Fritz Leiber: 126 books

This is the story of a beautiful woman. And of a monster. It is also the story off our silly, selfish, culture-bound inhabitants of the planet Earth. Es, who was something of an artist. Gene, who studied atoms—and fought the world and himself. Louis, who philosophized. And Larry—that’s my name—who tried to write books.

They are the aliens among us—and their ways and wonders are stranger than extraterrestrials!

“Now and then Mrs. Groener used to scream,” the big man explained, “when she’d been drinking heavily I’d leave the bedroom. It may have been a rebuke or summons to me, or a fighting challenge to the whiskey bottle, or simply an expression of her rather dark evaluation of life. But it had never meant anything more real than that—until tonight.”

They are the aliens among us—and their ways and wonders are stranger than extraterrestrials!

“You forget, baroness, the runic rhymes of the Prussian Nostradamus,” said Dr. Rumanescue, Vividy’s astrologist and family magician. “Wenn der Kassette-Teufel . . . ’—or, to translate roughly, ‘When the casket-demon is let out, The life of the Von Sheer is in doubt.’”

Jamie Bingham Walsh should have been known as Schizo Jimmie. People with whom he came in really close contact had their minds split and started to live in dream worlds.

Have you found out about the Big Engine? It’s all around us, you know—can’t you hear it even now?

“So the last fly has obligingly walked into the spider’s parlor,” he murmured, with a laugh.

There was an old Simorgyan legend, Fafhrd had insisted, according to which on the seventh day of the seventh moon of the seventh year of the Sevens-Cycle the king of the sea journeyed to the other end of the earth, leaving his opalescently beautiful green wives and faintly silver-scaled slim concubines...

Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, “Look, Buster, do you want to live?”

“Rig ship for the snowbank orbit! Snowbank orbit with stinger! Mr. Grunfeld, raise the fleet.” Aft, Croker muttered, “Rig our shrouds, don’t he mean? Rig shrouds and firecrackers mounted on Fourth of July rockets.” Ness said, “Cheer up. Even the longest strategic withdrawal in history has to end some time.”

Is it possible to have a world without moral values? Or does lack of morality become a moral value, also?

“I’m just looking at the Moon,” she said listlessly. “It’s green. Green as a beer bottle, green as emeralds, green as leaves with sunshine striking through them and green grass to lie on.” She couldn’t help saying those last words. They were her token to the face, even though it couldn’t hear.

They were just a Shakespearean troupe — they couldn't be connected with the Change Wars — or could they? The troupers of the Big Time lack no art to sway a crowd — or to change all history!