Fritz Leiber's "The Bleak Shore" (short story, fantasy, free)

My first story from author's famous "Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser" series. And I'll say a disappointing introduction to the series.

Story summary.

In a world not yet well explored, two adventurer friends - Fafhrd & Mouser - have a reputation of defying death in difficult situations. And suddenly a curse is placed on them - to sail to a far off "Bleak Shore", where we'll witness a scene that will be filmed decades later in "Godzilla": the two are in the midst of hatching reptilian monster eggs...

Of course, there will be happy ending for our heroes.

Fact sheet.

First published: Unknown, November 1940.
Download full text from Baen eBooks.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Fritz Leiber.

"Astounding Science-Fiction", June 1943 (ed John W Campbell, Jr) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents & review

For stories where I have a separate post, link on story title goes there. Links on authors fetch more fiction by author. For read stories, my rating appears in brackets.

Table of contents (best first, unread last).

1. [novelette] Henry Kuttner & C L Moore's "The World is Mine" (as by Lewis Padgett) (B): "Galleger, the mad--or at least cockeyed--scientist, really got himself in a jam that time. A plague of corpses, all murdered, descended upon him--"
2. [novelette] George O Smith's "Calling the Empress": 'Physics says that a thing which cannot be detected by any means does not exist. So their problem was to make a "nonexistent" spaceship somewhere between Mars & Venus change it course--'
3. [ss] Anthony Boucher's "Pelagic Spark": "One man, to prove a point, cooked up a phony prophecy. And other men, believing it implicitly, made it come true!"
4. [ss] E M Hull's "Competition": "Artur Blord backed down like a scared cur when faced with real danger. But it so happened he was backing rapidly in a direction he'd never have been able to go face forward!"
5. [ss] Lester del Rey's "Whom the Gods Love": "The Japs murdered his personality; their terrible error was that they didn't murder him. They gave him something that was a magnificent antithesis of Death--for him. For them it was Death."
6. [ss] Anthony Boucher's "Sanctury" (as by H H Holmes): "The commondoman knew the Nazis were close on his heels; his one though was to get to some other place in a hurry. The professor had another idea--& the Villa had a ghost that haunted parties!"
7. [serial - 2/2] Fritz Leiber, Jr's "Gather, Darkness!": "The Hierarchy was a phony religion based on super-scientific "miracles" & rigid tyranny. And the revolution was a magnificent buffoonery of super-scientific witchcraft based on military tactics!"

Fact sheet.

Labeled: "Vol XXXI No 4"
Download scans as a cbr file. [via David T @pubscans]
Alternate, supposedly better version, of scan. [via ka280al@pbscans]
Note: I have personally seen only the first (original) version.
Related: Fiction from Astounding/Analog, whole issues only, only issues edited by John Campbell; 1940s; old pulps.

Some online fiction by well known authors

Most are courtesy of Free Speculative Fiction Online. Where I have a post on a story, link on title goes there. Link labeled "download" fetches the actual story. Link on author fetches more fiction by author.

Among the ones I've read, my favorite is "Two Yards of Dragon".

1. Arthur Clarke's "A Walk in the Dark"; download text/audio; horror: Our primeval fears...
2. L Sprague de Camp's "Nothing in the Rules; download; humor: What if mermaids were allowed in women's swimming competitions?
3. L Sprage de Camp's "Two Yards of Dragon" (A); download: Adventures dragon hunting...
4. Fritz Leiber's "The Bleak Shore"; download.
5. Murray Leinster's "Nightmare Planet"; download: I don't recollect this title but it appears to be yet another variant of "The Mad Planet".
6. Frederik Pohl's "The Kindly Isle"; download.
7. Manly Wade Wellman's "O Ugly Bird!"; download.
8. Alice Sheldon's "The Man Who Walked Home" (as by James Tiptree, Jr); download.
9. John Varley's "Air Raid"; download.

Fritz Leiber's "The Creature from Cleveland Depths" aka "The Lone Wolf" (novella, gadgets, free): Who could imagine mobile phones would be so evil?

Well, the story is from long before mobile phones were around, so the gadget (the "tickler") here looks different & works differently.

It begins as an organizer - you tell it to remind you of certain events, & it will at the right time. Reminding is by telling about the event in your ear via an in-ear headphone, plus an insistent "tickling" using two rollers mounted on your shoulder. It runs a very long (audio) magnetic tape - one run lasts a week, with buttons to forward quickly to a certain time. To set an event, you move it specific date/time next week, then speak of the event into it. After you've set the events, the device runs the tape continuously. But most of it is blank, so you don't hear anything till an event is due.

Soon improvements in upgraded versions give it a life all its own, threatening the very human existence...

Very funny early parts & ending, but I thought it was draggy in the middle as the mood begin to set for impending disaster.

