(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: Chrononauts theme)
introductions, recent reads
JM:
Hello, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. You can find us in a lot of different places online. A lot of your podcasting apps of choice or YouTube. Just search for Chrononauts podcast. You can send us an email at chrononautspodcast at gmail.com. Find us on Facebook or on X @ChrononautsSF. We also have a blogspot chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com, which is the place you can go to find not only all our episodes, but also first English translations of quite a few works and first digital editions of some other works.
My name is JM, and I'm here with my co-hosts, Nate and Gretchen. How are you guys doing?
Nate:
Doing great, how about you?
JM:
Pretty crazy, up and down. Some crazy stuff going on with family and work, but yeah, managing. Really been getting into our author of the month these last few weeks and had a good time with it. Getting warmer out. I got a new Yamaha keyboard to play with, so I'm kind of happy about that. It's kind of cool. I've been using keyboards from the 1990s forever pretty much, so this first time I've actually had a keyboard that's less than 25 years old, so that's kind of neat.
Nate:
How about you Gretchen, how are you doing?
Gretchen:
I've been doing well. Finals are approaching, so I've been working quite a bit there, but it's been also pretty warm here in Albany. All of the trees are blossoming, so it's pretty nice on campus.
JM:
That's great.
Gretchen:
Yeah, the class work I have been doing, I've been enjoying, so it's not too bad of a workload.
JM:
We've had a lot of rainfall. It's good, we need it. We need it, so how about you, Nate?
Nate:
Nice weather here, and certainly excited to get into some interesting stories tonight, and I've been doing a bit of science fiction reading off podcast too, which I typically haven't been doing since the podcast started. I've been wanting to save the stuff for the podcast, but I figure I had a couple of classics.
JM:
Yeah, understandable, right? You kind of get embroiled in this subject on the podcast. So let's hear about that.
Nate:
Yeah, I had a couple of classics on the shelf that I had been wanting to read for a while, so I read "Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson, "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes, "Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula Le Guin, and "The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K. Dick. I was very, very mixed on "Snow Crash", and I think the other three were absolutely great, especially "Left Hand of Darkness", which I was really, really into.
Gretchen:
Oh yeah, that has been one I've been considering for a host choice in the future. I definitely love that book.
Nate:
Yeah, there's so much cool stuff in it.
JM:
Yeah, and I definitely thought of "Flowers for Algernon" as well, including that on the podcast sometime, because it's definitely an interesting work of its time. I read it when I was very young, so I wouldn't mind rereading it. It's certainly put a lot of thoughts into my head at a young age that I'd never really considered before, and it was really cool. So, and it's also very sad.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
Have you read it, Gretchen?
Gretchen:
Yes, I have. I read it a few years ago. I know that quite a few of my friends actually had it assigned to them in middle school, but I ended up reading it just on my own.
Nate:
I think it won the Hugo, I want to say, or one of the big awards.
JM:
Yeah, it won a couple of awards. I think maybe the Nebula and the Hugo. Not sure. It's definitely won some awards in both the short story and novel form. So it was originally a shorter work. I've actually read both the short version and the long version, but it was so long ago now that I can't really tell you exactly what the differences are. Some people definitively prefer the short version. So I don't know, you read the novel, I'm guessing, right?
Nate:
Yeah. It's like a 200-page thing. So I mean, it wasn't a terribly long novel, but definitely longer than a short story.
JM:
Right. Yeah, the original story is definitely like 50 pages or less or something like that.
Nate:
Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Well, I guess we haven't really gotten into the Hugo set before, but if you're looking for us to do that, just stay tuned in a couple of minutes.
JM:
Yeah, we are today. But yeah, so let's see, what have I been reading? It's hard to keep track sometimes. I was getting into crime fiction for a while there, early this year. I read something like three sort of classic crime fiction books from the AmErichan school, kind of hardboiled school. One was Charles Willeford, who is a really interesting, very gritty 1960s author, very sweaty, hardboiled and intense and kind of funny too. Intentionally, I would say the book I read was called "The Whip Hand". It was good. I'd read another one. I actually discovered him because of "The Playboy Book of Horror and The Supernatural," which, believe it or not, has some really amazing stories in it. And I think the one in there is called "The Machine in Ward Eleven" or something like that. It's a really, really cool story. And I'm like, yeah, I wonder what this guy's like. The book wasn't as good as that, but it was still pretty cool.
I actually started a Dennis Wheatley book called "They Found Atlantis". He's pretty well known for writing "The Devil Rides Out" nowadays, which was made into a pretty cool Hammer movie. But in his time, he was an extremely successful writer, pretty much forgotten now, and maybe with good reason we sometimes come up against this where some of these old pulp writers and stuff like that have some questionable content in their work. And this guy is like old British school and comes with its own special baggage, I guess, which "The Devil Rides Out" movie definitely dispenses with for the most part, although it interestingly comes off a bit more Christian than the book does.
But yeah, "They Found Atlantis" is a lost world story mixed with like a pirate adventure. And yeah, it's pretty fun, despite some sort of infuriating qualities. I don't know, it's got its moments. I think it was made into a film as well, "The Lost Continent", but I'm not too sure about that. So anyway, another Atlantis story from the 1930s.
Nate:
Cool. Well, we got more of those coming up for sure. How about you Gretchen? What have you been reading?
Gretchen:
Most of my reading has been for classes, but they've been enjoyable reads. One of the last things I was assigned to read was "Paradise Lost", which yeah, really enjoyed that. We weren't assigned the whole thing. We read like the first eight of the twelve books and I just finished it. Also read excerpts from Dante that I also just decided to read more of because I enjoyed it.
Nate:
"Inferno"?
Gretchen:
Yes, Inferno, but also I've started to read some sections of "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso" as well.
Nate:
Cool, yeah. No, those are really interesting. "Inferno" obviously gets all the attention, you know, because of the vivid horror imagery and stuff. But yeah, there's really really good imagery. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. But yeah, there's some really interesting stuff in "Purgatory" and "Paradise" that, you know, I still kind of think about, you know, the ascension through the heavens and all that. It's just really neat.
Gretchen:
Yeah, really, really enjoy those, the trilogy there. And I also have been reading it partially. We read some of Beckett as well, Samuel Beckett with like "Molloy" and "The Unnameable", which I'm working on a paper that like compares Dante and Beckett. So we have been combining the works of like two classes together for that. But besides that, I haven't read too much outside of class, although I did start over spring break, "Red Dwarf", which I have really been enjoying. I spent a TV show I've been meaning to get into for a while and it's been really fun.
Nate:
Yeah, I like that a lot, especially the earlier seasons.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah, I like the early seasons.
JM:
I did actually read one other thing. I forgot a Ryū Murakami book, not to be confused with Haruki Murakami, who's much more well known outside of Japan, I guess, but Ryū is more of a, I guess, weird, dark psychology kind of author. I don't know, the book was called "Piercing". It was kind of weird and funny, but I liked it. I'm not sure I'd be in a hurry to read more of his stuff, but I probably would. It was really interesting because it was a bizarre sort of mix of gentile and depraved kind of. So I don't know, it was good though. Apparently the film "Audition" is based on one of his works as well. So I don't know if anybody else seen that, but I've also been watching a lot of Star Trek because since our episode, especially a couple months back, I definitely got the urge. So yeah, lots of Next Generation in Deep Space Nine specifically.
