"Fritz Leiber - Gondolier" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

Moreland", and тАЬSpider MansionтАЭ for the first time.

Over the years I managed to accumulate as close to a complete collection of Leiber's work as you're
likely to find. And for years I assumed that all his work was readily attainable, if not perpetually in print.

The book that you hold in your hands is a result of a curious serendipity, that there is no author living or
dead that I would be more honored to pen an introduction about than Fritz Leiber goes without saying.
That I would've thought this to be an unlikely occurrence is an understatement. After all, Leiber belongs
to that pantheon of great writers that have shaped and molded the field of fantastic literature in the latter
half of the twentieth century and the works of such individuals are perpetually kept in-print and readily
accessible by one and all. Aren't they?

Apparently the answer to that question is in the negative. When Steve Savile first approached me to
verify the appearances of several Leiber stories in conjunction with a chapbook that he was preparing for


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the British Fantasy Society I was amazed at just how much material was no longer available to modern
readers. A few e-mails later and we were busily at work preparing two volumes that would bring the
тАЬlost LeiberтАЭ stories back into print. Even with the space of two volumes to work with it's been
impossible to include everything that we would have liked to. We've chosen to focus on those stories
that most modern readers would have the most difficult time locating with a couple of familiar tales
included. Some stories we considered far too significant to be excluded and you will see some of these
familiar tales interspersed in these two volumes. For the most part, our focus has been to restore to print
the most significant of Leiber's weird tales that have been unavailable for twenty or more years.

The first thing that became apparent to me as we assembled this collection was just how early in his
career Leiber had established himself as a master of the weird tale. While he did write a few stories that
could be considered standard fare for the pulps, (such as тАЬSpider MansionтАЭ with its weird-menace
excesses) as an example. From the very start his stories took on a modern attitude quite unlike that of his
contemporaries inWeird Tales , who were busily scrambling to pen stories of improbably-named cosmic
monstrosities and babbling aliens in a misguided homage to H.P. Lovecraft...

While Leiber's earliest stories can be classified as updates of the tropes of earlier horror fiction, there is a
decided modernity about them. A primary concern is that of the science fiction writer concerned about
technologies gone horribly awry. In the early story тАЬSpider Mansion", for all its classic gothic trappings
it is at its core a tale of medical experiments gone wrong. The same can be said of the much later (1950)
tale тАЬThe Dead ManтАЭ In both cases, it's not thescience that is at fault for the dire consequences, but
rather the fallible human element that manages to muck things up badly.

Both of these stories foreshadow Leiber's later work where he fuses the concerns of the twentieth
century with the mold of the classic weird tale of decades past. In тАЬThe Girl with the Hungry EyesтАЭ he
considers the тАЬvampirismтАЭ of advertising as a quite literal reality. In тАЬThe Black Gondolier", тАЬThe Man
Who Made Friends with Electricity", and тАЬMr. Bauer and the AtomsтАЭ present our modern forms of
energy in a new and terrifying light. Leiber's тАЬmadтАЭ scientists are not mad in the sense of the old villains
from the old Universal films from the 1930's, but rather they are often as not blinded by an arrogance
and absolute certainty in their own wisdom that they fall afoul of their own inventions and concepts. In
fact it could be said of Leiber that among his contemporaries only Philip K. Dick was his equal at