Notes.

1. "Depths" of the title has cold war linkage - "Free World" vs Soviet Union. Because of bomb scare most people live in massive underground caverns that double as bomb shelters. Only a few "outers" live on the surface.
2. "Creature" of the title is an advanced form of the tickler gadget.

See also.

1. L Sprague de Camp's "Alanias" (download as part of a larger package): Another story where a voice whispers propaganda into your ear without your conscious self realizing you are being manipulated.

Fact sheet.

First published: Galaxy, December 1962.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg, Manybooks, Feedbooks. [via Becky@ClassicScienceFiction]
Download audio version read by Gregg Margarite from LibriVox.
Alternate audio link at Internet Archive.
Rating: A.
Related: Stories of Fritz Leiber.

Couple of stories

Both are online, via scans of Astounding (British Edition), June 1958 where they were reprinted. One is online elsewhere too.

While both are ordinary, they also have something special going for them:

1. "Second Game" kept me fascinated & reading all the way through, though I didn't really find convincing the point it made.
2. While I personally found "Try and Change the Past" forgettable, I've seen others refer fondly to the series it is part of (series includes at least one novel, serialized in Galaxy simultaneously with publication of this story).

Here are the stories:

1. [novelette] Charles V DeVet & Katherine MacLean's "Second Game" (B): When a much smaller & powerful country invades & totally crushes your country, you're still a winner because, over a few generations, you will absorb the enemy in your gene pool! While something similar has happened more than once in India's history, I find the idea of counting it as a win totally absurd.
   
   Game part of the story comes from a chess-like but far more complex board game. Velda, the small invader in the story, a world of human-like beings, is crazy about this game & your skill at the game determines your social rank. The invaded, in the story, is the galaxy spanning human empire called Ten Thousand Worlds Federation.
   
   Story is told through the eyes of a human spy sent to Velda. Velda has repeatedly rebuffed the human contact but humans persist in trying to "persuade" them, eventually precipitating the doom.
2. [ss] Fritz Leiber's "Try and Change the Past" (B); read online or download (need to scroll down the page): A man is rescued from death by "Snakes", fighting the "Change War" with "Spiders" across space & time, with the intention of recruiting him as a time soldier.
   
   He figures if he could go back & change miner details near his end, he would not only live but escape from Snakes. Only the nature's law of "Conservation of Reality" prevents any significant postponement of his death...
   
   PS: I could not figure out how Snakes were able to circumvent the law of "Conservation of Reality" when they recruited him in the first place!

"Astounding Science Fiction" (British Edition), June 1958 (ed John Campbell) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

Links on author fetch more fiction by author. Where I have a separate post on a story, link on story title goes there. My rating for read stories appears in brackets.

Table of contents (best first).

1. [novelette] Dean McLaughlin's "The Man on the Bottom" (A): Surviving a sure death...
2. [novel - part 1, 2 (this), 3 of 3] Poul Anderson's "The Man Who Counts" (A): What if, during the creation of Israel during the 1940s, US had sided with Arabs instead of Israel? A very colorful fantasized variant of it.
3. [novelette] Charles V DeVet & Katherine MacLean's "Second Game" (B) : When a much smaller & powerful country invades & totally crushes your country, you're still a winner because, over a few generations, you will absorb the enemy in your gene pool!
4. [ss] Randall Garrett's "Penal Servitude" (B): Ultimate punishment for a tyrant...
5. [ss] Fritz Leiber's "Try and Change the Past" (B); read online or download (need to scroll down the page); time travel: You cannot really influence the present & future by traveling to past & changing it, because of the natural law of "Conservation of Reality"...

Fact sheet.

Labeled: Vol XIV No 6 (British Edition).
Download scans as a CBR file. [via Bob@pulpscans]
Note: Link points to a RAR file that contains target CBR, probably to work around some hosting service file naming constraints.
Related: Stories from the Astounding/Analog issues edited by John Campbell, old "pulps", 1950s.

"Galaxy Science Fiction", June 1958 (ed H L Gold) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

Link on author fetches more stories of author.

1. [novella] Frederik Pohl's "Mars by Moonlight" (as by Poul Flehr): "Certainly they were criminals -- they were in a Martian penal colony. But what were their crimes -- & how much time would they serve?"
2. [novelet] Frederik Pohl's "The Gentlest Unpeople" aka "The Gentle Venusian": "Unswervingly considerate & ever so polite, they were helpful to a fault ... even if the fault happened to be a monster out of space!"
3. [novelet] Robert Sheckley's "The Minimum Man": "Perceveral had a nerve asking for nothing more than his own small cubicle & a bit to eat! He'd take the whole world or else!"
4. [ss] Fritz Leiber's "The Last Letter": "Who or what was the scoundrel that kept these couriers from the swift completion of their handsomely appointed rondos?"
5. [ss] Robert Sheckley's "The Gun Without a Bang" (as by Finn O'Donnevan).
6. [ss] Joseph Wesley's "Perfect Answer" (as by L J Stecher, Jr): "Getting there may be half the fun ... but it is also all of a society's chance of survival!"

