"Fritz Leiber - The Black Gondolier And Other Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

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 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.

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 .