#fritz lieber

[retroscifiart]

Art by Tim White for Gather, Darkness! by Fritz Leiber (1979)

[comicarthistory]

Page from Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser Book 4. 1991. Art by Mike Mignola and Al Williamson.

[chernobog13]

Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, with their patron wizards, Sheeba of the Eyeless Face and Singable of the Seven Eyes.

[ungoliantschilde]

The reprint collection is like $22 on Amazon. Get it. It’s totally worth it.

some artwork from Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Mike Mignola, with Inks by Al Williamson, Colors by Sherilyn Van Valkenburgh, Letters by Bill Oakley and a Script by Howard Chaykin that was adapted from Fritz Lieber’s original work.

[threeravenspublishing]

Do you love Barbarians, Brutes, and Babes?

Do you love Barbarians, Brutes, and Babes?

Then you’ll want to check out our latest release. After years of reading classics like Swiss Family Robinson, The Time Machine, and Mutiny on the Bounty, I came across my first piece of genre fiction, hidden behind other books in the school library. And that book, was Conan of Cimmeria, a collection of short stories written by Robert E. Howard. I fell in love with the action-adventure / sword…

[kris-mage-fics]

sorry, i hope you don't mind, but a few days i also remembered the story about the kitten and the coffee and looked it up. if you're curious, it is Spacetime for Springers by Fritz Lieber.

Omg, yes that is the story I was thinking of! Thank you so much, Arden! <3 I knew it had a strange name that I wouldn't remember in a million years, lol! I found the story here if anyone wants to read it. The formatting is a bit wonky in a few places, but it's totally readable. (For context: in the tags of this post I mentioned it reminded me of a short story about a kitten and coffee.)

[chernobog13]

I really miss this era at DC!

And of course, how can you go wrong having a Kaluta cover featuring Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser?

Sword Of Sorcery #1, March 1973, cover by MW Kaluta

[endlich-allein]

The book is really expensive but for those who can afford it !! It's a work of art 😍 @ till_lindemann_official

Art Book 𝘈𝘮 𝘚𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘨 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘴 𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘣𝘦𝘯

37 poems by Till Lindemann, illustrated with 15 bound original etchings by Bodo W. Klös. 68 pages handmade paper, thread binding and hardcover in large format. The book is housed in a decorative box (approx. 40 x 50 x 6 cm) with an additional, removable etching in a separate folder. The cassette and the portfolio are covered with dark linen. Each book contains a fragment of the original etching plates.

Another book in small format is inserted into a recess in the bottom of the cassette. The book entitled: „Lieber Fritz, nimm meine Hand“ contains unpublished verses that Till Lindemann wrote to his grandson in 2012 and illustrated himself.

The edition is limited to 99 numbered copies signed by the author and illustrator.

12 copies labelled e.a. I - XII will not go on sale.

To purchase a copy of the book, send an email to the following address: buy1of99@outlook.com

More Information: www.tlartbook.blogspot.com

[indierpgnewsletter]

Fantasy Cities Volume 1

Around a year ago, I published a series looking at city settings from various fantasy games. I looked at 7 cities including Doskvol, Spire, Eversink, The City from a|state, Into the Cess and Citadel, Infinigrad, and Endon from Magical Industrial Revolution. I’ve now taken those 7 essays and expanded and improved them, added 2 more essays on Lankhmar from DCC’s boxed set and Freeport, a Pathfinder 1e city from Green Ronin. This PDF, Fantasy Cities Vol 1, is available now on my patreon.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction

In the history of the fantasy genre, cities have an interesting place. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which created so much of what we consider generic about fantasy, doesn't really care for cities. Which makes sense because the books themselves feel like an elegy for a time before industrialization, a love letter to the countryside - to woods and streams and the sands below your feet. The cities of Middle Earth are, at their best, noble and static, and at their worst, corrupt and fallen to the hubris of man.