Fact sheet.

The issue is labeled "Vol 16 No 2".
Download the magazine from Internet Archive (this copy is missing all stories but Flehr's, Leiber's & Stecher's).
Related: Fiction from Galaxy magazine (whole issues only), 1950s, "pulps".

"Galaxy Science Fiction", April 1952 (ed H L Gold) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents

Links on author fetch more fiction by author. Where I'm aware of an online copy of individual stories, I include those links too.

Table of contents.

1. [novella] F L Wallace's "Accidental Flight"; download: "Outcasts of a society of physically perfect people, they couldn't stay & they couldn't go home again -- yet there had to be some escape for them. Oddly enough, there was!"
2. [novelet] Damon Knight's "Ticket to Anywhere".
3. [ss] J T M'Intosh's "Katahut Said No": "When the machine ordered any course of action, the answer was always yes. Except when---"
4. [ss] Fritz Leiber's "The Moon is Green"; download: "Anybody who wanted to escape death could, by paying a very simple price -- denial of life!"
5. [ss] Lucius Daniel's "Martians Never Die"; download: "It was a wonderful bodyguard: no bark, no bite, no sting ... just conversion of an enemy!"
6. [ss] Peter Phillips' "She Who Laughs": "It's really a very simple story -- if you refuse to believe in ghosts & know that time is circular!"

Fact sheet.

Download full text from Internet Archive (does not include the text of Damon Knight's story).
Labeled: Vol 4, No 1.
Related: Fiction from Galaxy (whole issues only); fiction from "pulps".

Fritz Leiber, Jr's "The Mutant's Brother" (short story, telepathy, free)

Two brothers - Greer & John - with a telepathic mutation that matured after puberty - ability to control the minds of up to 4 or 5 people within a distance of about 100 feet.

They were orphaned early, were adopted by different families. Greer grew up a good man, in a loving family. John grew up a criminal in a abusive family.

Now law is closing in on John. Won't life be easier if he could make them kill Greer instead, & think they'd taken care of the criminal?

Fact sheet.

First published: Astounding, August 1943.
Download full text as part of the scans of Astounding issue where it originally appeared.
Rating: B.
Among the stories from John Campbell's Astounding/Analog.
Related: Stories of Fritz Leiber; fiction from 1940s.

Free fiction: Fantastic Science Fiction Stories, February 1960

At Internet Archive in multiple formats.

Editor: Cele Goldsmith.
Among the authors: Frank Herbert, Murray Leinster, Fritz Leiber.

Related: Fiction from old "pulps", 1960s.

Free fiction: Galaxy, June 1958

At Internet Archive in multiple formats.

"The pages for the stories 'The Gentlest Unpeople' by Frederik Pohl, 'The Minimum Man' by Robert Sheckley, and 'The Gun Without a Bang' by Finn O'Donnevan have been deleted from the files since the Copyright was renewed".

Editor is H L Gold.

Among the authors: Fritz Leiber.

Related: Fiction from Galaxy, 1950s; Old pulps.

ToC of forthcoming collection "Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories", edited by Jonathan Strahan, is online

At Night Shade Books.

Possibly useful "best of" list even for those not planning to pick up a print copy.

Free fiction: 8 stories from Fritz Leiber's "Fafhrd and Grey Mouser" collection

Explore or buy the whole collection of 7 volumes at Webscription. I link individual stories that are online below. It appears to be a fantasy series.

1. "The Circle Curse"; download.
2. "The Jewels in the Forest"; download.
3. "The Cloud of Hate"; download.
4. "Lean Times in Lankhmar"; download.
5. "In the Witch's Tent"; download.
6. "The Sadness of the Executioner"; download.
7. "Beauty and the Beasts"; download.
8. "Sea Magic"; download.

Related: Fiction of Fritz Leiber.

Fritz Leiber's "What's He Doing in There?" (short story, humor, free)

First contact the first Martian visitor to earth made was with a professor of cultural anthropology at his home. He soon asked to visit bathroom. But it's been hours since he's been there, & the question everyone in the family is asking is: "What's he doing in there?"

Answer, when they finally discover it, is of course funny.

Fact sheet.

First published: Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1957.
Rating: B.
Download full text from Project Gutenberg, Manybooks, or Feedbooks. [via QuasarDragon]
Related: Stories of Fritz Leiber.

Some good short fiction of Fritz Leiber

Jonathan Strahan, currently in the process of compiling ToC for a "best of Fritz Leiber" title for Night Shade Books, lists his current favorites - longer list from which he intends to choose (but presumably the stories that made some impression on him). List is near the bottom of his article.

