The Night of the Wolf

Fritz Leiber's _The Night of the Wolf_ (1966) is a fixup novel that really doesn't quite come off: four stories that are unrelated to one another except for a common theme of sanity and the search for peace are cobbled together in a thin future history frame of italicized introductory material. But if you read the book as a collection of stories rather than a novel... Well, this is an instance in which the parts are greater than the whole. The four chapters are titled: "The Lone Wolf," "The Wolf Pair," "Crazy Wolf," and "The Wolf Pack". The original magazine titles are: "The Creature from the Cleveland Depths" (_Galaxy_, 1962), "The Night of the Long Knives" (_Amazing_, 1960), "Sanity," (_Astounding_, 1944), and "Let Freedom Ring" (_Amazing_, 1950). They are to some extent reflections of their time. The earliest is a response to World War II, while the latest is a satire on the Cold War and bomb shelters. "The Lone Wolf" is about an eccentric inventor and idea man who is one of the last people to live on the surface of the Earth instead of the urban hives below. Welcome to the world of insanity novels, Vina Vidarsson beauty masks, and cybernetic Ticklers that ride on your shoulders like the Old Man of the Sea. The story may sound like a grim dystopia, but the overall tone is comical. "The Wolf Pair" is about a man and a woman armed with knives who meet in the middle of a post-holocaust desert. They make an uneasy truce for one night... and out of that is born the rise of a new civilization. "Crazy Wolf" is set in a future run by the League of Sanity and is a dialogue of sorts about who is sane. You may think that you know who is sane and who is crazy. But... what if the inmates have taken over the asylum? Readers who recall the days of draft cards will sympathize with the young hero of "The Wolf Pack" who gets a notice from the government announcing that he is about to be sacrificed for the Common Good-- a phony war manufactured by those in power. In no time at all, he has fallen in with revolutionaries who operate on the assumption that their enemies are insane. I am afraid that I frequently find much of the goings-on in the world today crazy. Leiber's stories are refreshing dashes of sanity. If you can, get the Ballantine edition, which sports a terrific cover by Richard Powers.