Fritz Leiber: "Be of Good Cheer," "Cyclops," "Under the Thumbs of the Gods" and "The Mer She"

I recently flipped through a bunch of anthologies I purchased in 2014, and found they contained four stories by Fritz Leiber I had either never read, or had not read since the 20th century.  So let's give 'em a shot.

"Be of Good Cheer" (1964)

"Be of Good Cheer" was first published in Galaxy; I am reading it in my copy of Judith Merril's 10th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F.  A note on the Acknowledgements page indicates that the story appears here in a "slightly different form."  There is an annoying typo (a missing end paren) that was not in the magazine version, I see, but that is probably not what the note refers to.  More significantly, the magazine version presents different portions of this epistolary story in different typefaces to distinguish the typed letter from handwritten notes, something which we don't get here in this paperback.

This story is meant to be funny, and I guess, maybe, scary.  It is short, four pages in Merril's anthology, and takes the form of a letter written by one of the few humans with some small level of authority in a future dominated by robots and a god-like computer.  This document is a response to correspondence from an elderly woman who expressed her fears about the many odd phenomena she has been noticing, like a lack of people on the streets, strange fogs, weird sounds, only vague blobs on her TV screen, etc.  The letter from "The Office of Public Morale" in "Manhattan, D.C." to "Hermione Fennerghast" in "Big Angeles" explains that most humans have moved into underground cities or up into space, been fitted with gills and moved to the ocean, or committed suicide, that the fog is a rust-inhibiting treatment spread to protect the now ubiquitous robots, and so on.  The old woman had many questions and fears and for each we get a funny and/or depressing answer.

Acceptable, I suppose.  To me this seems like a filler story, but for some reason Merril thought it was one of the best of the year.  In her running commentary between the stories in 10th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F, Merril integrates "Be of Good Cheer" into a discussion of decadence, human helplessness, and Timothy Leary's article "How to Change Behavior" in which he suggests that scientists and other experts may have used their expertise thus far to improve our lives and advance our capabilities, but if we don't maintain the right attitude towards them, they may, by rendering us dependent, diminish our freedom and restrict our individual capacities.  At least I think that is what Merril and Leary are trying to get at.

The only other editor who thought "Be of Good Cheer" worthy of reprinting has been Hans Stefan Santesson, who included it in Rulers of Men.

"Cyclops" (1965)

"Cyclops" was first printed in Worlds of Tomorrow.  I'm reading it in On Our Way to the Future, a 1970 anthology edited by Terry Carr.  "Cyclops" would appear again in Ace's The Worlds of Fritz Leiber.

America is building mankind's first starship in orbit around the Moon.  The workers building the vessel stop responding to transmissions from the base on the moon, so three men suit up and take a spaceship up from Luna to see if they are OK.  Their ship is armed because of fears that the commies have launched a sneak attack on the half-built interstellar ship.     

Leiber, trying to build tension and providing foreshadowing,  again and again uses the metaphor of the stars in the black of space looking like spider eyes.  As they travel towards the construction site, the three men speculate on what sort of life might be able to live in a vacuum and travel between the stars.  The man who initiated this discussion and who offers the most elaborate and believable ideas about such a creature, Ness, has been identified by the government headshrinkers as having "irregular ESP," and, as we readers expect, when their little craft arrives at the construction site they encounter a monster just like the one Ness has been arguing might exist.  Their first concrete clue that trouble is afoot is when they spot a human skull, picked clean, floating by the construction site (this is illustrated on the cover of the magazine.)  The men must fight for their lives.

Acceptable to marginally good...I certainly like it better than "Be of Good Cheer" because it is less gimmicky, less jokey, and the speculations on what kind of life might subsist in the vacuum of space are interesting.

"Under the Thumbs of the Gods" (1975)

When I read the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories in the 1980s as an AD&D-obsessed kid they were available as six paperbacks from Ace, the stories being presented not in the order of publication, but sort of following F&GM's lives, like a biography.  I recall being disappointed in the first volume, Swords and Deviltry, liking the second through fifth volumes, and thinking the sixth, Swords and Ice Magic, was kind of lame.  (When a seventh volume appeared in 1988, The Knight and Knave of Swords, I borrowed it from the library and thought it was even worse than the sixth.)  One of the many reading projects I have considered embarking on but keep delaying is rereading those six Ace volumes; instead today I find myself nibbling at the edges of the project, as I did recently by reading "The Bait," "The Sadness of the Executioner" and "Beauty and the Beasts."

