Here's an article about editor Cele Goldsmith, who played a major role in the revival of sword-and-sorcery fiction in the early 1960s. She published a lot by Fritz Leiber.

[galacticjourney.org]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 26 Sep 21 | 02:07PM by Dale Nelson.

Knygatin Wrote:
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> Dale Nelson Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Knygatin, since you've read so many of these
> > Fafhrd - Mouser stories recently, I gather,
> would
> > you like to name some of the stories that you
> > think are the best, along with The Swords of
> > Lankhmar?
>
>
> My absolute favorite story is "The Jewels in the
> Forest". One of his earliest. It is very exciting,
> and has some fine fantastic/magical situations. It
> opens with an ancient description of the year,
> month, and day (sort of like Clark Ashton Smith),
> and then succinctly captures an atmospheric
> bucolic scene, like a painting by Bruegel.
>
> Before that, the "The Circle Curse" begins the
> book, introducing the sorcerer Sheelba of the
> Eyeless Face who lives in a walking hut. Any story
> featuring Sheelba and the walking hut is
> worthwhile. It returns with full force in The
> Swords of Lankhmar.
>
> "The Sunken Land" is memorable.
>
> "When the Sea-King's Away" is a great little
> underwater adventure. Imaginative.
>
> Anyone interested in mountain-climbing should find
> "Stardock" interesting.
>
> "The Lords of Quarmall" is a very dark underground
> drama. Not a particular favorite though, too much
> jumbly back and forth actions.


Knygatin, I got the 1957 Gnome Press edition of the Faf-Mouser stories, Two Sought Adventure, on interlibrary loan, and expect to read it. It contains:

"Induction"
"The Jewels in the Forest"
"Thieves' House"
"The Bleak Shore"
"The Howling Tower"
"The Sunken Land"
"The Seven Black Priests"
"Claws from the Night"

I've read the first two items. I didn't expect the surprise twist about the misanthropic wizard's tower. I'd have been pretty pleased with myself to think of that, back when I was writing sword-and-sorcery stories.

These are not stories that bring me great delight, but I enjoyed "Thieves' House" more than the entertaining "Jewels," and "The Bleak Shore" more than "Thieves' House."

It wouldn't have been appropriate for Conan to fall under a curse spoken by Death itself, as happens to the Mouser & Fafhrd here. Something like that could have happened in a Dunsany story, but I don't suppose one would have cared what happened to the characters; nor would the outcome of the story have been the same.

I wondered if just possibly Ursula Le Guin's third and, for a long time, final Earthsea novel, [i]The Farthest Shore[i], owed anything to this story, which Le Guin had almost certainly read.

Now I've read "The Howling Tower," and I suppose this one impresses me the most of the four so far. (In fact I think this might have influenced me in one of those sword-and-sorcery-type stories I wrote so long ago, a thing called "A Sojourn in Pasgue.") It's a long time since I read Metclafe's "The Bad Lands" -- is there something akin to this Leiber story in that one? Some kind of eerie desolate locale?

I'll be surprised if any of the remaining stories in Two Sought Adventure get to me as much as this one did with its strange imagery of the tower in the prairie and the eeriness of the "howling."

It sounds like you are in a hurry to get it done with. I should find it difficult to savour the subtleties of the prose and the finer details of the stories, under such circumstances.

Dale Nelson Wrote:
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>
> I'll be surprised if any of the remaining stories
> in Two Sought Adventure get to me as much as this
> one did with its strange imagery of the tower in
> the prairie and the eeriness of the "howling."
>

Your own hunting grounds up in North Dakota. ;) Fritz Leiber uses a wide array of settings.

Knygatin Wrote:
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> It sounds like you are in a hurry to get it done
> with. I should find it difficult to savour the
> subtleties of the prose and the finer details of
> the stories, under such circumstances.

This copy is a library book, so I do have to return it by early next month, but I expect to complete the reading within a few days — plenty of time to spare. I guess if I were missing things by the way I’m reading it as my recreational book of the moment, I might not realize it, so I don’t know how answerable your implied constructive criticism is. : )

In what I’ve been writing on the stories this week, I haven’t intended that anyone should take my comments as more than notes or brief comments. If anyone finds something of interest and value in them, that’s good. They’re not intended to be close readings that unpack the stories in detail.

While I have the book, if you want to direct my attention to certain passages or topics, I might be able to respond. Anyway, thank you.

It was some years ago I read those stories in his second collection, and don't remember much more than I have mentioned above. "The Sunken Land" is a sort of Atlantis tale, mostly memorable to me for its dripping wet setting. All I recall from "The Seven Black Priests" is a skidding race down a snowy slope, which was "entertaining" enough and rather silly.

I don't plan to read Leiber again in a while. Though I am curious about The Wanderer. I also have a lovely collection called The Leiber Chronicles (and The Best of Fritz Leiber) with a wide array of short stories, which I may dip into now and again.

I like visual writers, and Leiber is very good at that (like his peers Smith and Vance). He is also shrewd at psychology, and has a lot of humor. But I find him a bit too materialistic to satisfy me completely.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 7 Oct 21 | 07:22AM by Knygatin.

Knygatin Wrote:
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>
> Fritz Leiber has a lot of humor.
>

I might add that The Swords of Lankhmar is perhaps the funniest, and most consistently ecstatic, book I have ever read.

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.

Knygatin, I checked out The Conan Grimoire, a book of reprints from the fanzine Amra, from the library. It has "Fafhrd and Me" by Fritz Leiber. If that's not in any of your books, I could scan it for you if you want to read it. It's about Leiber's beginning of writing the series. Just email me if interested.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 7 Oct 21 | 04:07PM by Dale Nelson.

Thanks, but please do not do that. I have piles of reading material, and don't have time to read all.


Fritz Leiber also acted in the student film Equinox, which has some nice stop motion animation by the great Dave Allen and matte paintings by the phenomenal Jim Danforth.