(music: low rumbling)
Fritz Leiber background
Now we're going to talk about an author that I really like. And when I said earlier that I couldn't think of any other reading, I thought I of course neglected our author up today, Fritz Leiber. And I've spent quite some time now, I guess, reading a lot of his stories, but also as much non-fiction work by and about him as I could find.
So essentially this writer is somebody that I've known for probably good 20 years, and I've read, I would say, a considerable amount by this time of his output. By no means everything, but as we'll discuss when we do this, he doesn't actually have a huge body of work and there might be a couple reasons for that. But what there is, I personally, this is one of these cases where I'm a little nervous to be doing this on the podcast because yeah, I just, I think he's really cool and I like him a lot. When we do these things, we do come up sometimes as we look into criticism and things like that, you know, sometimes we discover that there's a lot of different viewpoints and many people don't feel the same way about a work or an author.
And I can say right now that some of our fellow podcasters have been pretty hard on Fritz Leiber. So that's fine, but that's not what I'm here for personally, but we can certainly talk about him and criticize and do whatever we want for the next little while as we discuss the big time and some of the connected short stories. So I'll get into my experience a little more in a minute, but as you guys, I think have a fair bit less up till now. I was kind of wondering, do you guys have any experience with his work before now?
Gretchen:
I really haven't read much of Fritz Leiber really. I think this is my first experience with him. I know J.M. that you have mentioned his stories before to me, and I've always been curious to try him, but this is really my first time actually getting to read his work.
JM:
Even though you haven't read anything else, Gretchen, I'm thinking you do have a little bit of experience because you've seen all of Night Gallery, right?
Gretchen:
Yes, yes, he did, which was the story that was adapted?
JM:
There were two of them. The one was "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes", and the other one was "The Dead Man".
Gretchen:
Okay, yes, so those are probably the experience that I have with Leiber, which I do think "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" was a pretty good episode of Night Gallery.
JM:
Yeah, definitely one of his better known stories as well. So much so that Marshall McLuhan quotes it in one of his books, which Fritz was kind of pleased about. Even though the book apparently was one of his early ones, it was before McLuhan got to be too well known, and the book was quite criticized, and it has to do with advertising and the media and stuff, so it kind of makes sense that maybe it would be something that you'd mention offhand.
But what about you, Nate?
Nate:
Yeah, so I've only read two of his short stories before, "Belsen Express" and "Smoke Ghost", both of which are contained in the "Dark Descent" anthology. I do have an anthology of Fritz Leiber, that's just "The Best of Fritz Leiber", one of those Delray editions, I believe it is.
JM:
Oh yeah, Gretchen, you have that too, right?
Gretchen:
Yes, I do.
JM:
There's some really good ones in that, and one thing I like about that one is he does a little afterward at the end where he talks about each story for like a paragraph or two or something like that.
Nate:
Yeah, but I haven't actually read any of the stories that are present in there, except for the ones that we're covering tonight, which were included in there.
But yeah, I've only read those two short stories before. I guess this is really the first time we're taking a look at a Hugo-winning work on the podcast, I believe.
JM:
Yeah, and it is a coincidence that this happens to be a Hugo-winning work because I mean, I would have maybe wanted to get to Leiber eventually on the podcast, but I mean, the thing is, Leiber wasn't necessarily nailed down by genre, so he did some science fiction things, some fantasy stuff, some horror. Some people don't really think that his science fiction work is as strong as some of his other material. I don't know if I really would say that. I mean, I think I guess maybe some of the ones in the science fiction magazines were, maybe not, didn't stand out as much as his atmosphErich horror stories, but he has a lot of good science fiction stuff as well, and I think this book is maybe one of the best examples of a somewhat longer form science fiction work that he did. Certainly, Neil Gaiman also thinks so, and he talks about it in his introduction to the "Selected Works of Leiber," and one thing that is certainly interesting is that a lot of writers seem to know who he is, and he certainly won a lot of awards, but in general, he doesn't seem that well-known by the public at large, and I think that's a shame.
Like I said, I got introduced to his work a long time ago. I think not positive about this, but I think the first story that I read by him was probably "Gonna Roll the Bones", which is a story that was originally printed in Harlan Ellison's "Dangerous Visions" anthology. I didn't read it there. I actually only read through "Dangerous Visions" quite recently. That's some of the short stories that I neglected to mention because there's just too many, but yeah, that story was really interesting to me because I didn't quite get it. I didn't quite understand what the meaning of it was or what he was going for, but I found the style really fascinating, and you know, I was pretty young at that time, so coming back to it later definitely gave me a different perspective.
I think next I discovered "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" stories, which are his kind of sword and sorcery fantasy tales about these two wandering adventurers who meet up. One of them's a big, tall, strapping northern barbarian type, and the other one's this wily, rivalry, short, kind of sneaky dude named the Mouser. And the tales are kind of unique in the sword and sorcery genre, I think, because they tend to have a lot of humor in them, but they also mix a lot of different genres, and you know, there's horror elements as well, and they're generally very witty, but there's a lot of rip-roaring adventure. These two guys, you know, they're not always friends, but usually they are, and it's great when they're buddies, but a couple of stories, they're kind of at odds, and they're pretty silly, you know, it starts out when they're young men, about 17, and the series basically goes on until middle age, so you get kind of to experience all the trials and tribulations of a growing pair of vagabonds in a fantastic landscape full of horrible creatures and conniving and corrupt merchants and corrupt overlords and weird underground kingdoms, and it's really, really a lot of fun.
You know, there's a lot of, I guess, drinking and wenching, but you get used to that from sword and sorcery, and I guess the big difference between Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Conan, for example, is that F&GM is very self-aware and very tongue-in-cheek sometimes, and you just never know what he's going to throw at you, it can get pretty crazy, and it's probably the most fun I've ever had reading sword and sorcery as reading that stuff, and I remember the first story, "Ill Met in Lankhmar", I read on a bus to Buffalo, or maybe it was from Buffalo or something like that, and I remember, because I didn't really understand the context at the time, I remember thinking, oh, this kind of reminds me of what I think Dungeons & Dragons is like, like, kind of, and like, because I didn't really play at that point, but I knew people who did, and I was kind of like, yeah, I kind of get it, I get what it's like, and it's like that, and then I didn't realize, but I kind of figured out pretty quickly, oh, that came from this, that's really interesting, and yeah, when you read these stories, it is like, T.S.R. Inc actually did license the setting, and they ended up paying Fritz royalties, and so the last several years of his life, he was kind of living largely on the royalty checks. It's just really funny, there's some interviews online you can listen to from Fritz in the 70s, and, you know, maybe a year or two after D&D started, and Fritz, who's in his late 60s by this point, he is trying to explain to the host of the radio show what Dungeons & Dragons is, and why it's cool, and he's like, this old guy with a cracked voice, and he's like, oh yeah, you know, it's kind of like a war game, and he's trying to explain this concept. But at that point, it's not even the scare of the 80s, it's like this total weird, unknown thing that not that many people play yet, but in the appendix to at least some of the additions, Gary Gygax, who Fritz actually did meet and hung out with a bit, he kind of explains some of the influence on the game, and the Lankhmar stories, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories are some of the things he mentioned, along with Jack Vance "Dying Earth".
Nate:
Yeah, I think it drew from a wide range of influences, I think they had to deal with the Tolkien estate for use of the term Hobbit, and things like that, so I think they were reading a wide range of fantasy, and probably science fiction for some of the expansion modules and games based around D&D.