The earliest thriving fantasy cities are probably in the sword and sorcery of writers like Fritz Lieber or Michael Moorcock. These stories were influenced by, among other things, the machismo of pulp magazine stories. The cities reflect this. At their best, they're a canvas for male bravado and havens for debauchery and dissolution. At their worst, they're predatory and authoritarian.

In modern fantasy, the city is ascendant. The old tropes withered under post-modernism's sarcastic glare. Now, you get Ankh-Morpork and Bas Lag and many more that capture the contradictions, potential, and romance of cities as places to spend your lives. But what about games? A city in a novel has to be interesting on the page. A city in a game has to be interesting at the table, it has to bear the weight of the imagination of 3-5 people over a shitty internet connection. That's where I started the series affectionately known (by me) as WWTAWWTAC (pronounced whatawhatac), i.e. What We Talk About When We Talk About Cities.

And here’s an excerpt from the new entry on Lankhmar:

Creating a roleplaying game supplement for an existing fantasy city is tricky. It's trickier when it's a place as famous as Lankhmar, the City of the Black Toga, the City of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes. Not only are the stories well-loved, the city is an inspiration for other well-loved cities, notably Discworld's Ankh-Morpork which started out as a loving pastiche before evolving into something deeper. (Even the word "ankh" comes from Lankhmar). This means that you have to walk the line between giving fans what they want and making it a useful, usable supplement. Basically, DCC's approach is to not invent any new lore whatsoever - as far as I can see. They lay out what Leiber's originally stories say about Lankhmar and then give themselves permission to colour within the lines with small, inoffensive details. The end result isn't radical or surprising but it does seem genuinely quite good.

I’ve titled it Volume 1 because if we hit the patreon drive’s goal, I’ll do a Volume 2. Maybe I can finally tackle Waterdeep or Ptolus. Maybe I can expand to cities in novels and actually compare them to cities in games directly. Maybe I can look at cities in video games. Where does Dunwall from Dishonored end and Duskwall begin? There’s lots of things to explore!

Thanks to the 30+ folks who signed up last week, we’re currently at 94 out of 150. So if you’re doing okay and able to support, please head over to patreon and subscribe!

Link: https://www.patreon.com/posts/fantasy-cities-1-94754443

[hplovecraftmuseum]

Azathoth, perhaps the first NAMED cosmic character to appear in Lovecraft's fiction, is generally interpreted by fans and students of his works as a physical entity not unlike all his others. He is often illustrated as a bundle of tentacles or just a demonic grimacing face floating in outer space. Certainly Lovecraft used a variety of language to reference Azathoth, including frequent alternatives like 'Chaos'. Some of the discriptions are more 'poetic' and probably meant as 'Traditional' names than others. Early on Azathoth is cited as "The Daemon Sultan", possibly meant as a translation of a name given to him by someone of 'Arabic' origins. Abdul Alhazred, being a likely origin for the 'Sultan' reference. In later stories and the FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH sonnets, AZATHOTH particularly, the idea that Azathoth is more than an isolated physical entity is unquestionably posed by Lovecraft. One might bristle at the apparent inconsistencies, but one only need look at the similar diverse and illogical concepts of "God" in traditional Christian art, and scripture, to see that such is nothing unique. Writer Fritz Lieber was perhaps one of the first to recognise that HPL meant Azathoth to be more than purely a leader among demons. In one of his early essays on Lovecraft Leiber Jr states that HPL conceived Azathoth ultimately as "GOD". Even Derleth in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith admitted that Azathoth was the ultimate source of all the other fictional entities, including Cthulhu. Despite knowing this Derleth went on to structure the Cthulhu Mythos as Cthulhu- Centric. (Exhibit 489)

[awesomephil89]

Sind denn jetzt alle abgedreht?

NICHT DER AMPEL DISSTRACK!

