Fritz Leiber
Dark fantasist

Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. (24 December 1910 – 5 September 1992) was a hugely influential American writer of horror, science fiction, and fantasy.

He was also, at various times in his life:

• a student at the University of Chicago (where he gained a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in Biological Sciences);
• an episcopal minister;
• a Hollywood actor;
• an editor with Consolidated Book Publishers, Chicago, and later at Science Digest;
• a speech and drama instructor at the Occidental College, Los Angeles;
• a precision inspector with the Douglas Aircraft Company during World War II;
• …and a poet.

Biography

Leiber (left) was the only child of Fritz Reuter Leiber Sr. (right; 31 January 1882 – 4 October 1949), a noted Shakespearean actor on stage and also in Hollywood from 1916 to his death in 1950, and his wife Virginia (née Bronson), an English actress.

In 1935, only two years after his ordination, Leiber left the missionary churches in New Jersey and began a three-year stint as an actor with his father’s company. He appeared in a few films including MGM’s Camille (1937, dir. George Cukor), and, with his father, The Great Garrick (1937, dir. James Whale) .

Leiber married Welsh poetess Jonquil Stephens on 16 January 1936, and their son Justin Fritz Leiber was born in 1938. (Justin is a professor of philosophy and an sf author; his daughter Arlynn is the romance novelist Vivian Leiber!)

Jonquil died in September 1969. Following this, Leiber’s writing career was hit by a period of chronic alcoholism. Leiber remarried much later, in 1992, to long-time companion Margo Skinner, just four months before his death.

Fascination with the stage

Leiber’s fascination with the stage shows through in much of his work, from short stories featuring travelling Shakespearean companies such as “No Great Magic” (Galaxy December 1963) and “Four Ghosts in Hamlet” (novelette, Fantasy & Science Fiction January 1965) to the actor/producer protagonist of the novel A Specter is Haunting Texas (Walker 1969).

In The Big Time (1958; rev Ace 1961), about an incident in the “Change War” between two factions, Snakes and Spiders, changing and re-changing history throughout the Universe, all the action takes place in a small bubble of isolated space-time, about the size of a theatrical stage, with only a handful of characters.

The novel was adapted by Jim Tucker and performed at the Babcock Theatre, Salt Lake City, in November 1982.

Awards

The Big Time (1958); The Wanderer (Ballantine 1964); “Gonna Roll them Bones” (novelette, Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison, Doubleday 1967), about a gambler playing dice with Death; Ship of Shadows (novella, Fantasy & Science Fiction July 1969); and “Catch that Zeppelin!” (novelette, Fantasy & Science Fiction March 1975) all won Hugo awards; “Bones” and “Zeppelin” also won Nebula awards.

Fans awarded him the Gandalf (Grand Master) award at the World Science Fiction Convention in 1975, and in 1981 the Science Fiction Writers of America voted him the recipient of their Grand Master award. In 1976 he received a World Fantasy Life Achievement Award and in 1988 a Bram Stoker Life Achievement Award.

Other notable works

Other notable works are: The Green Millennium (Abelard 1953); Conjure Wife (Twayne 1953, as part of Witches Three), which relates a college professor’s discovery that his wife (and all other women) are regularly using magic against one another and their husbands; and Our Lady of Darkness (Berkley Putnam 1977) – serialized in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as “The Pale Brown Thing” (1975) – a fantasy novel set in modern-day San Francisco in which cities were the breeding grounds for new types of elementals, summonable by the dark art of megalopolisomancy, this received the World Fantasy Award.

Conjure Wife was filmed three times:

• Weird Woman (1944)
• Burn Witch, Burn (aka Night of the Eagle) (1962)
• Witches’ Brew (aka Which Witch is Which?) (1980)

In his own words…

The following appeared in Destiny VII, Winter 1953, ed. Earl Kemp & Malcom Willits. (Retyped – and copy-edited! – from scans by Tom Veal at The Fanac Fan History Project.)

Resources