JM:
Yeah, after that, I started digging more into him, and a number of his horror novels, a number of the other science fiction works, and yeah, I might mention a few of them briefly, so when you talk about his influences and his, I guess, conceptions, or what his stories are like, rather than try to explain right off the bat, why don't I just let the man speak for himself?
So, he says, in the back piece to the Ghostlight collection, he says, "My chief and some of my minor concerns in writing fiction, mostly involving science and the weird supernatural, but in general, following the fantasy trail that curves and zigzags between imagination and fantasy are, wars, other catastrophes, social conflict and growth, the monstrous and thrillingly terrifying in big industrial cities, weaponry and assortly adventures, sex, alcohol, Shakespeare, and the Jacobean dramatists, cats are lovely and elegant fellow travelers, chess, at which I've been rated expert, the most elegant, mysterious, and merciless of games, and spiders, those most elegant and horrifying of arthropods, astronomy, and our mistress, the moon."
So, among the awards that Fritz has won, we have nine or more Hugos, four or more Nebulas, the Bram Stoker Horror Award, the Lovecraft Award, British Fantasy Award, the Balrog Award, and Second Stage Landsman.
But Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. was born somewhere on the north side of Chicago, on Christmas Eve 1910, to theater parents like one of his influences, Edgar Allan Poe. As demonstrated by his humorously named brief memoir, "Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex", his upraising was maybe a little less tumultuous, though in another amusing coincidence his mother's name is Virginia. His grandfather came over from Germany and was a captain on the Union side in the Civil War, commanding a company of Black AmErichan soldiers. His mother's siblings were all women, the Bronsons, and they ran the gamut of what was then considered, "acceptable occupations for women." The Mantell Theater Company seemed reasonably well established. They rehearsed at a huge mansion in Atlantic Highlands. Virginia Bronson signed on in Chicago after attending acting school.
Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. was born, "into the backstage world where he could watch fantasy being created, the spells being woven for the audience in the darkness out front, the mechanics of illusion and illusioning, a world where the need for make-believe is never questioned and the importance, perhaps even necessity, of fantasy and living and thinking is not denied. A world of dressing rooms, backdrops, and wings where clothes were costumes, things were props, faces were makeup, and colors were fascinating curves of gelatin that hewed the light. A world through which the lines of Shakespeare reverberated over and over. A world that inclined toward tolerance and progress and that centered in big cities, New York in particular. A world of theaters, hotels, and railway stations."
And that is Fritz talking, by the way, sort of cheekily referring to himself in the third person. But yeah, if you really want to know more about him, I highly recommend reading the memoir/autobiographical essay. It's very, very instructive, I think, and that's where most of my quotes come from here.
But a couple of years later, Fritz Sr., who was leading man in the company at this time, built a bungalow across the street from the Mantell estate there in New York. And when he started school, Fritz Jr. moved in with his grandmother Flora back in Illinois, a town he described as a, "Bradbury sort of town named Pontiac." And generally though, he seemed to have moved around quite a bit between New York State and Illinois, mostly living with relatives, presumably while his parents' troop was on tour. In the summer times though, Fritz and his parents got to hang out together and vacation at home.
Fritz Sr. was an avid and serious reader with a meticulous method. Basically, he would go through one author every summer and he would always buy his books in sets. So his book collection was probably a whole lot of set pieces of different classic writers. And it seems like this is largely what he grew up with. Now, sometime during Fritz's childhood, his father started up his own acting company. And the idea was to alter AmErichan Shakespeare productions somewhat and make them rely less on elaborate sets. Fritz Sr. did much of the carpentry himself and the costume design. And he told his actors to be natural and reactive. And it was a very modern approach at that time.
Fritz says his first exposure to genre fiction, aside from "The Wizard of Oz", which he had thought was nightmarish because he had the flu at the time. This was during the big flu epidemic that took down so much of North AmEricha and other parts of the world. There were two issues of Weird Tales. His friend had sent him while he was in Chicago. And "The Insidious Doctor Fu Manchu", he didn't much like them at the time. "Too many spiders and centipedes, too much death and strange disease."
But the interest, like many of his interests, awoke slowly over time. Same goes for chess, which he picked up from one of Dad's actors. And it would be a big deal throughout his life. And a game he apparently has complex and ambivalent feelings about. When he was into it during certain periods, he was a competitive player, taking part in many tournaments such as the Santa Monica Open Chess Championship, where he made seven wins and one draw and achieved an expert rating. So not quite a chess master, but close. And he actually did write many stories involving chess in some way, literally or less so.
Gretchen:
Yes, one of them we'll be talking about tonight.
JM:
Yes, exactly. This is one thing I find really interesting about Leiber is that I think, I mean, people say this a lot about authors, right? And they say, well, they write what they know. And you definitely can feel that with a lot of, I guess, mainstream authors. But I don't know, I think when you read some, like, pulp stories from the 30s or something, it's hard to kind of imagine the author in some of those stories. They seem kind of like, oh, here's an adventure story about some guy going off into outer space battling giant centipedes or something like that. And yeah, Fritz can kind of do that, but almost everything that he's ever written from what I can tell, especially now, after, I think, becoming very familiar with him and his personality, you can feel a lot of his own experiences in everything that he writes. And it's pretty cool. It's definitely something that, I mean, I guess you come to see more and more of his science fiction, I guess, integrated into the mainstream, probably.
Nate:
Certainly the last 10 minutes of what you've been saying about his early life. I can definitely see that in all the stories, basically, that we're looking at tonight. I mean, there's definitely a lot of those influences that come in there, like, for sure.
JM:
Well, I think about the only thing missing is cats, but they do feature in a lot of the other stories. So, yeah.
Gretchen:
Unfortunately.
JM:
Unfortunately, yeah, I mean, there are some cat illusions, though, which is cool, but yeah. But unfortunately, one of the things that he did often write about was alcoholism, and that would be a barrier to both chess and writing, and marked various interregnum periods in his productivity. But we'll talk a bit more about that a bit later.
But Fritz went to the University of Chicago, and there he studied psychology and philosophy, and started hanging out with others who were interested in science, and indeed, science fiction. As well as supernatural horror. So, a friend got him into the work of Lovecraft, another big influence, with whom he did correspond a bit before Lovecraft's death.
And that theater company got some serious backers in Chicago, who then made some bad business decisions, don't forget, were now in the Depression. So, a few years into it, the company was bust. However, persuaded by a friend of the family, Fritz Jr. entered the Episcopalian Ministry of all things, and here's one of the most wacky chapters of Fritz's life, in my opinion, that really made me laugh, because I used to imagine what it would be like to do something like this.
So, basically, he gives reasons for this that are, if nothing else, fairly solid. He reasons, well, preaching is a kind of acting, isn't it? Maybe true belief would come out of it later.
So, Fritz is pretty charming in his autobiography there, and he just basically says he needs to be taken by the nose a bit, and led to a thing in order to start doing it. And it's kind of funny, you know, he kind of makes himself out to be a little bit, like, I guess, timid and unambitious, but then, like, somebody will suggest something to him, and be like, hey, that sounds like a really good idea, and just try it. And then one of his family members said, Fritz is a good boy and really smart, but you have to tell him to do something.
And he did alright at the Theological Seminary, and was soon shuttling between two parishes and giving sermons, he said, were adequate. And all friends thought he was gaga for God, but he lasted two semesters before realizing this whole thing was silly, and bowing out with "embarrassed firmness", is what he said.