[ghostlyheart]

I want to make a list of my favorite weird tales and ghost stories because I've been listening to quite a lot recently and it's hard to remember what's what. So here are a few in no particular order:

The Human Chair (Edogawa Ranpo)

The Underbody (Allison V. Harding)

The Thing on the Doorstep (H.P. Lovecraft)

The Girl with the Hungry Eyes (Fritz Lieber)

The Lonesome Place (August Derleth)

The Color Out of Space (H.P. Lovecraft)

Ringing the Changes (Robert Aickman)

The Doll (Daphne du Maurier)

Afterward (Edith Wharton)

[nem0c]

sampled that guy's book (Disch's) and he's very much a "TV HAS ROTTED AMERICANS' MINDS AND WILL MAKE THEM INTO FASCISTS" type midwit boomer with very little to to say

so it's kind of funny how fanatically he keeps on jumping down to suck Gene Wolfe's dick just for writing an Guy With Sword book with good prose & unclear coherency

also apparently in the early 80s Wolfe's romishness wasn't known. so Disch thinks he's an Anglican.

Disch was published in New Worlds and very consciously belongs to the same group as Moorcock and Ballard (and I guess Brian Aldiss, who retained a very fannish appreciation for older sf) - who were quite polemically seeking to drive a wedge between New Wave sf and the stuff that came before it. I think Disch is more charitable than Moorcock was in 'Starship Stormtroopers' but the motivation is similar.

I would agree with his assessment (in the first chapter, which is all that I read, so we are both throwing half the facts at each other here) that the majority of sf is compensatory power fantasies written by and for lower and lower middle class machinists and technicians, and with his modifying statement that the resentments and power fantasies of the lower classes are not in themselves bad things, and his further modifying statement that when these resentments and desires remain unconscious they can be exploited by unscrupulous actors.

I would disagree with his decision to then seek new forms within sf entirely, or to seek to 'mature' the genre by hoping to attain credibility in the eyes of the Academy and become 'real literature'. Given I'm not an sf writer of the 70s, I have no motivation to create a break from what came before, and I don't think such a break is tenable in the US (in the UK, maybe) - most of the Golden Age authors became editors, publishers, teachers, encouragement to the subsequent US New Wave. There was a direct continuity in the field.

His extremely pessimistic and elitist take that Americans have become beholden to new cultural tech (as though each text has a definite, singular reading which not only can be found by readers but will necessarily be unconsciously absorbed by them with no breaks or slips or contestations) is unfortunately the source of much of what I enjoy about his fiction (particularly 334) - that detailed study of sociological changes '5 minutes into the future' using all the best techniques of 19th-century french realism and an inductive spooling out of the possibilities of current tech. I can't dismiss it off-hand.

It is also very funny to me when people who would cry horror at Robert Howard or Fritz Lieber or Jack Vance or whoever love Gene Wolfe because he makes Joyce references and so 'redeems' what is otherwise a fantastical sword-and-sorcery tale. Disch was raised Catholic and became an atheist so it's a shock he wasn't hyper-aware of Wolfe's Catholicism. He's not hiding it.

[theseventhoffrostfall]

Hi. First, let me butter you up with dumb formal compliments. I think you're one of the smartest individuals i had the luck of gazing upon online. Truly, I wish i could make your acquaintance and have a conversation with you. Hope your ego feels properly buttered.

Second. Do you have any tips for someone that has been reading a lot but mainly trashy low-brow books how to breach towards actually good content? I like reading more than any form of content consumption but i feel like I'm doing the same thing as marvel slop marathons but with paper instead. I know i could read something with actual meaningful content but just like someone who's been eating Chick-fil-A for lunch everyday it's hard to bring oneself to consume actual decent meals at first, y'know?

Well, consider me thoroughly greased up

Anyway, sorry for the wait; saw this earlier just as I was heading to work

So my go-to for high-density brain candy is Gene Wolfe's bibliography, but you did ask for not getting thrown into the deep end. To the best of my recollection, his short story anthologies are a lot more digestible; his novels you should probably work your way up to.

Jack Vance's novels (I've gushed about the Demon Princes before) tend to be pretty fun and engaging without the, uh, proclivities that certain classic Fritz Lieber-esque authors of classic genre fiction tend to indulge in. Lovecraft and Howard likewise, if you don't mind purplier prose and the occasional bout of astounding racism (in Howard's defense, the biggest example was from a rough draft novel he never published in his lifetime).

