Perhaps best known for his heroic fantasy work, Fritz Leiber also created an exciting range of science fiction that reflected his various enthusiasms — cats, chess and the theater.
Leiber became interested in writing through correspondence with a college friend, with whom he collaborated in 1939 in the creation of the heroic-fantasy duo Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. The adventures of this pair became central to Leiber's career, comprising a lengthy series that includes The Swords of Lankhmar (1970), arguably the greatest modern heroic-fantasy novel.
Leiber's first important work of science fiction, meanwhile, was Gather, Darkness! (1950), in which a religious dictatorship is overthrown by rebels who disguise their super-science as witchcraft. In the 1950s, he created the Change War series. The initial volume, The Big Time (1961), takes place entirely in one room (an R & R location called the Place, sited beyond normal realities); suggestive of a play in prose form, it reflects Leiber's background in theater (both his parents were Shakespearean actors, and Leiber himself acted on both stage and screen, including a small part in the 1936 Greta Garbo film Camille).
The Big Time (1961) won a Hugo award for Best Novel, as did Leiber's most ambitious science fiction work, The Wanderer (1964) , a long disaster novel telling of the havoc caused by the arrival of a strange planet in the solar system. Its mosaic narrative technique, through which events are observed through a multiplicity of viewpoints, foreshadowed the profusion of similar novels and films in the 1970s. Leiber won a further Hugo for "Ship of Shadows" (1969) and completed the double of Hugo and Nebula awards for the third time with "Catch that Zeppelin!" (1975).
Noted also for his fantasies in modern settings, such as "Belsen Express" (1975), Leiber was the most influential model for the sudden creation in the 1980s of the subgenre of contemporary (or urban) fantasy. By refusing to create an easily recognizable template for his science fiction, however, he may have sacrificed some popularity in that genre. In compensation, he was the only writer of his generation developing and producing his best genre work in the late 1970s.
Leiber's many awards include the 1975 Grand Master of Fantasy (Gandalf) Award, the 1976 Life Achievement Lovecraft Award, the 1981 Grand Master Nebula, six Hugos, four Nebulas and approximately 20 others.
Selected Bibliography:
Gather, Darkness! (1950)
The Green Millennium (1953)
The Big Time (1961)
The Wanderer (1964)
The Swords of Lankhmar (1970)
Our Lady of Darkness (1977)
Film/TV Adaptations:
Weird Woman (1944)
Burn, Witch, Burn (1961)
Fritz Leiber