Fritz Leiber Is Like Love and Rockets

Dec 24, 2010 21:43

Fritz Leiber would have been 100 years old today, and I'd like to think that somewhere people are gathered in a ChiChis celebrating. Not likely since it’s Christmas Eve but I can hope.

I'm sure no one argues with Leiber's place in genre history, but I'll be honest and say that he wasn’t an author I took to from the first. Sure I'd played enough D&D to be familiar with the name, settings, and characters from the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, but when I first read them they left me less than engaged. Yeah, I dug "Thieves' House" and "Claws from the Night", but even the good bits were over my head and the prose lacked what I can only describe as the purple quality I craved.

Leiber was unlike any Fantasy fiction I had encountered before. He was something else, something weirder, and more than a bit dangerous, like sneaking a shot of whiskey from my parents liquor cabinet. I'd tried it and thought it wasn't for me, going my way without realizing how much my tastes would change six or seven years later.

When I was in my 20s and living in Jersey City, I bought one of those slim paperbacks that had the word "sword" in the title. One story had the two heroes go on a fishing trip and engage in dubious philosophy, another told what happened when they decided to live together and the misadventure that resulted. The stories showed real life writ as adventure fiction. I got where Leiber was coming from, and every now and then, say waiting for a bus in Chinatown, I'd look at the weather-aged buildings of lower Manhattan, and, if I squinted, I'd see Lankhmar. (It's likely for reasons like this that M. John Harrison wrote "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium" and "What It Would Be Like to Live in Viriconium". Get treatment, indeed.)

Something similar happened with the comic book Love and Rockets.

I’d been to enough specialty comic shops growing up to recognize the Hernandez Bothers' work, but it wasn't until college when a friend sat me down with a stack and told me to "Read!” that I got hooked.

Now if you've never read Love and Rockets, I'm not about to try and describe the series to you. To the point of this post, the Hernandez Brothers in Love and Rockets mix life and genre in such a way that you're never quite certain where one ends and the other begins. They'll take real life and recast it as superhero comics (or they 'll take superhero comics and recast it in the mold of real life -- I'm not sure it matters). It's a bit hard to describe, but you know how everyone in your family approaches a mythic archetype in your mind? It's a bit like that. The Palomar stories or the misadventures of Penny Century, and how life happens to Maggie and Hopey, all these things sweep you along and somewhere there you see yourself and where you came from and the people you know.

That's what I was also getting from Leiber.

In “The Life of the Mind” Hannah Arendt says “there is nothing in an ordinary life that cannot become food for thought”, and I’d say that’s the quality that links Leiber and the Hernandez Brothers. They’re exploring ordinary life in their work.

It's only their personal preference for the extraordinary that makes their work into genre.

(Yeah, I know there's a lot more to Leiber than the sword & sorcery stories. Folks interested in his stuff should check out his horror fiction. In particular Our Lady of Darkness is a favorite, though it's hard to pick one especially when set beside Conjure Wife and The Sinful Ones.)

love&rockets, hm, books, leiber

Previous post Next post
Up