The Worlds of Fritz Leiber

[essentialsaltes]

A collection of Leiber's short stories from the 50s through the 70s. When I spotted the book at a garage sale, I noted that most of the story titles were unfamiliar. Sadly, there's a reason for that. Most of these are pretty weak, and Leiber's preoccupation with young girls obtrudes uncomfortably from time to time. But there are a few light and amusing gems in there: "Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum" tells of the great world beetle convention. "The Last Letter" tells of how the mail systems in the 25th century go haywire when a piece of mail is found that is not a printed advertising circular, but rather some sort of missive writed by a person using an inky stick or something of the sort. And "Our Saucer Vacation" lets us readers visit Earth as part of a family of tentacly aliens on holiday: only you can prevent illicit civilization meddling.
The headliner is Catch That Zeppelin, an alternate history-esque vignette of 1930's New York City, as seen through the eyes of zeppelin engineer Adolf Hitler. Not really that good a story - Fritz himself allows that it was awarded the Nebula and Hugo "to comfort my old age -- old people do have an advantage in such competitions, if they can manage to function at all." But there's a detail that provides some extra weirdness to the story. The bullk of the story relates the details experienced by the narrator after being thrown back into a 1930s NYC with a zeppelin moored at the Empire State Building, the tallest building in the city. At the end of the story, the narrator is thrown back into the present:

When I at last fully came to myself, I was walking down a twilit Hudson Street at the north end of Greenwich Village. My gaze was fixed on a distant and unremarkable pale-gray square of building top. I guessed it must be that of the World Trade Center, 1,350 feet tall.

It seems his 'present' is yet another, possibly happier, alternate history.

Comments

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

That would be kind of you. I'm pretty dependable, if I do say so myself.

As for completism... let's see... HPL and PKD are probably the only ones that I'm pretty sure I have absolutely everything. In the I-bet-pretty-close-to-complete... Stephen Donaldson. Umberto Eco. James Blaylock. Jonathan Lethem. Borges. Those leap to mind.