Re: Fritz Leiber
Posted by:
Dale Nelson (IP Logged)
Date: 7 October, 2021 10:12AM
I was thinking about the range of story types in modern fantasy (that is, the fantasy that includes the Fafhrd and Mouser stories, The Lord of the Rings, etc.). It's a wide range!
The Lord of the Rings shows strongly a beginning, middle, and end -- even though we know an enormous amount happened before the main story starts with the aged Bilbo's birthday party, and even though we are told briefly about some events occurring after Frodo and his hobbit companions set things right in the Shire. This main story takes just a matter of months. The Lord of the Rings shows a strong quality of unity in this way.
But modern fantasy also includes story cycles to which any number of "episodes" could be added or (if the author had wished) subtracted. Here's a thought experiment. Let's suppose that Robert E. Howard didn't commit suicide. He thought "enemies" in Cross Plains were going to get him, so he faked a suicide and took off. He didn't know about the Gnome Press editions of his stories -- mixed with new ones by other authors -- that appeared while he was around 50 years old; these were small press publications, after all, not likely to be seen in ordinary book stores. But Lancer began to publish paperbacks of Conan stories, some by Howard, some by de Camp, Carter, and Nyberg, beginning about the time Bob Howard had turned 60. These he did see. He got his identity legally established and alerted Lancer and de Camp etc. to his being alive, and told them to stop publication of his stories and the writing of stories with his character. So now Bob Howard has control of his creative work.
He could exploit its money-making potential to the maximum. But Bob doesn't need the money. He's been successful in the career he took up after faking his death. He had married and has a nice home and he's already put his kids through college. He decides that he wants to issue a revised Conan saga that represents his best work in that form. So he decides to weed out stories such as "The Vale of Lost Women." And the point I'm making is that this is easy.* The Conan cycle is very loose. When Howard or de Camp or Carter added a story, nothing really changed as far as the character's life was concerned. Likewise, Howard, now in his early 60s, decides to add a couple of new stories. There need be no problem with that, either! The Conan cycle is very loose. Howard can add beads to the necklace or take them off the string. He might have undertaken a great de-cluttering of the Conan cycle. The stories he rejected, he could say were false legends recorded in the Nemedian Chronicles, but a new and better manuscript has come to light, so....
Well, I see the Fafhrd and Mouser stories as a cycle like the Conan stories. I suspect that at various points in his life Leiber may have thought he wouldn't be writing any more of them; but if editors were interested, he could do so. So, when Cele Goldsmith edited Fantastic, he added some stories not in the Gnome Press book and Goldsmith bought them. Then there were no new ones for a while, except one or two ("Ill Met in Lankhmar") in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, till Ted White proved interested in buying new stories for Fantastic and Stuart Schiff for Whispers, etc. Sword and sorcery really caught on in the 1960s and 1970s, and Leiber had a market again. Leiber could go on freely adding new stories. But suppose the time came when he decided he wanted to publish the best stories as the authentic F&GM chronicle. Easy! Just as I've suggested with Howard, he could posit that the rejected stories were bogus interpolations in the sources. The cycle is loose; Leiber could add or subtract freely.
Is there something in the modern fantasy genre that falls between the relatively tightly-constructed variety at one end of a spectrum and the loose story-cycle at the other end? I think so: what about Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan/Gormenghast world? You do have the trajectory of Titus's birth-boyhood-young manhood, in which he leaves Gormenghast; on the other hand, Peake seems to have seen the sequence as open-ended; he could have gone on to polish the third book and to write one or more further ones if his health hadn't broken down. It seems as if the Titus oeuvre could have begun as something relatively tightly constructed that became open-ended. I don't know.
*Arthur Conan Doyle could've done the same thing if he'd wanted to. He could have posited that any number of Dr. Watson's stories were imaginary "cases" in which Watson and Sherlock Holmes set up a puzzle, a mystery, then figured out how SH would have solved it if it had really occurred. The authentic cases would be just such-and-such stories.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 7 Oct 21 | 11:03AM by Dale Nelson.