I haven't read many stories of Leiber - probably just about a half dozen. Among the ones I've read, there are two on his list:

1. "A Pail of Air" is very good post-apocalypse survival story, & is online as text, MP3 reading, & MP3 dramatization.
2. "Coming Attraction" is very famous, but I've never been able to figure out what makes it special. Its text, audio or comic book adaptation might be online (but I don't have a link handy).

Others I can recollect but that are not on Strahan's list:

1. "Wanted - An Enemy" probably does belong to his "best of" list. A pulp era story with an interesting proposal to stop wars - a man is trying to convince apparently peaceful Martians to raid & loot earth...
2. "Sanity": Appears to have been anthologized often enough, but I found it an ordinary tale. Premise is interesting, though: the definition of "normal" human behavior depends on the society within which the actors live.

Related: "best of" lists.

Fritz Leiber's "A Pail of Air" (short story, post apocalypse, free): "survival in the face of desperate circumstances"

Leiber is another author I got introduced to via the wrong story, & kept avoiding. This one is a much better story compared to his "Coming Attraction" (included in Silverberg's SF Hall of Fame, vol 1).

While I won't put it in the league of best stories by anyone, it's a fine example of fighting extreme adversity with a positive outlook. Many familiar tropes have been mixed well.

Story summary.

A "black star" (or "dead sun") was moving through milky way in a direction opposite Sol, & passed rather close by. Earthmen never had a warning. At the time of passing earth was on one side of sun - towards black star; other planets were on the other side of the Sun.

In the gravitational tug of war between the Sun & the visitor, earth got torn away from Sun & was captured by the black star; moon was pulled in by Sun - so earth doesn't even have moon now. There were major geological upheavals on earth at the time of passing - leading to much destruction. Parts of this narrative sound like H G Wells' "The Star".

More than a decade has passed since the event. Earth is now in orbit around this new sun, & its axial rotation period is now 10 times longer. It's now a dead frozen world with no sunlight, currently "beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto", moving "farther out all the time."

A hardy man named Harry not only survived with his wife, they decided to have children after the event & teach them what it takes to survive in this harsh world. No one else is known to be alive, though near the end of the story they will not only meet other survivors but find hope in this world.

Story is narrated by the 10 year old son of Harry. His accounts of the events are based on what he has heard from his parents - he himself has never known a friendlier earth. Fourth member of the family is his sister. Family has figured out a way of living in a makeshift shack ("Nest") that is not airtight.

They burn coal for fire that they get from somewhere on a lower floor of the old building that now houses the Nest & is mostly under the frozen atmosphere; these coals were may be previously collected (I'm not clear). Living off old canned food, I think - I don't recall many mentions of food sources.

Title comes from buckets of solid oxygen the family needs to collect from outside & melt in fire indoors - since earth's atmosphere is now frozen.

Some interesting descriptions of this world:

1. "when the Earth got cold, all the water in the air froze first and made a blanket ten feet thick or so everywhere, and then down on top of that dropped the crystals of frozen air, making another white blanket sixty or seventy feet thick maybe."
2. "all the parts of the air didn't freeze and snow down at the same time."
3. "First to drop out was the carbon dioxide... Next there's the nitrogen ... it's the biggest part of the blanket. On top of that and easy to get at, which is lucky for us, there's the oxygen that keeps us alive. Pa says we live better than kings ever did, breathing pure oxygen... Finally, at the very top, there's a slick of liquid helium, which is funny stuff. All of these gases in neat separate layers."
4. "Odd things happen in a world that's about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for heat—that's the liquid helium." There is a mention of a similar effect in Larry Niven's "Wait It Out" (set on Pluto).

Collected in.

1. David Drake, Jim Baen, & Eric Flint (Ed)'s "The World Turned Upside Down".

Fact sheet.

First published: Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1951.
Rating: A
Download full text or MP3 (later via Wikipedia).
Update 20 July 2008: Michael Williams' comment below gives a link to a 1 hour unabridged version, as opposed to my MP3 link above which is a dramatization; I haven't heard either of the two MP3s. Thanks Michael.

** Fritz Leiber's "Coming Attraction" (short story, non-genre)

A ghetto story that I didn't really get properly - probably because it's just a lot of babble. A British man saves a woman from assault in a public place in some degenerate US city. She wants him to take her away to Britain, later assaults her benefactor during a bar fight. We learn that she is in the habit of asking many visitors to take her away from country. In between, we keep getting talk of US/USSR military bases on moon, & how those on ground are afraid of them.

Collected in.

1. Robert Silverberg (Ed)'s "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume One, 1929-1964".
   

Fact sheet.

First published: Galaxy, November 1950.
Rating: C

Note: Why is this post so short?