The Hyperion Cantos does a great job of easing you into a really dense and interesting setting, via a first-book structure built to evoke the Canterbury Tales in space. It's a really fantastic read, the author's evident desire to take 19th-century English poet John Keats to pound-town notwithstanding, but as always I have to advise you to never, ever read the second duology. There are two books in the series, and that is how it should be.

I also think the Spiral Arm series has a good interplay of character building and worldbuilding in a vast, alien setting, and this one I can actually recommend the whole series. Unfortunately I didn't really click with any of the author's other work, but that might not be the case for you.

Dune is a step between, say, Book of the New Sun and a modern work in terms of having a bit more action and more digestible prose and pacing, but it's still a very slow, dense and weird read about alien and somewhat repellent characters in an alien and somewhat repellant setting by most standards. The same is true of what I'd characterize as its fantasy counterpart, the Second Apocalypse series by R Scott Bakker. The Sun Eater series by Christopher Roucchio, in that respect, can be thought of as another step down from the Tower of Weirdness and should go on your "sooner but not immediately" list.

Whom Gods Would Destroy and Bathwater are both trippy Weird Fiction works that I take the chance to shill whenever I can, but the former in particular goes up on your "work your way up to it" list

David Drake's works are more conventional sci-fi and fantasy tales, but there's more to bite into than you can expect from typical pulp or modern works. These might be a good starting point. Likewise for Eric Nylund's (yeah, the guy who wrote the good Halo books) A Game Of Universe, a Grail Quest story in a sprawling sci-fantasy setting starring a mind-stealing assassin.

I'll probably self-reblog a half dozen times as more suggestions spring to mind

[soulsanitarium]

Do you believe?

Happy to find this from the Netflix🙏. Night of the Eagle is a 1962 British horror film directed by Sidney Hayers. The film was retitled Burn, Witch, Burn! for the US release.

Another (Low budget) film Weird Woman (1944) is also loosely based on Fritz Lieber’s 1943 novel called Conjure Wife. Leiber’s novel was first published in 1943, and has become the inspiration for several other films including the British film Night of the Eagle (1962) and the American comedy Witch’s Brew (1980).(Greene 2018, 84.)

🦅”When we first meet the professor (played by Peter Wyngarde), he is intoning the words “I Do Not Believe” as he inscribes them on a blackboard for his students, the objects of his disbelief being the supernatural, witchcraft, superstition, and the psychic, all of which, he says, demonstrate “a morbid desire to escape from reality” which can only exist in an atmosphere of belief. After nailing his colours to the mast in such uncompromising fashion, it is quite clear that Professor Taylor, like his fellow sceptic Dr. John Holden in Night of the Demon, is well on course for a rude awakening. (Exshaw 2007.)”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️I loved this movie in so many ways. First of all it presents many of my❤️ subjects: Elitism - Psychiatry & Realism vs. Primitive Superstition, and there are a lot of questionable gender & culture issues i.e. a lot of things to study🙂Visually stunning!

🕷️Night of the Eagle depicts the use of charms or supernatural powers in an “everyday” environment and juxtaposes it with a rationalist view which is questioned during the progress of events. Freud developed the notion of the ‘unheimlich’ as a source of fear: something uncanny or ‘unhomely’ – the familiar made strange.(Botting 2013.)

“a remarkably effective piece of trickery considering the date of the film and its obviously limited resources. (Exshaw 2007.)”

Sources

Greene, H. 2018.Bell, Book and Camera: A Critical History of Witches in American Film and Television

Botting, J. 2013. Why I love... Night of the Eagle. https://www.bfi.org.uk

Exshaw, J. (2007). Night of the eagle. The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, (3), 107-108.

Spoiler Alert in Trailer!🚨

[vylencia-memes]

A Spectre is Haunting Texas by Fritz Lieber

Cover by Richard Clifton-Dey