So, meanwhile, Dad had plans to start a new company, and was able to do this. And Fritz was sort of aimless at this point. I returned to university under partial philosophy scholarship, not really working out. So, he finally got a full season of acting under his belt. First, under a pseudonym. And this would be a touring company in the old vein. And he was playing Edgar in "King Lear", and some of his first published stuff were actually write-ups in souvenir programs for 1934 on plays like "King Lear". And he was also writing children's stories for a magazine called The Churchman.
Dad had a long game in mind, and the young Fritz didn't know about this, but he used money gained from the tour to move his family to Los Angeles, and get into films. And Fritz Sr. did have a good reputation, and he ended up in something like 50 features before his death in 1949, sometimes in quite prominent roles. Fritz Jr. himself was in a few. He played a scene with Robert Taylor in the movie "Camille".
Now, in his autobiographical essay, Fritz speaks very candidly and openly about his problems with sex as a young man, and his naivety, and even occasional gochness. And it's pretty charming to me. I think he's pretty good at laughing at himself. Sometime in the, I guess mid-30s, he met his wife, Jonquil Stephens, who was an English or possibly Welsh woman, and head of his college poetry club. I mean, that's how they met. And this was in Chicago, but they would eventually relocate to San Francisco, where he spent the last decades of his life.
And Jonquil's death in 1969 was really hard on him, and caused him to go through one of his several, as he termed, some alcoholic crisis. And sort of documented this in his novel "Our Lady of Darkness", which is, again, very autobiographical. He speaks very wanderingly and highly of Jonquil, and she seems to have had an interesting and very active life. He said she was one of the four most central influences on his life.
It's kind of interesting to picture them. Fritz was a really big, tall guy, six feet four, Jonquil four foot ten. From the way he tells it, she was pretty much the boss of the relationship. And it's really funny because in his autobiographical essay, he starts out by talking about how he had a chance to meet the author, Thomas Mann, who's somebody that he really liked and respected. And he got to meet him because Jonquil basically gave him an introduction. And apparently she was kind of always pushing him to meet people he really liked and respected, including Lovecraft. He actually was so into Lovecraft by 1936 that he actually read her "At the Mountains of Madness". And she's like, well, you seem to really like this guy's stuff. Why don't you write him a letter? He's like, no, no, I'm sure he has better things to do. And she's like, OK, fine, I'll write him a letter. So she wrote him a letter and that's how their correspondence started. So for the last three months of Lovecraft's life, they were writing back and forth like a lot. And apparently Lovecraft introduced him to a lot of the supernatural and weird fiction stuff, which she didn't really know anything about until that time.
It's kind of interesting, but you can kind of get the feeling that Jonquil might have been the witch subject of Leiber's book, "Conjure Wife". So "Conjure Wife", which I do want to talk about briefly, is a book that was written in 1943. It's a book about a young college professor and his wife. And this professor discovers at some point that his wife is a witch and she's been practicing all this witchcraft stuff under his nose and he's been completely oblivious all this time. And him being a very rational and down-to-earth sort of intellectual academic guy, he's like, this is all nonsense, you know this, right? And so he gets her to stop and he makes her promise not to do any more witchcraft. And well, as soon as she stops doing witchcraft, his life goes completely to hell. Of course, the eventual discovery about all this is that, in fact, many women in his circle and, in fact, many women in general are witches, even if they don't even know it. And while that premise may seem kind of incredible and maybe a bit sexist, I think that when you kind of see the relationship that the couple, the main couple has in the story, I think it personally really diffuses a lot of that. There's also an interesting historical precedent. I'm guessing that both of you have probably heard of the "Malleus Maleficarum"?
Nate:
Yeah, yeah.
JM:
So in the Malleus, there is a part where this guy is, I don't know, hanging out in his library or something like that and is talking to his young daughter. And through this conversation, the naive, unknowing young daughter reveals to him that she and his wife are practicing witches and that she's been educating the daughter in witchcraft. And, of course, he is truly horrified by this and by the revelation that, in fact, many women around them practice witchcraft.
In a way, this is Fritz Leiber kind of answering that and trying to make a different story out of it and saying, well, okay, it could be true. We work together on this and maybe it's necessary that the witchcraft be practiced. Maybe witchcraft itself is neither evil nor good. And obviously, it's how you use it. That's the important thing. And yeah, I really love "Conjure Wife". It's a hard book to sell to people nowadays because when they hear the premise, they kind of want to scoff, right? And that makes perfect sense to me. But if you just read it and you see what kind of a book it is, it's actually really, really good. And I think that the mass media must agree because this is by far the most adapted Fritz Leiber story. It's been filmed, I think, a total of four times. First thing in the 1940s under the title "Weird Woman". Then again in 1960 or 62 as "Burn, Witch, Burn", a really cool British film. Then in the early 80s as "Witches Brew" as a comedy. Yeah, it's stories definitely been out there.
I've seen all of those adaptations and I have to say, although they all have their charms, especially the British film "Burn, Witch, Burn", also known as "Night of the Eagle", none of them are quite equal to the book in my opinion. The book has a lot more to it. And yeah, that's really cool.
But during this time, that is the late 30s, he talks about meeting Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch. His first published story was "The Automatic Pistol" in Weird Tales. And shortly after that, John W. Campbell published "Two Sought Adventure", the first published but not necessarily first written Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story. And I believe this was in 1939 or 1940. And Fritz was a pacifist, but like so many, especially after Pearl Harbor, his conscience got the better of him and he more or less signed up becoming an aircraft inspector at Douglas Aircraft in California.
And there was a lot of moving back and forth and he started working for the magazine Science Digest after the war. And it was the most stable job he ever had for 14 years. And he says he wrote some good stuff during that period, but his output was definitely slow and it got slower as the drinking got heavier. Apparently he and Jonquil liked to throw parties. In 1949, he had a short-lived fanzine of his own, New Purposes. And it ran for 16 issues over a six-month period. And he says it was mostly dedicated to free love and stuff. Ahead of its time, maybe in some ways, but Fritz looks upon it with faint embarrassment saying he was hardly the most fit proponent of the idea.
Frederik Pohl became his agent and in 1949 he attended his first World Science Fiction Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio. And he seems to have been a fairly frequent guest at these events over the years. Last in, actually, London, Ontario in 1992, a mere days before his death. He's supposed to have lived pretty frugally and in the 70s, Harlan Ellison was vocally angry about the fact that the guy who had been so widely awarded over the years was living in a tiny cramped room in a San Francisco residential hotel with his manual typewriter balanced over the sink where he did most of his writing. But others said that he kind of preferred to live simply and spent most of his money on dining and travel. So, like I said, he died in 1992. He had married his second wife, Margot Skinner, who was also a poet, but the marriage didn't last very long. Seems it's probably only a matter of months, actually, but that time he was, yeah, it was fairly odd in years so it's kind of a late time to get married, but why not if you can, right? I'm not sure how much longer she survived.
Yeah, so our novel that we've chosen, though, is "The Big Time". And why don't we take a quick break before we get to it and we'll start talking about it.
(music: airy synths, reading of introduction from "Big Time")
non-spoiler discussion
"You don’t know about the Change War, but it’s influencing your lives all the time and maybe you’ve had hints of it without realizing.
"Have you ever worried about your memory, because it doesn't seem to be bringing you exactly the same picture of the past from one day to the next? Have you ever been afraid that your personality was changing because of forces beyond your knowledge or control? Have you ever felt sure that sudden death was about to jump you from nowhere? Have you ever been scared of Ghosts—not the storybook kind, but the billions of beings who were once so real and strong it's hard to believe they'll just sleep harmlessly forever? Have you ever wondered about those things you may call devils or Demons—spirits able to range through all time and space, through the hot hearts of stars and the cold skeleton of space between the galaxies? Have you ever thought that the whole universe might be a crazy, mixed-up dream? If you have, you've had hints of the Change War."
