Imagine a world where computers write the books and authors are mere marketing devices to help sell the product. This is the world Fritz Leiber imagined nearly 50 years ago. Leiber, a brilliant writer and innovator, wrote SF like the Change War series where agents of the future battle to change the timeline (or protect it). His most famous work was the Fafard and Gray Mouser series of sword-and-sorcery adventures. But Leiber, ever the innovator, came up with the concept of The Silver Eggheads which seems to be coming to fruition in the near future. Until then, we have real writers who actually write the books they hawk to the reading public. Let’s celebrate them until the computers take over writing the books as Leiber predicted.
I know one guy in the Philly area who will very happy to see this selection.
THE SILVER EGGHEADS is one of Leiber’s lesser known works, Patti, but I think it’s terrific! What vision into the future!
I’ve read a lot of Leiber, but not this one. Good pick, George.
You should track down THE SILVER EGGHEADS, Rick. It’s one of Leiber’s underrated works.
Sounds pretty prescient to me.
Leiber must have had a crystal ball, Jeff.
I do love Leiber’s work, Patti, but this is my choice for the weakest novel of Leiber’s…the good notion it’s based on is executed in that sort of Well, I have the contract, I guess I have to finish the thing mode that is rather familiar to many writers. Hell, I’ve even worked like that to some limited extent (“even I” only because the only sort of paragon I am is the paragon of dabbler). But it is a Leiber novel, so you won’t be suffering as you read it…you just wouldn’t want to try to judge Leiber from this one on its own. Of course, the faceless orbs of the title are writers caught up in the machine-works of the freelancer’s life in the 1950s…when things were tough, too, even if you were selling to the SATURDAY EVENING POST for the highest word rates before or since for a regular market for short fiction (and an actually weekly one) or COLLIER’S, like, say, Vonnegut, or you were staffer at SCIENCE DIGEST, as Leiber was till he was fired, as Ed Gorman noted the other day (he was an alcoholic, but a productive one…till after the firing, and one of several interregna in his production occurred…this one broken, at least most publicly, by the special Leiber issue of FANTASTIC in 1959 that Cele Goldsmith commissioned)(Leiber being the only writer to have had special issues devoted to him and his work by the trio of FANTASTIC, THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, and WHISPERS, each a decade apart…just one of the many great and insufficient honors paid to him…).
I consider THE WANDERER as Leiber’s best work, Todd. THE SILVER EGGHEADS is a marvel to me because Leiber had nothing like “artificial intelligent” to work with…he just made it up himself! Amazing!
Well, the Eggheads, unless I’ve managed to misremember over the decades, are actually human writers encased in the ovoids…but even so, robotic and computer intelligence was a pretty common coin in sf by the ’50s, to be sure. Leiber’s plaint was for the life of a writer…being a faceless cog was a feeling not too uncommon then as now, sadly…and perhaps always so, to one degree or using other metaphors.
You know, I’d forgotten THE WANDERER just then. My favorites among his novels are the horrors, CONJURE WIFE, YOU’RE ALL ALONE, and OUR LADY OF DARKNESS (which F&SF ran, in shorter form, as THE PALE BROWN THING…ALONE has been published in variant form as THE SINFUL ONES…and CONJURE WIFE, rather amusingly though not altogether incorrectly, was packaged in one edition by Award Books in the late ’60s as a Gothic…I have to wonder what Phyllis Whitney readers made of it).
I loved CONJURE WIFE, YOU’RE ALL ALONE, and OUR LADY OF THE DARKNESS, Todd. Leiber was a master.
I just wish there was a whole lot more of Leiber in print. I recently read You’re All Alone (one of the book’s many titles it seems) and was reminded of how so much of Leiber’s work was driven by horrorific concepts that served as comments on contemporary society. The novel certain;y speaks to today just as The Silver Eggheads does.
Night Shade Books is publishing a Leiber collection in Spring 2010, Ed. Hopefully, his neglected novels will find their way back into print.
Indeed, it was OUR LADY OF DARKNESS, which was republished in a two-fer with CONJURE WIFE a half-decade or so back, that inspired Algis Budrys to demand, “Where is Leiber’s National Book Award? Where is his Pulitzer?” Budrys had his own faceless man book in WHO?
“All anybody needs to know about prizes is that Mozart never won one,” Henry Mitchell once said. Rather than a National Book Award or a Pulitzer, I’d settle for having the Library of America do a Leiber volume so a new generation of readers could discover this master’s work, Todd. They’ve done Philip K. Dick and H. P. Lovecraft, why not Leiber?
CONJURE WIFE is definitely a classic.
Sadly, Leiber isn’t as well-known among those who don’t know much about fantastic fiction as Dick and HPL are. Perhaps we all can do something about that.
Yep, Jeff…the only Leiber novel to get 2.X films…the loosely-based WEIRD WOMAN, the rather good if mistitled BURN, WITCH, BURN! and WITCH’S BREW, a conedy more in response to BURN, WITCH, BURN! than the novel. Though some of the better NIGHT GALLERY segments are not quite good enough adaptations of Leiber short stories.
I have the Night Shade Leiber collection on order, Todd. And I persuaded Rick Robinson to order a copy, too. Perhaps Night Shade might be interested in publishing some Leiber omnibus volumes if we all support their Leiber short story collection.
Unfortunately, Night Shade tells me they won’t have a TOC for the collection until early next year, for publication of April.
I have read CONJURE WIFE and THE WANDERER and other Leiber, but I have to admit it’s the Mouser & Fafhrd stories that I enjoy the most. That may be due to the timing of my first reading them, right in my “golden age”. Suddenly, out of nowhere – actually out of my older brother’s bookshelf – there was fantasy and sword and sorcery wrapped in a clever, humorous, action-filled package.
One of my favorite all-time stories is Leiber’s “Bazaar of the Bizarre.” He was a master storyteller, Rick. He was equally adept at novels and short fiction.
Well, among the most interesting things about F&TGM was that Leiber used them to work himself out of (or around) writing blocks…and they aged with him (Fafhrd, of course, being an alter-ego of his, the Mouser of a friend of his youth, Harry Fischer, who co-created the characters with him and co-wrote the first story, “Adept’s Gambit”). Certainly some of Leiber’s best work (and a bit of his worst) is in that sequence…I think the only sequence in S&S quite up to Leiber’s is Jack Vance’s DYING EARTH/Cugel stories, though certainly Karl Edward Wagner, Phyllis Eisenstein, Janet Fox, Joanna Russ [she and Leiber trade cameos in for their characters] and co-progenitor C. L. Moore are among those who rate for me).
I’d have to rank Vance’s DYING EARTH series as tops, Todd. But Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are a close second.