Fritz Leiber: "The Princess in the Tower 250,000 Miles High," "Black Glass," and "The Button Molder"

Let's take a little trip to the late 1970s with the creator of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Grandmaster Fritz Leiber.  As is so often the case, I am reading these stories in scans at the internet archive.

"The Princess in the Tower 250,000 Miles High" (1977)

This one looks like something of a rarity, a story only ever printed once, in Robert Silverberg's New Dimensions in Science Fiction Number 7.

This story, just three pages, is written sort of like a fable.  It also exposes us, yet again, to Leiber's interest in teenage girls and incest.

In the far future the Earth is ruled by an insane emperor, Caligula (I guess as a kind of joke, and adding to the fairy tale feel of the story, the characters in "The Princess in the Tower 250,000 Miles High" have evocative classical names like Jason, Medea, and Helen.)  Using up all the Earth's resources, Caligula has a bridge built between the Earth and the Moon, and has lots of additional oxygen manufactured, enough for Terra, Luna and the bridge.  This destroys Earth's ecology, causing mass death.

The last man, Jason, flees the over-oxygenated Earth and starts ascending the space bridge.  He brings with him his infant daughter, Helen, the last woman and his child with his "mistress" Medea.  Plants are growing on the bridge, and animals have preceded Jason in their flight from Earth, so Jason and Helen have food.  It takes them seventeen years to get to the Moon, and they see many strange sights on the way.  When they get to the Moon, we are to assume, they become lovers.

The style is smooth and Leiber offers numerous compelling images, so even if it is somewhat ridiculous and throws all our sexual taboos in the dumpster this is an entertaining story.  Thumbs up!

SF fans who love cats or dinosaurs are always being catered to, so it is nice to see
Gino D'Achille throwing a bone to the niche audience of SF fans who want to see 
a monster walrus (these people sometimes refer to themselves as "Team Maguma.")

"Black Glass" (1978)

"Black Glass" made its debut in Peter Weston's Andromeda 3, and Terry Carr included it in his The Best Science Fiction of the Year for that year.  I'm reading it in a scan of the 1984 paperback edition of The Ghost Light, a profusely illustrated Leiber collection.

For most of its 26 pages "Black Glass" is a long-winded slowly-paced bit of surrealism or maybe magical realism.  A guy takes a long walk in Midtown Manhattan, much like MPorcius did in the days before his exile to the living death of the provinces, and the degradation of New York (because of crime and pollution and so forth) parallels the degradation of his own body and life due to age.  For example, many of the skyscrapers are sheathed in black glass through which outsiders cannot see, reminding the narrator of the recent problems he had with his eyes.  He also has visions or day dreams or whatever, like of the city being flooded or of the famous lions in front of the Research Library coming to life.            

He sees an attractive woman in green, and follows her, and she has some surreal adventures which he observes, like ice skating at Rockefeller Center with a guy who looks like the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz.  (SF people--Robert A. Heinlein and Philip José Farmer are coming to mind immediately, but they are far from the only ones--love cats and they also love the Oz books,)  In a subway station the narrator is accosted by a short Jew wearing "a white gauze mask such as the Japanese favor during cold epidemics."  This guy explains that "it's the dead Dreck I want none of, the Guck (that's the goyish word for it,) the black foam," a mutated form of industrial waste.  This guy seems paranoid, but when the narrator rides the elevator to the top of the World Trade Center he finds the Towers decrepit, and the city below buried hundreds of feet deep in what must be the black foam the masked man spoke about.  When the narrator descended the subway stairs and/or when he boarded the WTC elevator, was he transported forward in time?  Or is he just hallucinating?

Atop the World Trade Center he encounters the green clad girl, and he helps her perform a commando raid on an enemy artillery piece deployed in the World Trade Center that is firing upon the Empire State Building.  They knock out the gun, using a crew-served weapons system that harms inanimate objects but not people (this weapon is convenient for the plot and tone of the story, compelling the woman to seek aid, even from an old man--she cannot activate its powers by herself--and exempting the narrator from facing the moral dilemmas faced by real soldiers over the prospect of harming or killing strangers.)  The narrator is captured after they knock out the gun, but he immediately wakes up in 20th-century NYC again, safe and sound.  He knows his time travel adventure was real because he still has his component of the weapon, a sort of talisman sculpted into the shape of a lioness. 

The Jewish character, a sort of Jackie Mason figure, is amusing, and the plot is OK, but most of the story is boring.  In theory I should just eat up a story about a dude who is sad taking a walk around Manhattan, but Leiber fails to present crisp images or convey emotion--it is all tedious and drab, sort of vague and nebulous.  And it is very long, with lots of redundant, superfluous detail.  When the narrator looks out across New York from the observation deck of the World Trade Center, Leiber doesn't just say the city is half buried under 700 feet of black particles, but lists off a bunch of famous buildings and tells us what portions of each is still visible above the ebon flood.  All the New York geographic detail Leiber offers is, I suppose, some kind of love letter to Gotham, and I sympathize with the attitude Leiber is exhibiting, as I miss those views every day myself as I drive by herds of cows and flocks of sheep and whatevers of goats, but most of Lieber's NYC details encumber and detract from the traditional "I went to another world and met a sexy princess and helped her people fight their enemies" plot instead of elevating or complementing it. 

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  Presumably editors like "Black Glass" because they like New York and old Jewish comedians as much as I do and respect Leiber for trying to marry mainstream literary stuff with time-honored pulp plot elements, but for me the stoiry does not work.  

"The Button Molder" (1979)

"The Button Molder" first appeared in Whispers #13-14 and won a British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction.   It reappeared in Whispers III, which is where I am reading it, The Best of Whispers, and various Leiber collections.

Like "Black Glass," "The Button Molder" is largely a story about urban life with characteristics of mainstream literary fiction, but is very successful; whereas "Black Glass"'s urban component was just a list of New York landmarks, "The Button Molder" is a vivid depiction of living in an apartment in a big city, of the city resident's relationship with other city dwellers, with his apartment, with the sights and sounds of the city, an evocative portrait of what makes city life rewarding and what makes it aggravating.

In his intro to the tale, Whispers editor Stuart David Schiff suggests it is to some extent autobiographical.  The plot of the first-person narrative follows a writer as he leaves one San Francisco apartment building because it has become inhabited by noisy and otherwise intrusive tenants (like "Black Glass," reflecting the urban crime wave of my youth) to move to another, much more salubrious, building.  We learn all about the narrator's hobbies and interests, even his attitude about life, follow his happiness at moving into a great new apartment and then his frustration and depression as he suffers writer's block when he realizes the big project he has embarked upon is beyond his powers.      

"The Button Molder" is a ghost story, and a recurring theme over its 28 pages is the narrator seeing things that are not actually there, ascribing life to things which are not alive, discovering hidden things, hearing things that he can't identify, and encountering mysteries which are never solved.  The climactic encounter with the ghost or hallucination is quite effective.  

The story also includes many literary references--to the Oz books, to Shakespeare, to Ibsen--and many astronomical references as well as a few references to chess and to classical music.  

I really enjoyed this one, and can recommend it strongly as a ghost story, a story about life in the city, and a story about life as a writer.  

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I find Leiber's body of work uneven, but stories like "The Button Molder" make all the bumps in the road along the way worthwhile.  If you want to hear me gush about other Leiber stories I think are great, try here, here and here...if you want to hear me condemn what I consider his misfires try here, here and here.