brucec@tekecs.UUCP (Bruce Cohen) (09/07/83)
I'm sorry, I can't let that go unremarked. First you misspell the poor man's name (it's Leiber, not Lieber), and then you hang an albatross like "Riders of the Purple Wage" on him. That piece of middle age libido (maybe unfair, but I'm angry because I might have liked the story if it had only been about a third the length) was written by Phillip Farmer, *NOT* Fritz Leiber. If you are wondering about his ability as a writer, just for overkill, consider the following (very incomplete) list of Leiber's works: Conjure Wife Our Lady of Darkness (my vote for best ghost story of all time) The Big Time (and the other Change War stories) You're All Alone The Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories Smoke Ghost (second best ghost story) A Bit of the Dark World (another of the top ten ghost stories) The Wanderer The Silver Eggheads I agree that some of his work is not as good as the best (B+ instead of A+), but I can't think of anything he's written since the middle fifties which was even the least bit clumsy, let alone mediocre. By the way, a bubblegum cigar to the person who can remember the name and plot of the movie in which Fritz Leiber played a corpse. Bruce Cohen UUCP: ...!teklabs!tekecs!brucec CSNET: tekecs!brucec@tektronix ARPA: tekecs!brucec.tektronix@rand-relay