The Best of Fritz Leiber

Firstly, the title is a lie. You would have to be stuck in a foxhole on Mars to not know the Lankhmar stories are some of Leiber's best work, and there are exactly zero of these to be found here. Some of his other more well know stories, are, however. You could perhaps call it a best of Leiber's SF and some other bits, maybe. Best Of Fritz Leiber : Gonna Roll the Bones - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : Sanity - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : WantedAn Enemy - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : The Man Who Never Grew Young - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : The Ship Sails at Midnight - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : The Enchanted Forest - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : Coming Attraction - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : Poor Superman - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : A Pail of Air - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : The Foxholes of Mars - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : The Big Holiday - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : The Night He Cried - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : The Big Trek - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : Space-Time for Springers - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : Try and Change the Past - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : A Deskful of Girls - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : Rump-T1tty-T1tty-Tum-Tah-Tee - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : Little Old Miss Macbeth - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : Mariana - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : The Man Who Made Friends with Electricity - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : The Good New Days - Fritz Leiber Best Of Fritz Leiber : America the Beautiful - Fritz Leiber Dicing with Death. 4.5 out of 5 Stable throwback. 3.5 out of 5 Well, you asked us to alien invade you, Earthman... 4 out of 5 Opposite flow. 3.5 out of 5 Not so beautiful influence. 3 out of 5 Wild FTL Elven hunt experiment. 3.5 out of 5 Strange social fashions. 4 out of 5 Power of the mind not funny. 3.5 out of 5 A dark star interloper rips the earth out of its orbit, and everything freezes. One family finds a way to construct a shelter to survive the freezing. 3.5 out of 5 This Galactic Empire stuff is crazy. 3.5 out of 5 Goodbye money. 3 out of 5 Mike Pseudohammerpod. 3.5 out of 5 Hey Joe, don't go. 3 out of 5 Superkitten research. 3.5 out of 5 Snake of a husband gets the bullet. 3.5 out of 5 Sexy ghost deal. 3.5 out of 5 Jumbo magic pattern words. 4 out of 5 Glowing with postapocalyptic tranquility. 3.5 out of 5 Switch off. 3 out of 5 Well zapped. 3 out of 5 Dull, robotic and smashing. 3 out of 5 Puritan grumpy. 3.5 out of 5 4 out of 5

These days, if Leiber is remembered at all, he's best known for his sword & sorcery stories of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, published over a period of many years. The Fafhrd & Grey Mouser stories are very entertaining, and I'm glad to have them, but Leiber did so much more than that. If all you are looking for is an entertaining story, Leiber provides those, but that's not the complete picture. Leiber was a highly talented writer with gifts of humor, mordant irony, and seeing mystery and strangeness in the apparently ordinary. While he can be playful, he treats his subjects with a seriousness befitting a serious (and adult) reader. His ear for the sound of words in combination was extraordinary, with the consequence that his prose can be among the most distinguished produced in sf and modern fantasy. Sometimes, he managed to put all of these qualities into the same work, but to see him at his best, you need to read a fair number of his stories (and novels). _The Best of Fritz Leiber_, published originally by Ballantine & Doubleday back in 1974, tried to do a good job of selecting his "best" and most representative stories published in science fiction and science fantasy. I would call the result a qualified success. I say this not because there's anything wrong with the stories selected. All the stories included in this volume belong in such a collection. And it serves as a good reminder of Leiber's range to have stories like the ironic dystopias of the '40s and '50s, "Sanity" and "Coming Attraction" and "Poor Superman", together with the '60s-era science fantasy of "Gonna Roll the Bones" and the social commentary of "America the Beautiful." So whence the qualms? The qualifications to the success of this book arise from three sources: 1) Several of Leiber's best stories were left out apparently for no considerations other than those of space. I'd mention the 1968 Hugo Award-winning story "Ship of Shadows" in particular, and perhaps his long novella, "You're All Alone." The absence of "Ship of Shadows" is particularly irksome. 2) Leiber wasn't a one dimensional writer: he wrote excellent science fiction, science fantasy, and horror. Some of his very best work was excluded because of the restriction that this collection contain only science fiction and (some) science fantasy. This restriction caused them to drop stories like "Smoke Ghost," "The Sixty-Four Square Madhouse," "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes," "The Black Gondolier," and "Ill Met in Lankhmar." 3) Leiber lived for another 17 years after this book was published. This isn't a complaint. It's an observation: Leiber surprised us by actually writing some of his better stories in the years that followed this collection. I'll mention a few: "Catch that Zeppelin!" and the especially memorable "Belsen Express" (with its perfect moment of characteristic Leiberian irony in the denouement). So the title of this book is a bit inaccurate. To do Leiber credit would take a much bigger book