Fritz Leiber

At 81 years old, Fritz Leiber physical status not available right now. We will update Fritz Leiber's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Leiber was heavily influenced by H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Graves, John Webster, and Shakespeare in the first two decades of his career. Beginning in the late 1950s, he was increasingly influenced by the works of Carl Jung, particularly by the concepts of the anima and the shadow. In the mid-1960s, he began incorporating elements of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. These concepts are often mentioned in his stories, especially the anima, which becomes a method of exploring his fascination with, but estrangement from, the female.

Leiber liked cats, which are featured in many of his stories. Tigerishka, for example, is a cat-like alien who is sexually attractive to the human protagonist yet repelled by human customs in the novel The Wanderer. Leiber's "Gummitch" stories feature a kitten with an I.Q. of 160, just waiting for his ritual cup of coffee so that he can become human, too.

His first stories in the 1930s and 40s were inspired by Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. A notable critic and historian of the wider Mythos, S. T. Joshi, has singled out Leiber's "The Sunken Land" (Unknown Worlds, February 1942) as the most accomplished of the early stories based on Lovecraft's Mythos. Leiber also later wrote several essays on Lovecraft the man, such as "A Literary Copernicus" (1949), the publication of which formed a key moment in the emergence of a serious critical appreciation of Lovecraft's life and work.

Leiber's first professional sale was "Two Sought Adventure" (Unknown, August 1939), which introduced his most famous characters, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. In 1943, his first two novels were serialized in Unknown (the supernatural horror-oriented Conjure Wife, inspired by his experiences on the faculty of Occidental College) and Astounding Science Fiction (Gather, Darkness).

1947 marked the publication of his first book, Night's Black Agents, a short story collection containing seven stories grouped as 'Modern Horrors', one as a 'Transition', and two grouped as 'Ancient Adventures': "The Sunken Land" and "Adept's Gambit", which are both stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

The science fiction novel Gather, Darkness followed in 1950. It deals with a futuristic world that follows the Second Atomic Age which is ruled by scientists, until in the throes of a new Dark Age, the witches revolt.

In 1951, Leiber was Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in New Orleans. Further novels followed during the 1950s, and in 1958 The Big Time won the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Leiber continued to publish in the 1960s. His novel The Wanderer (1964) also won the Hugo for Best Novel. In the novel, an artificial planet nicknamed the Wanderer materializes from hyperspace within earth's orbit. The Wanderer's gravitational field captures the moon and shatters it into something like one of Saturn's rings. On Earth, the Wanderer's gravity well triggers earthquakes, tsunamis, and tidal phenomena. The multi-threaded plot follows the exploits of an ensemble cast as they struggle to survive the global disaster.

In the same period, Leiber published "Black Gondolier", a short story in which a protagonist uncovers a cosmic conspiracy in which oil from ancient fossils preys upon human beings and human civilizations. Leiber received the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1970 and 1971 for "Ship of Shadows" (1969) and "Ill Met in Lankhmar" (1970). "Gonna Roll the Bones" (1967), his contribution to Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology, won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 1968.

Our Lady of Darkness (1977), originally serialized in short form in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction under the title "The Pale Brown Thing" (1977), featured cities as the breeding grounds for new types of elementals called paramentals, summonable by the dark art of megapolisomancy, with such activities centering on the Transamerica Pyramid. Its main characters include Franz Westen, Jaime Donaldus Byers, and the magician Thibault de Castries. Our Lady of Darkness won the World Fantasy Award—Novel.

Leiber also wrote the 1966 novelization of the Clair Huffaker screenplay of Tarzan and the Valley of Gold.

Many of Leiber's most acclaimed works are short stories, especially in the horror genre. Owing to such stories as "The Smoke Ghost", "The Girl With the Hungry Eyes", and "You're All Alone" (later expanded as The Sinful Ones), he is one of the forerunners of the modern urban horror story. Leiber also challenged the conventions of science fiction through reflexive narratives such as "A Bad Day For Sales" (first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1953), in which the protagonist, Robie, "America’s only genuine mobile salesrobot", references the title character of Isaac Asimov's idealistic robot story, "Robbie". Questioning Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, Leiber imagines the futility of automatons in a post-apocalyptic New York City. In his later years, Leiber returned to short story horror in such works as "Horrible Imaginings", "Black Has Its Charms" and the award-winning "The Button Moulder".

The short parallel worlds story "Catch That Zeppelin!" (1975) won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story and the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1976. It presents an alternate reality much better than our own, as opposed to the usual parallel universe story depicting a world worse than our own. "Belsen Express" (1975) won the World Fantasy Award—Short Fiction. Both stories reflect Leiber's uneasy fascination with Nazism, an uneasiness compounded by his mixed feelings about his German ancestry and his philosophical pacifism during World War II.

Leiber was named the second Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy by participants in the 1975 World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), after the posthumous inaugural award to J. R. R. Tolkien. Next year he won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. He was Guest of Honor at the 1979 Worldcon in Brighton, England (1979). The Science Fiction Writers of America made him its fifth SFWA Grand Master in 1981; the Horror Writers Association made him an inaugural winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1988 (named in 1987); and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him in 2001, its sixth class of two deceased and two living writers.

Leiber was a founding member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loose-knit group of Heroic fantasy authors founded in the 1960s and led by Lin Carter. Some works by SAGA members were published in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies. Leiber himself is credited with inventing the term sword and sorcery for the particular subgenre of epic fantasy exemplified by his Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories.

In an appreciation in the July 1969 "Special Fritz Leiber Issue" of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Judith Merril writes of Leiber's connection with his readers: "That this kind of personal response...is shared by thousands of other readers, has been made clear on several occasions." The November 1959 issue of Fantastic, for instance: Leiber had just come out of one of his recurrent dry spells, and editor Cele Lalli bought up all his new material until there was enough [five stories] to fill an issue; the magazine came out with a big black headline across its cover — Leiber Is Back!

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