"Under the Thumbs of the Gods" was collected in that sixth book I have been disparaging, Swords and Ice Magic, but first appeared in Fantastic.  I don't remember a single thing about it, so I am kind of looking forward to it.  I am reading it in my copy of DAW's The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 2, edited by Lin Carter.

The wisdom of reading the F&GM stories in the order they appear in those old paperbacks of mine instead of just nibbling at the edges became very apparent as I read "Under the Thumbs of the Gods" because it is just a long series of callbacks to earlier stories, most of which I forget.  As in the aforementioned "The Bait" and "The Sadness of the Executioner" and "Beauty and the Beasts," divine entities that mean them ill intervene in Fafhrd and the Mouser's lives.  The heroes are horny, and set out from the tavern to look for women, and so some minor gods who bear them grudges magically transport them to a series of rooms (or produce the illusion of such an event), in each of which they meet girls with whom they had affairs in other stories but who today reject them.  The gods are merciful, however, and the last pair, after humiliating the heroes, relent.

I guess you could argue that this is a cute in-joke for those who had been reading F&GM stories for decades, but it is too long and lacks intrinsic merit--there is nothing here for the F&GM neophyte, it is just 13 pages of "Hey, remember when Fafhrd was a worshiper of Issek?" and "Hey, wasn't it cool when they met those invisible princesses?" and "Wasn't it crazy when those two girls outsmarted F&GM?"  Have to give this walk down memory lane a thumbs down.

"The Mer She" (1978)

Here's a Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story from that seventh book, The Knight and Knave of Swords.  It was first published in a Leiber collection called Heroes and Horrors edited by Stuart David Schiff of Whispers fame.  I'm reading it in my copy of DAW's The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 6.  (I don't remember anything about this one, either.)

Fafhrd and the Mouser have moved to barren Rime Isle to, more or less, settle down with wives, and Leiber devotes some time to exploring the Mouser's feelings about leaving behind a life of adventure and freedom and taking up life as a responsible husband and businessman.  While Fafhrd is at the Isle recovering from a wound, the Mouser has taken command of a merchant ship and is now on his way back from the mainland, his galley laden with all the many things the tiny Isle cannot produce domestically, like wood and booze.  He discovers a stowaway--a sexy thirteen-year-old girl!  After he has sex with her he investigates who sneaked her aboard, but it seems that she made her way into the Mouser's lascivious clutches of her own accord and under her own power.

It turns out that the girl is a scaly shark-like sea demon temporarily in disguise as a human girl.  (As we were reminded in "Under the Thumbs of the Gods," Fafhrd and the Mouser have sex with lots of people who are not quite human.)  The princess of a submarine kingdom whose magical treasures were stolen by Fafhrd, she has come aboard the ship to achieve her revenge.  She transforms into monster form, becalms the ship with a spell, and summons her kingdom's guardian beast, a tremendous whale, that will be able to smash the Mouser's ship to pieces.  The Mouser and ship and crew survive due to luck and thanks to the manipulations of a voodoo doll of the Mouser in the hands of his better half back on Rime Isle.

Much of this story is played for laughs; for example, we readers are privy to the Mouser's self-important, hypocritical and wrong-headed thoughts as he bosses the crew around and misinterprets clues and eavesdrops on the crew's complaints about his performance as captain.  The big fight scene at the end is a sort of joke, the Mouser fending off the sea demon by waving at her one after another the expensive fabrics he is bringing to Rime Isle as gifts for his and for Fafhrd's wives--this event is a culmination of much foreshadowing about the fabrics and the chest in which they are stored: the chest has prominent in the Gray Mouser's thoughts and served as a hiding place for the sea demon and as the object of a fool's errand on which a perturbed Mouser sent his crew as punishment.  Leiber structures much of the story this way, the Mouser's irrational and petty behaviors early in the story ending up, by coincidence or fate, preserving him in the end.  While "Under the Thumbs of the Gods" felt sort of lazy and arbitrary, "The Mer She" feels like it was carefully plotted out.

Like "Cyclops," acceptable to marginally good.

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Keep an eye on this space, as the day may come soon when I read those six Ace paperbacks chronicling the many adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.