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

writing science fiction that was truly horrifying.

The theme of humanity as but a bit player in the cosmic drama was an idea that Leiber often made use of
in ways far more inventive than that of many of his contemporaries. Whereas H.P. Lovecraft took this
idea in one direction, Leiber made the concept of an unknowable and hostile cosmos far more personal
in stories such as тАЬThe Dreams of Albert Moreland". In this story a chess master is drawn into a game
with frighteningly high stakes against an opponent reminiscent of one of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones.
(Cthulhu as a galactic gamesmaster)? Not exactly, though in the hands of a lesser writer the story could
easily have become that ludicrous. In Leiber's hands it's more about the all-consuming nature of the
obsessive and the danger of actually getting what we want. Albert Moreland wants a suitable opponent
to test his skill on and he gets exactly that.


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Leiber's correspondence with Lovecraft is interesting in that of all of Lovecraft's correspondents only
Leiber seemed immune to the desire to begin banging out slavish pastiches of the mythos created by the
elder writer. In fact, it may well be that Leiber's correspondence led him to an early realization that the
horrors of the past were just that, the past and would need a new and vital approach in the latter half of
the century. It was not until considerably after Lovecraft's death that Leiber penned an actual mythos
story. In this area as in other sub-genres, he excelled and his тАЬThe Terror from the DepthsтАЭ is perhaps
the standout piece in Edward Berglund's watershed anthologyDisciples of Cthulhu .

Taken as a whole, this book chronicles Leiber's remarkable achievements in weird fiction, stories that
are thoroughly modern examples of the horror story, tales such as тАЬThe Thirteenth StepтАЭ which uses the
unlikely device of a speaker's тАЬqualificationтАЭ talk at an AA meeting to tales such as тАЬLie Still, Snow
White", a masterpiece of erotic horror written years before the term had degenerated into a marketing
label. There's a variety and richness here that could only have come from an author as gifted as Fritz
Leiber.

John Pelan

Midnight House, 2000




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THE BLACK GONDOLIER

Daloway lived alone in a broken-down trailer beside an oil well on the bank of a canal in Venice near
the caf├й La Gondola Negra on the Grand Canal not five blocks from St. Mark's Plaza.

I mean, he lived there until after the fashion of intellectual lone wolves he got the wander-urge and took
himself off, abruptly and irresponsibly, to parts unknown. That is the theory of the police, who refuse to
take seriously my story of Daloway's strange dreads and my hints at the weird world-spanning power