JM:
So "The Big Time" was published in Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, March and April, 1958. And the book version came out in 1961, and it was an Ace Double with libraries "The Mindspider and Other Stories", which most, but not all of the other stories we're covering tonight can be found in that one, but not the best one, which, well, I don't know what you guys think the best one is, but I have a feeling we all probably might agree on that, so I guess we'll see.
So it was, I believe, the Galaxy with, maybe with a book publication that it won the Hugo, and it was written to the accompaniment of music, one of only three times Fritz apparently did this. The second of the three times was "Deskful of Girls", which we'll get to at the end here. But "The Big Time" was written to the accompaniment of Beethoven's Pathetique and Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. Now, in 1958 when this story was published, Leiber hadn't written anything for three years. He says, "the reason I hadn't written anything in that time. I was going through my first and most severe alcoholic crisis, and between drinking and fighting drinking, there was no time for anything else, nor the capacity for doing anything creative, of course. But when I finally did get off the booze and squared away, it took four months, there were complications, I had to get off sleeping pills too. I wrote 'the Big Time' in exactly 100 days from first conscious conception to sending off the manuscript, which I laid out lovingly and handsomely and final typed myself. Very rich with all the stuff of my galloping alcoholism and its eventual remission. Fictionally transmuted, of course. My typewriter was hot. I have that on the testimony of no less than Horace Gold, editor of Galaxy. He changed his mind after that, of course, as soon as I sent him a story he didn't like, in fact. But at the time, he said so, and it was true. My typewriter really was hot, and something spun off almost automatically."
So this is the third time I've read this book, and this book is one of the cases where something has actually gotten better for me each time I've read it, and so I really enjoyed visiting it again, last visited it almost four years ago now, when I was actually a guest on the Hugos There podcast talking about it, and that was a really good time, but here we're going to go over things and through things the Chrononauts way. And yeah, it was, I guess, what you could say maybe it's a deep reading for me this time, and I feel like I got a lot out of it, and I enjoyed it a lot.
I've always, I guess, been fascinated by the concept of not just time travel, but how things from the future and past traveling into different time periods could influence things, and maybe in ways that would be very unfortunate to, I guess, the people living in that time period. Definitely said this before, but I think that if people were actually coming to us from the future, they would probably be our enemies in a way, because they would be set on leading us down a certain path, and this book is all about that. And in fact, it's very influenced by the Cold War clearly, and I guess I really did pick up on that a little more this time and how much that probably influenced, I guess, not just the story itself, but the way the book is written and the kind of paranoia that interlaces some of it and stuff like that.
I think this is a really interesting example of a book that's quiet in the sense that it's, it takes place on one room. There's not really a lot of action, but there's an awful lot of tension and an awful lot of underlying things that seem really terrible that are not fully gone into, but are just grazed just enough where you kind of realize the horror of the situation. How sad it is that these people are kind of stuck with this.
So this is you guys your first time reading this book. Let's hear some general, very general opinions to start with, I guess. What do you guys make of the style, the, I guess, the character of it, the conflict and so on?
Nate:
There's definitely a lot in here, for sure. And I think this is one of those books that really would benefit from a second or even third reading because of that. I guess on its face, we're dealing with a locked room mystery with a whole background of weird timeline manipulation stuff in a way that I thought was a little bit reminiscent of Leinster's "Sidewise in Time". But that was basically a straightforward adventure story, which is not what we get here. I think overall, I really like this one. But again, it has a lot of like subtle character moments and things like that that I think would hit a little bit better, and I'd appreciate it more a second time around, you know, knowing what's happening, knowing the characters involved and, you know, what they do in the other stories that we're covering tonight. But also here, I think having a second go around at that, it would be nice to revisit for sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I agree, especially even the other stories that we're covering tonight, they all feel like ones that definitely are worthy of rereading and like viewing from a fresh perspective after having gone through it the first time. There's a really a lot of richness in "The Big Time" and thinking of especially what you have said, JM, about like people from the future being sort of our enemies. And it kind of feels reminiscent to me a little bit of Moore. And I definitely see the Leinster though, "Sidewise in Time" as well.
Nate:
Yeah, the Moore you mean the "Vintage Season?"
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely some clear similarities there. I mean, we get all these like, I don't even say it's random mashups of people from various different time periods, but yeah, how people from the far future would go back to ancient Rome or whatever. In this case, they're not there for tourism, but they would probably be perceived by that world in a totally different way.
JM:
Right.
Nate:
It's just kind of interesting to think about all the little stitches in here through time that we get of people from various times, not only meeting up in this, I would even call it an alternate reality, like the timeline and continuum here is just so fluid and flexible. It's almost like anything can happen at any time and change anything though, I guess we'll see in one of the later stories that's not exactly how it works, but it is kind of, and it just gives everything a very weird, but interesting feeling.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Pretty recently, I was talking with a friend of mine after class about time travel stories. And it was right around the time I just finished reading "The Big Time" and was reading some of the other stories we'll be talking about. And sort of like how the ripple effect and the butterfly effect and how differently Leiber tackles that in this story and in the other stories that we'll be covering. It's just a really interesting way of looking at timelines and how we view the past and present and future.
Nate:
And there's certainly other takes on it in popular media that I want to mention later. But yeah, he does have a very interesting take on it. And the way it plays out both in "The Big Time" and the other stories is like almost completely different. So it's not like the other stories are "The Big Time, part II" and "The Big Time, part III". They're just like totally different takes in their own way on this weird universe that we get. Some of them don't even mention the time travel war at all. We just like kind of get this little snippet view, whereas here we kind of get a front and center view. But in a interesting and I guess unique way in that we don't get the full picture at all, we just get this like one strange piece of it with a lot of major players or at least major players in that they do a lot in the universe compared to some of our other characters.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's interesting that like the other stories sort of like just add layers. There's not really like one central, even like you were saying this isn't like a full view of everything that's going on in this universe, but all together they kind of make all these pieces that sort of fit together in a really interesting way.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
And I think another interesting thing is a lot of these stories were published more or less around the same time. So people were taking in these stories in the same first couple of months.
JM:
He submitted three stories that took place in the same universe to three competitive markets and he wondered if that was really a smart thing to do. This is the usual kind of Fritz Leiber kind of disarming tendency where he's like, yeah, I don't know if I did the right thing. But because indeed, I think a lot of people who read "The Big Time" are not actually aware that there are stories connected to it. That's not a very publicized thing. And in fact, I didn't realize that for a long time. To the point where I think I was actually getting ready to do the Hugos There guest spot. And that was kind of when I realized, oh, wait a minute, there's a whole bunch of other stories. And the main character from "The Big Time" has a whole other story. What?
So it's not like nowadays where, you know, everybody has their big universe that they they publicize their big series. And it's all a big event published every couple years. There's a big 800 page doorstopper set in the whatever universe. Yeah, this is a totally different climate, right?
So one of the scary things that I didn't 100% pick up on the first time I read it, and which is kind of more apparent to me each time I go, is that the time periods described in the book in "The Big Time", and the different times that are alluded to and there are many of them, including contemporary ones to Fritz Leiber's time, are not really the time periods that we know. Things have obviously changed a lot.
