in Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930), in which men and women live in groups "... but in most groups all the members of the male sex have intercourse with all the members of the female sex. Thus sex with us is essentially social." He regarded with admiration John Humphrey Noyes' Oneida Community which flourished between 1840 and 1900 and practiced what Stapledon presented as fiction. These ideas were incorporated in a number of his stories beginning with The Ship Sails at Midnight (fantastic adventures, September, 1950) which was derivative of William Sloane's To Walk the Night; they were implied in The Green Millen-nium, and most successfully presented in Nice Girl with Five Husbands (galaxy science fiction, April, 1951), in which through a slip in time, a man wanders into an idyllic commu-nity of the year 2050 very similar to the Oneida Community. Leiber's ideas on sex were presented in such impeccable good taste that there was little reaction to them. The oppo-site was true of Coming Attraction (galaxy science fiction, November, 1951), which in every sense epitomized his sec-ond big successful period as a science-fiction writer. Coming Attraction introduces a British visitor to post-atomic-war life in New York City, where it is stylish for women to wear masks (since many of their faces were seared by atomic blasts) and where a warped culture has arisen which Leiber artistically unveils with magnificent indirection and almost psychiatric insight to produce one of the masterpieces of short science fiction.

  Appointment in Tomorrow (galaxy science fiction, July, 1952) is, in a sense, a sequel to Coming Attraction. Originally titled Poor Superman, it tells of a cult which regales a United States that wants to be hoodwinked with fraudulent claims for "Maizie," a "thinking machine" that is "solving" the world's difficult problems, and falsities of un-manned space probes which presumably have already made contact with civilized life on Mars. When the promotion man of the movement tries to convert all this humbug into reality, he is effectively stopped. It was just an ordinary sort of story, but The Moon Is Green (galaxy science fiction, April, 1952) fell just a little short of greatness. In it, tender hopes and yearning for beauty of a woman closeted in the lead-lined radioactive world of tomorrow bring sorrow to her husband in a gamble, instinct with tragedy, based on illusion-ary hope.

  That Leiber had become the poet of the world of post-atomic war was evident in A Bad Day for Sales (galaxy science fict
ion, July, 1953) in which he keeps his focus on a vending robot that maintains its selling pitch and its built-in reflexes after the bomb has dropped, an effective variant on There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury.

  That he dropped his writing in 1953 before he solidified this second phase of his writing career was due to lack of psychological stamina. Working on science digest by day and writing in the evening and on weekends interfered with his creativity, he said. Instead of trying to reach an accom-modation, he took to drinking heavily, eventually leaving his job in 1956. Then as abruptly he quit drinking. Some alcoholics have a lost weekend to worry about, but Leiber had nearly four years, irreplaceable years, of writing to account for. He made his comeback with Time in the Round (galaxy science fiction, May, 1957). H. L. Gold, then editor of that magazine, exulted: "Leiber's back and galaxy's got 'im!" The result was a pleasant story built around tomorrow's theater, which is capable of bringing into being images of the past and future. When some primitive men and dogs unprecedently solidify and threaten the audi-ence, they find themselves frustrated by a child with some mechanical pets. The winner proved to be The Big Time, a two-part serial running in the March and April, 1958, issues of galaxy science fiction. This tale is of a war fought by changing the past and the future, and it is told in the vernacular of a party girl who is a hostess of The Place, a timeless night club suspended outside the cosmos. The philosophical upshot is the comprehension by mankind of a higher state of conscious-ness, and its evolution from time-binding (the unification of events through memory) to possibility binding (making all of what might be part of what is). It gained Fritz Leiber a Hugo as the best science-fiction novel of 1958

