Fritz Leiber

I don't know if Tracer Hand is ever coming back. Looks like the three of us are gonna be all alone with a pail of air.

I don't remember the title of it, but the story where the woman uncreates her world is pretty impressive. big fan of this dude back in the day, and i still pick up his paperbacks when i see them cheap (including the lankhmar stuff, rarely.)

and by "back in the day" i clearly mean middle school.

Never read a word of him, but Fafhrd (sp?) / 'Gray' Mouser were huge among older US role-playing gamers back in 1970s / 1980s. Gary Gygax obviously saw those books as a major inspiration for D&D (though so much of the basics = Tolkien of course), and eventually - 1986? - they released an AD&D supplement called LANKHMAR: CITY OF ADVENTURE. I still own that, though I've never properly read it; still less did I ever play any games with it. (Note that this was all a long time ago.)

Perhaps this is not of interest to anyone.

After a little hesitation, Tom and Mark explained that on the radio show.

i don't recall them going into the d&d bit, tho i did doze off towards the end /:

my copy of 'pail of air' arrived today, and is in fact the one used on FT

the other source of D&Dmythosstuff of course being jack vance blah blah blah blah

hi James Redd and thomp and pinefox and DV! i'm sorry i've been awol

that "science fiction hall of fame" book looks great! i should probably get it. a very poorly-kept "secret" about the show we're doing is that i know fvck-all about science fiction really, having gotten into the early 70s Galaxy magazine stuff about two years ago and then working backwards (and occasionally forwards) from there.

the book i'm kind of using as an unofficial bible for the show is "The World Turned Upside Down", which contains the two stone-cold classics that we began the show with as well as a lot of other good stuff. it's really worth getting.

in that hall of fame book i'm proud to say that i have read "a rose for ecclesiastes", which is SUPERB despite some pretty cartoony kung-fu at the end

Did you look at the contents of Volume 2, 2A actually, which I forgot to link to?

no! how come?

it's too bad to hear that the rest of leiber's stuff is so hit and miss.

you'll soon find that was the case with 99% of his contemporaries as well.

Volume Two has the longer stories, the novellas, including "The Marching Morons," "With Folded Hands" and another story you might be familiar with.
Yes, perhaps you will come across something known as Sturgeon's Law in your researches, although Sturgeon's constant was a little lower than ian's.

There was another Fritz Leiber story in one of the Dangerous Visions called "Gonna Roll Them Bones" that got a lot of attention, but I barely remember anything about it- I assume it was a craps version of The Seventh Seal. Also mentioned with some frequency is "The Girl With The Hungry Eyes"- the sci-fi entry in the Harold Bloom criticism series, which I peeked at an preparation for this thread- has a quote about this story from Marshall McLuhan!

Wait, xpost mechanism ate my edited response to Ian's post, which was:

Yes, perhaps you will come across something known as Sturgeon's Law in your researches, although Sturgeon's constant was a little lower than ian's.

i think it's a little rich of ted sturgeon to take credit for something that every moderately rockist stoner has come up with in the wee hours

surely it's an anti-rockist sentiment:

"dude 90% of pop sucks!"
"90% of everything sucks, dude!"

it was after all coined in defence of sf, which some saw as trivial crud.

Alternative phrasing

Sturgeon's Law is often cited using crud instead of crap or shit. The percentage figure also sometimes varies, having been in print as "94%" and even "98%."[citation needed]

The current phrasing of the Law is often taken as the second clause of a longer saying: "Ninety percent of science fiction is crud, but that's because ninety percent of everything is crud."

Interpretations

The meaning of Sturgeon's Law was explicitly detailed by Sturgeon himself. He made his original remarks in direct response to attacks against science fiction that used "the worst examples of the field for ammunition." Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crud is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artistic artifacts do.

Sturgeon's Law may be regarded as an instance of the Pareto principle.

See also:
Finagle's law
Hanlon's razor
Gresham's law
Law (principle)
Adages named after people
Murphy's law

The sci-fi community needed that in place so when the auditors came calling they could say: "Quality control? We have quality control- we have Sturgeon's Law!"

so should we have a general slugs thread? i can't remember having read tonight's asimov story from the title: on the other one, that doesn't mean i haven't, i guess..

I went through that same thought process.

yeah maybe! i was thinking of starting a new thread for each story? what do you guys think? is that too akin to spammage?

looking at the wikipedia summary it sounds fairly typical and i don't remember it at all, but it turns out it's collected in robot visions, which i totally had as a ten year old, and may still, in my parents' loft, & know i read the whole thing because i remember feeling incredibly short-changed on getting halfway through and finding the second half was a bunch of essays - i mean, what kind of loser reads essays? those aren't exciting at all -

but uh yeah i've read it, who knew.

ooh, x posts. it's not like we're too crowded to fit another thread in, let's do both.

i.e. one for each story plus one to speculate about THEE VAST OVERARCHING PROJECT OF THEE SLUGLORDS. (or whatever.)

that sounds great if you guys are down with it! OK

I tried to revisit his stuff last week by looking at it in library anthologies but I kept getting sandbagged by openings like this:

Come in, Phy, and make yourself comfortable."

The melllow voice- and the suddenly dilating doorway- caught the general secretary of the World playing with a blob of greenish gasoid, squeezing it in his fist and watching it ooze between his fingers in spatulate tendrils that did not dissipate."

The other Fritz Leiber thread, where some of us said exactly what we said on this thread.

Anyway, I can't really keep up with the sluglords- by the time I post to one thread they do a hyperspace jump to one for the following week.

"spatulate" !

I looked it up- it means "leaf-shaped." I thought it would have meant "spatula-shaped."

i enjoyed the leiber slugs podcast, looking forward to listening to the other ones!

hey guys, no offense, but one tech note...when i had the volume up loud enough to hear all the talking (and occasional trailing off), some of those sound effect interludes were just piercing.

Yeah, I had a similar problem.

Spatulate

the novel-length lankhmar is my favourite -- eg the one where emperor glipkerio is

*SPOILERS ALERT*

a: freaked out by a single female pubic hair placed on his pillow!
b: commits suicide by jumping into a lead sarcophagus poised on a slipway down into the sea -- a sea so deep the coffin doesn't go all the way to the bottom but comes to rest at a midway bouyancy point, the lead pressed down on glipkerio so as to finelymould his features

That's 'Swords of Lankhmar' - absolute classic. Always imagined Glipkerio as John Hurt's Caligula. The whole Lankhmar series is great: grown-up, literate and very, very perverse.

But no, Silver Eggheads isn't very good at all, and folk upthread seem to have been remarkably unlucky in hitting his less worthwhile writing. Fritz was a troubled alcoholic who wrote to support himself, which doesn't make for quality control. But when he's really on, he's incomparable, the writer I go back to whenever I'm jaded - picking up 'The Green Millennium' prompted me to search out this thread. My other tip would be 'Our Lady of Darkness', my favorite horror novel, set in decadent 70's San Francisco.