Nate:
Yep. Yep.
JM:
And it's pretty scary, some of the things that he describes. And you realize the kind of the small time that the people lived in before they came to the big time, which is wherever they were recruited from. Do you guys think this counts as military science fiction?
Nate:
Not really.
JM:
It doesn't really feel like it.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I wouldn't personally didn't feel that it would.
Nate:
I mean, there's obvious like influence from the Cold War and that general feeling of paranoia and mutual espionage and kind of technology transfer. But I wouldn't say military stuff, like military science fiction to me just has a very, I don't know, like almost like pro patriotic, it almost feels like it's a, I don't know, it just feels like a whole totally different vibe than this.
Gretchen:
I feel like Leiber's work is a lot more about the repercussions and like the effects that it has on the people involved. And I feel like the military sci-fi that I know about just doesn't go into with the sort of depth that Leiber kind of here is exploring. It kind of focuses on, it is about war, but in a different aspect than military fiction sci-fi usually does.
Nate:
Yeah, there's like a lot of, I wouldn't say glorification, but focus on like the pomp and circumstance of the military. I mean, I think of like Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" or "The Mote in God's Eye" or something like that, where we get into all the minute details of like the space ranks of the military and what certain officers function is and what your duty is to the military and why the military is awesome and stuff like that. And none of this is really present here. I mean, we are dealing with an army who is actually going out to fight in a war, but I don't know, that just like never really feels like it's the focus of the story. It's just kind of like in the background and something that happens to be happening while the events of this story is playing out.
JM:
Yeah, and I think that might be one reason why it's good to reread this short novel because there's a lot of explanation given in Greta's character voice, but he does kind of throw you in right away, right? And you don't understand how it all fits together right away. I mean, right from the beginning, you do get an explanation of what the change war is, and that's really cool. But in general, I think it's hard to see the full picture until you're done almost. And it sort of comes to you piece by piece.
And speaking about Heinlein, Leiber obviously kind of admired him because he does refer to him a few times in a couple of these stories, actually. And there is the opening quotes from most of the chapters of this book, which I had a weird feeling about because I'll talk about them a little later, but I really liked a lot of the quotes that start the chapters. But the way he attributes them is not very, he's not being very detailed about it. He just kind of gives the name of the author. He doesn't give a scene or a book title or anything like that. And I kind of thought, oh, maybe he did that on purpose, because like it's the change war. Did these people actually say these things? So I went and looked up everything. And yeah, it's all real quotes, except for the one that's attributed to Autonomous, which is just attributed to Fritz Leiber now. So yeah, I don't know.
Gretchen:
It would have been fun if he did throw in a couple of fake ones. That would have been pretty cool.
Nate:
Yeah, especially something tied in the in-universe lore. We've seen that in a couple books, which I think is always an interesting approach.
Gretchen:
Yeah, thinking of even "Wounded Sky" from our last episode with the fake science papers that she references.
Nate:
Yeah, that stuff's always fun.
JM:
He shows off a lot of his reading knowledge, but it's not in a pretentious way. It's actually usually in a really fun way. I think not just being, oh, "look at me. I'm well read". Like he tries to really find things that are appropriate. And he has a lot of fun, I guess, not just with the quotes, but even Greta, the first person narrator of this book, she does a lot of name dropping. There's a lot of like literary references and stuff like that, which I think he's having a lot of amusement with. And even when you read his autobiographical essay, he does that a lot. And he'll just throw in something. And sometimes it'll surprise you like he makes a reference to the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock at one point, I didn't expect that. My old teachers and my dad know who Stephen Leacock is, but I didn't really. That's kind of cool. And of course, it was a reference to Shakespeare, because something about the names of various characters, supposedly Italian characters and Shakespeare plays and apparently Leacock made up one called Solunio.
Why don't we talk about what happens in this book then? So before we do that, I guess, so the book is narrated from the point of view of a woman named Greta, and we get her voice through the entirety. So I guess before I kind of go through the happenings in this book, what do you guys think of the narrative voice?
Nate:
I think it was one of the weaker parts of the book. I like Greta as a character, but he just doesn't capture her voice in a way that some other authors are able to capture women's voices. There's some passages that just seem a little off, like he's trying a little bit too hard to be feminine. That just doesn't entirely work for me, but it's not something like later Heinlein, like "Number of the Beast", where I'm like rolling my eyes so far out of my head that I feel like I'm gonna break my skull, you know?
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I feel that it was weaker too, but not too much. I think that it was mostly just, I can see it being written at the time that it was written, I guess. It does feel that it's a little dated, but not enough that it took me out of the story itself.
Nate:
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Yeah.
JM:
So I think, I don't know, I like it. I mean, maybe it's just because I like his style, but I also think that he captured a pretty unique and fun voice to narrate the story. And I can hear a voice in my head when I was reading this like the whole time. And I mean, there are some parts, yes, they're a bit actually uncomfortable and they have to do with a certain character that we'll get to later. But like, I don't really think that, I don't know, I don't think that we're meant to, I mean, we're meant to sympathize with her, like we're meant to kind of feel sorry for her a little bit, I think. And whether you think that that's like, I don't know, unfortunate that you have to pity the main character who's narrating the story, because maybe she's not quite as resilient as she could be sometimes, or she's not like, she doesn't stand out for herself the way maybe she should. But at the same time, I think that that's the narration does a pretty good job of justifying that. And it doesn't make it good, it just makes it kind of relatable.
Gretchen:
I will say that all of the stories except one are first person narration, I do like the effect that it has on the stories and how it kind of does show the events from like a particular fixed point, rather than having a sort of third person narration. I do like that aspect of it.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely. And I do like Greta as a character, and I like her focus on as the focal point of the story and her role in the story itself. It's just some of the word choices here. Again, I'm being really minorly nitpicky here. I mean, when I say it's one of the weaker parts of the book, I mean, the weaker part of a strong book to me is still strong. But I mean, yeah, there were a couple of times where I didn't note down any examples. But again, the word choice felt a little bit off, not necessarily in a bad way, just in an off way, just something that doesn't sit 100% right now, not offensive or bad or anything like that, it just I guess maybe doesn't land as well as it could have. But it's a relatively minor nitpick. It didn't really hamper my enjoyment of the work overall.
JM:
So I mean, I think the other thing is it is supposed to be a little bit corny at times, like not in a I mean, I'm not saying that in a derogatory way. But I think I do think like there's a certain amount of cornball, not dialogue, but just like the way the way it's expressed and stuff, it feels sort of of its time. In a way that I think is very charming, personally, not like it doesn't put me off or anything like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it is pretty endearing, even when it does a bland, as Nate said, it's not something that again, takes you out of the story or makes you want to not read it.
JM:
Yeah. And I mean, I do think it fits her personality too. And I think a lot of it is her attempt to cushion her bad feelings with silly humor, I think a lot of the time that maybe doesn't quite always come off. But like, you know, she's trying, right? I don't know, maybe it's just because I'm seeing this, like usually I would say if I wasn't into the book so much, I'd be like, oh, that's just Fritz doing his thing. But because I'm into it, and I'm following the narrative voice, I'm more like, oh, that's just how Greta, that's just how she's talking and how she's trying to reason things out and trying to deal with her emotions, which are sometimes pretty negative. She has a problem, a couple of major problems, I think, that are expressed through the narrative. So like, while she's not, she's a good person, and she's a fun person, she's definitely an unreliable narrator as well, I think.