  and catapulted him right back into the limelight, but then he decided that satire was being overdone and he would try farce. The Silver Egg-Heads, originally a novelette, was expanded to novel length for a Ballantine Books paperback. It was written in the broad, raucous tones of a Robert Bloch broadside, intend-ing to spoof writers, agents, publishers, and their associates scientifictionally. It fell with a dull thud when submitted to Gold for galaxy and eventually appeared in fantasy and science fiction, January, 1959. Leiber, a master at tasteful, subtle, balanced humor, was not suited to slapstick. This seemed to break Leiber's stride. He had started his comeback so auspiciously, now he felt he had to search for other markets. He was welcomed with open arms at fantas-tic, where an entire issue, November, 1959, was devoted to Leiber stories. The issue went over big and one short story, The Mind Spider, involving a danger that terminated the practice of telepathy, was used as the basis of his first short story science-fiction collection by Ace. More significant, the issue led off with his first new Grey Mouser novelette since 1951, Lean Times in Lankhmar, and it hit the jackpot of reader approbation. Clubs devoted to the science and sorcery school of fantasy had come into existence and Leiber, through the Grey Mouser, suddenly became the leading liter-ary exponent of that literary form. So popular was he, in fact, that Scylla's Daughter (fantastic, May, 1961) was nominated for, but did not win, a Hugo at the 1962 World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago; exactly the same thing happened to The Unholy Grail (fantastic, November, 1962) in Washington, D.C., one year later.

  Back in Hollywood again, Leiber found the going rough, with fantastic his one steady magazine market, supplemented by Ballantine Books, which helped to keep his name alive with a reissue of Night's Black Agents in paperback (sans Adept's Gambit) and following this with a horror collection, Shadows With Eyes (1962).

  During 1960 and 1961, to keep food on the table Leiber did four three-month continuities for the Buck Rogers daily strip and Sunday page for the National Newspaper Syndi-cate. He found the effort of turning out sheer plot and dialogue no more profitable than writing pulp fiction.

  When American International purchased Conjure Wife for a motion picture with a script written by accomplished fantasy craftsmen Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont (this was the picture released as Burn Witch Burn), Leiber got a boost to his ego but no inflation of the pocketbook. He no longer controlled rights to the work.

  Despite his precarious economic status, he decided to gam-ble the better part of a year on The Wanderer, a 120,000-word novel of a lacquered planet which abruptly appears in space alongside the moon, causing earthquakes and tidal disasters on Earth. This was intended to be the definitive world-doom story, told in alternating vignettes of various stratas of society.

  Sticking close to grim "realism" has paid off richly in science fiction for Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham, John Christopher, and various others, and it might have for Leiber, too, but he wouldn't follow the rules. In-stead of settling for a single departure from the norm and then throwing the spotlight on human reaction, Leiber has connected the actions of his characters with bizarre extrater-restrial happenings.

  The story builds with increasing fascination into a highly advanced epic, conceptually in the vanguard of modern science fiction and to that degree gratifying to the seasoned reader sated with predigested pabulum marketable to the masses by virtue of a self-imposed limit on imagination. The world-doom story, with the focus entirely on the fate and reactions of the "man in the street," has been told with high skill and extraordinary effectiveness for over 150 years. It is debatable if today's practitioners have added much that was not in The Last Man by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in 1826 or in Deluge by S. Fowler Wright over a century later (1929). Yet, it is quite possible that in The Wanderer, Fritz Leiber has shown that there are ways of writing science fiction so that it can hold both the basic and the advanced audience. In attempting to show the effect of the catastrophe on a dozen or more people concurrently, Leiber's effect becomes unartfully choppy. Nevertheless, though the reader moves bumpily along, he remains interested, never losing track of the disparate variety of characters and situations. As the invading planet is discovered to be a propelled world, inhabited by multitudinous diverse creatures working in har-mony; with their revelation of the state of galactic civiliza-tion and travel through hyperspace, the story moves into superscience, but this is balanced and even made more accept-able by contrast with more ordinary events on Earth and the reactions of the Earthmen.

