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The best of Fritz Leiber de Fritz Leiber
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The best of Fritz Leiber (original: 1974; edição: 1974)

de Fritz Leiber

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562442,308 (3.99)18
Collection of stories written between 1944 and 1970 by one of the most popular science fiction authors.
Membro:Jean_Sexton
Título:The best of Fritz Leiber
Autores:Fritz Leiber
Informação:Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, c1974.
Coleções:Hutch
Avaliação:
Etiquetas:Science fiction, Fantasy

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The Best of Fritz Leiber de Fritz Leiber (1974)

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Exibindo 4 de 4
What to say - it's classic SF from a master. Several of the stories are very short. Most are clever, all are well-written, many are provocative and challenging. This edition full of typos, including planet/plant in a story about mysterious plants on a strange planet, so that was frustrating until I figured out which was meant.

( )
  Cheryl_in_CC_NV | Jun 6, 2016 |
Fritz Leiber is a legendary name in science fiction and fantasy, up there among the stars with the likes of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke et al. I do not know whether the present book includes his best (since the author has endorsed it himself, it should), but it does have some fantastic stories.

Leiber calls himself a “Science Fantasy” writer in the introduction: it seems an apt term, because there is nary a hard SF story in the whole volume, and many of them are outright fantasies. The author uses the world of the future and imagined scientific advances as a prop to hang his stories on, which are mostly fantasy.

The story nearest to a hard SF story in the volume, A Pail of Air, is also my personal favourite. Earth has been “abducted” by a passing dark star, pulled into its gravitational field and taken away from the Solar System. The atmosphere has frozen in the absolute zero of space, the different constituents each freezing at a different temperature and forming layers atop the soil, with water at the bottom and oxygen at the top. A scientist and his family have managed to survive by creating an almost-hermetically-sealed-room with a fire which is never allowed to go out: they replenish the oxygen periodically scooping the frozen layer from outside and allowing it to evaporate. The story is told by the young son of the scientist, who has been born on this dismal dead planet. The story is a wonderful paean to mankind, determined to survive no matter what.

A couple of stories are surreal vignettes, disturbing in their dark intensity. Interestingly, Leiber says that both these stories “almost wrote themselves”. The Man Who Never Grew Young is the story of an eternal in a world where time flows backward: all around him, he sees people grow young and go back into their mothers’ wombs, but he is destined live for ever. In Mariana, the world of make-believe is taken to its logical conclusion – which is (terrifyingly!) ridiculous.

These stories span the period from the end of the Second World War in the nineteen forties to the cold war period of the early seventies: and many of the stories reflect the concerns of the era in their content and intent. Sanity and Wanted: An Enemy are straightforward in their concern with war and world domination. The Foxholes of Mars and The Big Trek are essentially moralizing stories about war, even with their SF setting – and I found them rather mediocre.

Leiber’s concerns about right-wing America are reflected in Coming Attraction, Poor Superman and America the Beautiful. In two of these stories, the protagonist is British, and the story is essentially a look at one’s own country through foreign eyes. Even though the Soviet Union is a thing of history and the cold war is largely forgotten, these stories remain chilling remainders of where humanity can go when bigotry and paranoia is allowed to dominate – something which is very valid almost all of the “liberal” democracies today.

Fritz Leiber is also a terrific satirist. As a person who grew up in the late sixties and early seventies, the story Rum-Titty-Titty-Tum-Tah-Tee was especially hilarious for me: new age philosophy, modern art, jazz music and pop psychology are all put together in a hilarious romp of a tale and lampooned. But for all that, it is still a valid fantasy. The same is also true for The Night He Cried, where Mickey Spillane and his brand of hard-boiled detective fiction is mercilessly slaughtered.

There were also a couple of stories I could not quite “get” - Little Miss Macbeth and the multi-award-winning novella Gonna Roll the Bones. However, this is not to take away from the power of these stories: only a confession of the limitations of my aesthetic sensitivities.

***

Running across all these stories is the common theme of human existence, the sheer joy of it, even in extremely adverse conditions. This is the real courage to live, as epitomised by the scientist holding on on a destroyed earth in A Pail of Air:

Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold it only so long, then he has to toss it to someone else. When it’s tossed you way, you’ve got to catch it and hold it tight – and hope there’ll be someone else to toss it to when you get tired of being brave.


If I should choose one passage to describe Fritz Leiber’s philosophy (if there is such a thing!), this would be it.

***

Fritz Leiber says:

All I ever try to write is a good story with a good measure of strangeness in it. The supreme goddess of universe is Mystery, and being well entertained is the highest joy.


Any perceptive reader, I feel, would agree wholeheartedly with the entertainment part.

( )
  Nandakishore_Varma | Sep 28, 2013 |
It's the centennial of Fritz Leiber's birth. Unfortunately, Leiber, winner of numerous awards, writer of many styles, adept in horror, fantasy, and science fiction, is something of a forgotten author. Or, more accurately, remembered for little more than a sword-and-sorcery series.