(music: spacey synth, high pitched trails)
plot summary, spoiler discussion
So everybody is affected by the change war. But most don't know it. The spiders and snakes, sort of comic booky names there, they want to change everything to fit their particular designation of reality. Is it ideological? Is it merely a state of the world or the galaxy or the universe that they want to maintain? It's never made entirely clear, because yeah, our book takes place in a recuperation station, which the narrator Greta refers to as the place.
It's a kind of drop off point for soldiers in this great temporal war. And Greta and her colleagues are sort of combination nurses and entertainers. And yes, that does seem to include entertainment of an intimate nature, at least sometimes.
Nate:
Yeah, that was definitely the sense I got.
JM:
Yeah, for sure. The place is like a combination nightclub and zeppelin hangar. Or like a stage set, in fact, with various eccentrically attired and behaving characters popping in and out at regular intervals. And Greta is a former native of Chicago, probably from some time in the first half of the 20th century. But it's not really our first half of the 20th century. And she's a party girl, is how she describes herself. And she was taken out of time and space at age 29, apparently by the spiders for whom she works. Her Scandinavian parents had wanted her to be a doctor, but she's very disturbed by medical stuff, especially where the spiders are concerned. They tend to invert people.
Her suggestion is that by the time of the story, she's been there a very long time. She does get the occasional vacation from a place, though currently those are off limits. And she likes to go to Renaissance Italy, it's a favorite spot for her. The downside is that she has to go piggybacking with soldiers in the temporal war. And who knows what they might be up to there after they drop her off at her destination.
There are also weird surgical practices the spiders carry out. And the man named Doc in the place is supposed to be responsible for this, but he's too inebriated all the time. Sid is nominally in charge. And there's also a Beauregard, a piano player. Doc, the hopeless drunk from Nazi-occupied Tsarist Russia. And Sid feels sorry for Doc and covers for him. The spiders have serious punishments for dereliction of duty, it's hinted. Maud, the old girl, an experienced woman from the 23rd century. And the new girl, Lili, who is from around the First World War sometime.
So, three girls and three guys from various times and places. And everyone has nightmares pretty much nightly. Anyway, on the big day in question, they're all hanging out and getting ready for a pickup. There are lots of technological marvels in the place, but two of them worth highlighting right now are the major and minor maintainers. And the minor maintainer is for environmental control, and the major maintainer maintains the portal into the time gates or whatever they use.
There's a pickup they attune and they tune in the maintainer and bring in the soldiers. They could be from any time and place. They could be alien. They could be, yeah, from billion years in the past or future, as we'll see. But the three they bring in now are Erich, a Nazi soldier of the Third Reich, and Commandant of Toronto, where he seems to have a reputation rivaling the hangman of Prague, a Roman named Marcus, and a guy who looks like a Greek god, but is actually an Englishman and a pacifist in budding, as it turns out. So, this part totally reminds me of Schachner, a story that we read a couple months ago.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
Yeah. The three are agitated, and Erich, the ostensible or ostentatious leader, finds them difficult to control. Some kind of operation in St. Petersburg went wrong, and they pulled out quickly at Erich's insistence. Sid messes with the gravity to break up the fight between Erich and the new guy Bruce. Bruce is a soldier from what Erich calls World War One, but he knows Bruce is really a poet. And Bruce diffuses attention by throwing down two left-handed gloves and complaining about how much of an injustice this all is, and in the end focuses on the shoddy equipment. Typical British guy, I guess, in that sense.
Lili fawns over him and slaps the new glove on him somehow, and suddenly he doesn't have to struggle anymore. Is it love in the air? She recognizes his name and has read some of his poetry, she says. Erich and Greta are lovers, and everybody knows what a filthy Nazi Erich is, but a spider soldier in the change war, well, they're all the same, really.
Erich and his gang had to go to St. Petersburg to get Einstein back from the snakes in 1883, apparently. And the weird discomforture of a Nazi soldier, "rescuing Albert Einstein, though were they really", is not really lost on me. So, so in the timeline, Greta and Erich are familiar with. Russia was conquered, and the Nazis took over the whole West, including the United States, for a good 50 years. And they associate the snakes with communism and the East, though how accurate that is, we're not really sure.
Erich thinks there may be snakes among any of them, because they have spies everywhere. So both Erich and Greta start to get depressed. And Greta tells bad linguistic puns to cheer them up. It's just really, really great, actually.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Corny but great. "Got mittens". But Erich laughs like he's dying. And so yeah, there's now nine, the workers and the three Hussars, because the opening is Shakespeare quote referring to the three Hussars, and now we have them. So, but just as they're finally diffusing the tension and starting to throw a party, something shows up on the major maintainer. And it's a spider distress call. Something's not right, as the indications keep changing. Sid thinks he recognizes a person, and then he doesn't. And it's a part or something from thousands of years in the past.
So they bring three more in from the void. Kaby, a warrior woman, and two extra terrestrials. A lunan from the ancient distant past, and a venusian solder from the distant future.
Nate:
I really like these alien characters.
JM:
Yeah. The lunan is a six tentacled telepathic moon creature, Ilhilihis hence forth called Illy in the book, thankfully. The lunans decimated their planet with atomics a billion years before our time, and left behind a whole lot of craters and stuff. And it's cool how Greta reviews in her mind things to keep in mind when interacting with and comforting an injured alien. It's quite sweet, and the two of them are obviously fond of one another. And she describes him as a really tall cross between a spider monkey and a Persian cat. I think it has more to do with personality than anything else, but I can't really say for sure.
But she's quick to banish all thoughts of interspecies romance, though, by saying, how could their affection be anything but platonic? Well, still, they pair up. He needs her company, and they really get along. And Erich isn't that bothered. They have a fun interaction at the start where Illy challenges her clockingly and asks, has she ever even bandaged a Terran octopus? She has, in fact, one from the future, but she doesn't tell him.
So they've come with a very large bronze chest decorated with all sorts of threatening symbology. And there seems to have been a terrible battle. Kaby, the warrior, describes it rapturously, but in the end it overcomes her and she bursts into tears. And it all comes out when she continues. So they were defending Crete again. It's apparently a stronghold in time. And the snakes used a weapon to melt their guns, and though they were rescued by a small craft called an express room, piloted by Sid's old acquaintance, they are attacked somehow and are exposed to the time winds. Kaby keeps sending out her distress call, and Benson was the guy with the mission. And he told Kaby how to operate the chest, which is an atomic bomb.
So they were supposed to go to Sid's and pick up three black hussars. And they got him there, and more. But they're supposed to go to Alexandria and detonate. To save Rome, I think. And Sid is furious. It's a recuperation station, not a battle post, he says. But of course they're all panicky about having the live bomb. Is it armed? So they want to introvert or throw it out. So to introvert, in this case, means totally isolate the place. There's no hope after that. They'd be permanently untethered from the cosmos. Or so I thought. Turns out not to be true. And I was still a little unclear on how introversion works, because they make it seem like they, well, once they take that step, there's no turning back. But I guess once they get the device back that's missing in the story, they're able to fix it in the end.
But Doc has an idea, but nobody can understand him. And poor guy. Illy is a thinker, and the satyr Sevensee just wrestles time and space around. So they don't have any idea about atomics. But they debate stridently over the bomb for a while, and Erich literally jumps on it. Bruce's trying to get them to convert to pacifism. But Erich the Nazi commandant is having none of that. And meanwhile Greta knows they've all been moved by Bruce, though. And Erich tries his best to ridicule him. But Lili, of course, as well as Beau and Doc and the satyr Sevensee, want to join him. And they all turn to Greta for her answer, and she's the one that notices, yes, the major maintainer is gone.