  Interest grows as the inhabitants of the invading world attempt to rectify some of the harm they have done, prior to answering to a "police" world which is pursuing them, intent on preventing inadvertent damage to less advanced civiliza-tions. Their makeshift efforts to right some of the wrongs they have done are rejected as insufficient by the pursuing globe and a clash of the two worlds moves them out of our space-time continuum.

  The Wanderer is flawed but far from a failure. Had it first been published in hard covers and widely reviewed, it might have made a larger first impression. Amid a flood of paper-backs it was almost lost, but already laudatory bits and pieces are cropping up in science-fiction criticism. It may enjoy a delayed reaction, which could prove decisive in Leiber's career.

  While Fritz Leiber has made his mark, his story is in every sense an unfinished one. The Grey Mouser series has estab-lished him as the greatest living writer in the sword and sorcery tradition. A pioneer in the attempt to modernize the ancient symbols of terror, he has also gained recognition for spearheading a movement to the lore of fantasy and witch-craft in the body of science fiction. As a stylist he ranks among the finest writers of fantasy today, one possessing rare gifts of characterization and humor. Even as an entertainer he has something to say, taking definite stands on social questions. Throughout his writing career the "branches of time" theme has fascinated him. In three of his biggest novels, Destiny Times Three, The Big Time, and The Wanderer, as well as in many shorter works, he has speculated on what might happen if the reel of life could be rewound and played out again. Destiny Times Three is much more than the title of one of Leiber's finest stories; it is a symbol of the three separate starts he has made in his writing career, in search of he knows not what.

  17 C. L. MOORE

  E. Hoffman Price, pulp magazine wr
iter of the 1930's, never tires of telling anecdotes about the remarkable Farns-worth Wright, editor of weird tales, who either discovered or helped develop a third of today's great names in fantasy fiction. Wright would invariably "dig into his desk, and thrust a manuscript at me," Price recalls. "The accompanying sales talk would have made the hypothetical Man from Mars mistake me for the prospective purchaser, and Farnsworth for the author's agent!

  "But the highest peak was reached," Price says, "in 1933, when he handed me a manuscript by one C. L. Moore.

  "And that did take my breath. 'For Christ's sake, Plato (a nickname for Price), who is C. L. Moore? He, she, or it is colossal!' This, of all times, was when my enthusiasm equaled Farnsworth's. He quit work and we declared a C. L. Moore Day."

  Shambleau, the story responsible for the editorial holiday, appeared in the November, 1933, issue of weird tales. Wright led off the issue with the story and the impact on the readership was every bit as great as he anticipated. One of the most enthusiastic reactions came from the pen of the man Wright characterized as "the dean of weird fiction writ-ers," H. P. Lovecraft, who wrote: "Shambleau is great stuff. It begins magnificently, on just the right note of terror, and with black intimations of the unknown. The subtle evil of the Entity, as suggested by the unexplained horror of the people, is extremely powerful—and the description of the Thing itself when unmasked is no letdown. It has real atmosphere and tension—rare things amidst the pulp traditions of brisk, cheerful, staccato prose and lifeless stock characters and images. The one major fault is the conventional interplane-tary setting." Shambleau was a triumph of imagination, but beyond that it was a "first" story of such storytelling skill as to place its author among the pulp fantasy leaders of the era, which included H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and A. Merritt. It introduced Northwest Smith, a scarred space outlaw, as fast with the ray blaster as his prototypes in the old West had been with the six shooter. A man nearing 40, with steely no-color eyes, a streak of murder in his makeup, and a psychological hardness that has resisted the most soul-destroying horrors. Northwest Smith rescues a strange brown girl from a Martian mob and takes her to his lodgings. When she unloosens her turban, instead of hair a cascade of worm-like tendrils falls like a cloak almost to her feet. Despite his revulsion, he is seduced by her allure and, buried in her Medusan coils of loathsome horror, experiences a sensuality that threatens his life force. The intervention of his Venusian friend Yarol saves him from ecstatic oblivion.