Tag Archives: Fritz Leiber

Presser Makes Facebook Friends Real Friends

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The Chicago media has been actively following ArLynn Presser’s quest to meet all 335 of her Facebook friends (she has many more now) this year. 

Presser is Fritz Leiber’s granddaughter. She is the author of two dozen books, most of them romance novels published under the pen name Vivian Leiber.

Her travels eventually will take her to three continents. You can follow her progress on her WordPress blog.

The Chicago Tribune’s Sunday section ran a lengthy profile with some poignant family history:

Given up for adoption just before her third birthday, she endured a rocky childhood with her adoptive family and, later, in foster care…

[Her] biological father, Justin Leiber…, too, is a Facebook friend, whom she first tracked down through a private detective when she was 25. For her Facebook experiment, she traveled last winter to see him in Tallahassee, where he is a philosophy professor and writer.

A video post from that trip shows Presser retreating to a bathroom after her father guided her through the photos in his office; not one was of her or her sons. “I thought I was coming here because, well, yeah, he’s my Facebook friend, but I thought I was his daughter,” Presser says tearfully in the video. “He is just a guy who has a family, and I’m not part of that family.”

[Thanks to Steven H Silver for the story.]

They Sound Like Heroes To Me

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A Mind Forever Wandering has posted a well-done introduction to Fritz Leiber’s stories about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (newly released in listenable form by Audible.com):

One of Leiber’s original motives was to have a couple of fantasy heroes closer to true human stature than the likes of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian or Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan. Fafhrd is a tall (seven feet) northern barbarian; Mouser is a small, mercurial thief, once known as Mouse and a former wizard’s apprentice.

File 770’s Silent Service

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Behind the cut is Steve Feldberg’s latest press release about the glories of sf and fantasy at Audible.com, leading off with Neil Gaiman’s introduction to Fritz Leiber’s The Swords of Lankhmar.

A real live blog would also host its own MP3 excerpt of Neil’s comments, but here at Pinocchio.com, where the WordPress software refuses to load a file bigger than 2MB, my second best idea is to point you to SFFaudio’s copy.

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Denvention 3’s Classics of Science Fiction

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Denvention 3 accepted John Hertz’ suggestion to program discussions of the “Wonders of 1958,” selected classics of science fiction. Read up and join in! The list of books and John’s notes appear on the Denvention 3 website. But let me save you a click —

Mile Closer to the Stars – Classics of Science Fiction
Book discussions led by John Hertz

We are in the golden-anniversary year of 1958, a golden year for science fiction. We’ll celebrate with five Classics of SF book discussions on books published that year and still famous, often reprinted, worth re-reading or first reading now. Look for them in the program grid as “Wonders of 1958.”

James Blish, A Case of Conscience and The Triumph of Time
Some call Conscience Blish’s finest book. Is it science fiction? Is it a story? Is its best moment when the Pope says “What did you do about it?” In the same year came the last of the four Cities in Flight novels. Is it a success standing alone? How does Time compare to Conscience?

Algis Budrys, Who?
This penetrating study of identity, loyalty, uncertainty may be both more bleak and more hopeful than it seems. If there is a sermon, it is preached by silence. Budrys is known for his deftness and timing; here too are poetry, a fundamental grasp of tragedy, and the surprises of love.

Robert Heinlein, Methuselah’s Children
By painting portraits Heinlein repeatedly asks the next question.  What if your lifespan was two hundred years?  What if you didn’t care?  If you are hunted, should you run?  Where should you go?  Here too is the first and perhaps best of Lazarus Long.  Extra credit: compare the carefully rewritten 1941 version in the July-September Astounding.

Fritz Leiber, The Big Time
Spiders are the good guys, and our hero is a woman.  The first Hero was a woman too, go look up Leander.   Indeed this is a very classical book; it preserves the unities of time, place, and persons, which is mighty strange, considering.  There’s slashing drama, and if you’ve never been a party girl, it might not be what you think.

Jack Vance, The Languages of Pao
With four worlds in the spotlight, one populated by fifteen billion, this is a story of one boy and one man.  Knowledge may be power.  Concentration and diversity may each be extreme.  The characters say linguistics is the science here; perhaps it is really cross-cultural study, or patience.  Vance’s own language is the gold.