There are no stories from that series about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser here unlike the recent Night Shade Books Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber. That collection, though, is a retrospective of Leiber's entire career. This book collects Leiber's favorite stories from about two-thirds of the way into a career that covered more than 50 years. Still, the collections share six stories.

Writer's favorites are not always reader favorites. I personally wasn't excited by "The Night He Cried", an attack on what Leiber feared would be Mickey Spillane's pernicious influence on fantasy. "Little Old Miss Macbeth", sort of a science fantasy in a post-apocalypse America, didn't strike me as more than an exercise in mood.

"Gonna Roll the Bones" is science fantasy too but successfully blends dicing against the Devil in a spaceport with marital discord. "The Man Who Never Grew Young" follows the life of an immortal of our time in a universe where time now runs backward, Egyptian monuments devolving back to quarried stone, nomads leaving the Nile for the desert.

Other works are successful retoolings of mainstream stories. "The Ship Sails at Midnight" outlines the effect of a woman who becomes a muse, crutch, and inspiration to a group of men. The sexual and psychological rewards and pitfalls of the situation are well depicted. "The Foxholes of Mars" deals metaphorically with Hitler and World War One.

Political satire and suspicion of centralized technocracies is a theme in a surprising number of stories. "Sanity" and "The Enchanted Forest" all take a dim view of trying to build "normal" societies with no room for the eccentric and aberrant. "Poor Superman" is not only an attack on the grandiose promises of Scientology and Dianetics but the totalitarian faiths of the 20th century.

"Coming Attraction" and "America the Beautiful" are both stories of Brits coming to America and learning, through relations with women, of hidden sexual fetishes and social neuroses. In the first story, it's a post-nuclear war America with a mania for masked women and female wrestling. In the second, a story from 1970, America's relentless quest for perfection and a clean environment has fetishized catastrophe.

Sheer pageantry is on hand with "The Big Trek", where a man joins a bizarre calvacade of aliens leaving man to his nuked out Earth and going to the stars, and "The Big Holiday", about an American holiday of the future. Disaster on a grand scale is here in "A Pail of Air" where a wandering comet has knocked Earth out of its orbit and the atmosphere has condensed into vast drifts of frozen gas.

"Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-Tah-Tee" is about the ultimate earwig, a rhythm which threatens to so compulsively grip the human mind as to destroy human civilization. It struck me as a very Alfred Bester type story. So did "The Good New Days" to a lesser degree. It's a satire on Beatniks and set in a polluted, over automated society where having a job is the ultimate status symbol. "Mariana" treads some of the same solipsistic ground that Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint does from almost the same time.

"The Man Who Made Friends with Electricity" has been an influential story with many writers taking up the notion of intelligences haunting the technological infrastructures of man. The original is still charming.

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser may be missing but there are stories from two other Leiber series. "Space-Time for Springers" is the first installment about hyper-intelligent super-kitten Gummitch. There are two Change War stories. "Try and Change the Past" shows, with a man's attempt to avoid being fatally shot by his wife, to what lengths the universe will go to preserve historical reality. "A Deskful of Girls" is kind of tangential to the series, a high tech vampirism used to steal, in a ghostly, faintly sentient, ectoplasmic form, the sexual charisma of would-be starlets and "sex goddesses". A tale that's both erotic and social criticism.

Leiber contributes notes to all his stories, and Poul Anderson's introduction reveals Leiber the man and artist.

Leiber's sheer versatility means that large numbers of stories may not be the reader's thing, but this is definitely a place to start in appreciating a fading legend. ( )
  RandyStafford | Mar 15, 2012 |
A very strong collection of twenty-two varied stories from Fritz Leiber (in the Afterwards, Leiber describes these as the best of his "science fantasies"). The only story I had read previously was the Hugo and Nebula Award winner "Gonna Roll the Bones," which I had thought was one of the stronger entries in Dangerous Visions, and which stood up well on a second reading. Other than "Bones," these stories are presented chronologically; the later stories are all very strong.

Of the stories that were new to me my favorites were "Coming Attractions," a story offering telling predictions about future America; "A Pail Full of Air," an emotionally powerful little tale about a family of disaster survivors; "Space-Time for Springers," a superb cat story; and "Little Old Miss Macbeth," a post-apocalyptic story with hidden meanings and effective symbolism. Even some of the stories that started as like dated, sexist adolescent wish fulfillment, like "A Deskful of Girls," proved to offer unexpected depth. The biggest disappointment was "The Night He Cried", a story written when Leiber was angry at Mickey Spillane. ( )
  clong | Dec 26, 2007 |
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Nome do autorFunçãoTipo de autorObra?Status
Fritz Leiberautor principaltodas as ediçõescalculado
Anderson, PoulIntroduçãoautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
Kresek, LarryArtista da capaautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado

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