So they appear to be introverted now, in fact, and they speculate on whether the introversion happened with the maintainer before it vanished, or if the banishment is the cause of the introversion. And Greta gets it. Introversion equals scuttling. So the packages containing the ghost girls, which Greta calls envelopes, are all flat. Have they escaped? So what are these ghost girls? Well, they seem to be extra entertainment that they keep around. And there are remnants of people who existed in time and are now, I guess, wiped out of history. And all that's left of them is a vague remnant of a human being. And it seems very cruel that they use these people for these purposes.
But what about all these doppelgangers? Greta thinks they could vanish at any moment, which always seems like a possibility in the big time anyway. It does sound like certain artifacts or symbols or rituals are meant to prevent that, or at least protect individuals against it. They set the place apart, and Greta and Sid have eerie feelings about the two ghost girls who were in the room when it happened. And they finally don't settle down, glumly and recklessly, up and about, and doing useless things. And Greta starts musing.
Gretchen:
(reading from chapter 10)
Lili and Bruce stood up, still gabbing intensely at each other, and Illy began to pick out with one tentacle a little tune in the high keys that didn't sound like anything on God's earth. "Where do they get all the energy?" I wondered.
As soon as I asked myself that, I knew the answer and I began to feel the same way myself. It wasn't energy; it was nerves, pure and simple.
Change is like a drug, I realized—you get used to the facts never staying the same, and one picture of the past and future dissolving into another maybe not very different but still different, and your mind being constantly goosed by strange moods and notions, like nightclub lights of shifting color with weird shadows between shining right on your brain.
The endless swaying and jogging is restful, like riding on a train.
You soon get to like the movement and to need it without knowing, and when it suddenly stops and you're just you and the facts you think from and feel from are exactly the same when you go back to them—boy, that's rough, as I found out now.
The instant we got Introverted, everything that ordinarily leaks into the place, wake or sleep, had stopped coming, and we were nothing but ourselves and what we meant to each other and what we could make of that, an awfully lonely, scratchy situation.
I decided I felt like I'd been dropped into a swimming pool full of cement and held under until it hardened.
I could understand the others bouncing around a bit. It was a wonder they didn't hit the Void. Maud seemed to be standing it the best, maybe she'd got a little preparation from the long watches between stars; and then she is older than all of us, even Sid, though with a small "o" in "older."
The restless work of the search for the Maintainer had masked the feeling, but now it was beginning to come full force. Before the search, Bruce's speech and Erich's interruptions had done a passable masking job too. I tried to remember when I'd first got the feeling and decided it was after Erich had jumped on the bomb, about the time he mentioned poetry. Though I couldn't be sure. Maybe the Maintainer had been Introverted even earlier, when I'd turned to look at the Ghost-girls. I wouldn't have known. Nuts!
Believe me, I could feel that hardened cement on every inch of me. I remembered Bruce's beautiful picture of a universe without Big Change and decided it was about the worst idea going. I went on eating, though I wasn't so sure now it was a good idea to keep myself strong.
JM:
She wonders about opportunity and motive, and mentally examines everyone else's. The maintainer is supposed to have a flashing light when it's introverted, but no one was paying attention because of Bruce. And she ultimately figures it was probably Lili at the behest of Bruce, even though she has doubts about this theory. The woman is putty in the hands of the man she loves theory, that is. And that is a direct quote.
Lili and Bruce argue about whether they can open the door or not, and Bruce thinks there has to be a way. Lili breaks down in front of Greta and talks about her resurrection and how she wishes she hadn't done it. She talks of remembering two different lives for herself, dying of the same disease in 1929 and in 1955 Nazi-occupied London. It wasn't much liquor in the 50s, she recalls, so it took a lot longer. But she thought Bruce had died at Passchendaele! Incredible. She had the thing for him all this time, even though she only knew his poetry. And that doesn't really happen, I say, but Leiber might be the sort of guy who believes it just might.
Now, she's basically got some kind of spirituality thing on, because she's now met Bruce in real life here in the place. And she talks of the strange Japanese man who came to her with swords and a futuristic weapon and asked, "Voulez-vous vivre, madamoiselle?" Greta is deeply affected by Lili's tale. And she realizes she'd been a little harsh toward her all this time.
Lili insists Bruce didn't notice the thing, but she's still happy there are no change winds now. How could she not be? And I love the way Greta responds to this. Lili's all like, this is an unbeatable opportunity! And Greta's all, she wants to serve her big love thing up to us on a platter, but it doesn't cut or cook that way. So what's this big opportunity? She says to herself, hang on to your hat, Greta, it's hope!
She starts to think of what life would be like forever, just hanging out in the place, and it cracks her up and not in a good way. Ms. Polly Andry, sadder children, the place Peace Packers's football team, a crucified Bruce, a martyr to his cause. But now they can't get out, so what's the point?
Maud starts menstruating, so they know they're somehow back in the small time. Drunken Erich throws a big rant against women, and he's just, I guess, both letting off steam and trying to goad people, which is something he's really, really good at. But of course, this baby cosmos thing wouldn't appeal to him at all. Bruce punches him in the face and calls him Loki. Meanwhile, Doc has been carrying around this weird modern art sculpture of spears and whirly things, and he hands it to the furious Erich, who tries to smash it, and it does it, so Erich now leaps on top of the bomb and primes it.
Greta is able to pray several different times that he makes a mistake entering the combination, but no, Kaby gave them accurately what the combination was. And now it's get out or die. There'll be a sun in a bag soon. So the warriors seem oddly delighted. Erich guessed what Greta has, of course, that Lili did it at the behest of Bruce, or sort of, and of course he covered for her. There's a physical fight now in the place, and Kaby the Amazon really kicks ass, but Erich the Nazi just stands there smugly.
Kaby takes charge of Lili and threatens her with inversion, without anesthetic. It's Greta's worst nightmare, on top of the fact they're probably going to be blown up. Everyone is in favor of extracting the information from Lili at whatever cost. With Illy, the alien, wincing and saying, don't mind me, I'm just sensitive, get on with the girl, make her tell.
Then Greta looks at the weird sculpture Doc was trying to show everyone, and figures it out. Doc was trying to say earlier to invert the bomb, and the glove Lili gave Bruce, a right-handed one, was his left-handed one inverted, turned in the fourth dimension. The weird sculpture is the major maintainer, which Lili placed in the art gallery of the place. Doc knows everything that's in the art gallery, and that thing doesn't belong.
While everyone is distracted by Lili and Kaby, Greta goes and inverts the thing back to its proper maintainerness. And then they can flick back the introversion switch, which I had the impression was permanent, but it seems that it's not. So the change winds hit again, and Greta is so relieved, like an alcoholic, getting her fix. Sid demonstrates his acting chops, and fools everyone into thinking there is a spider lord visiting them from headquarters. Greta is really impressed with how good of an actor he is, and Leiber's theater love shows itself yet again. But nobody seems that pleased with Greta, least of all Sid, and it's a bit sad. Erich and Bruce and Mark are all buddies again. Sid isn't being nice, and she seemed to think Illy the alien would speak up for her or something. But Lili does recount what she did, but something about it makes Greta think nobody is convinced. So now she's all alone. And the love level has been punctured too. Lili is disillusioned and Bruce is washed up.
Yeah, all things change, Mark says, but nothing is really lost. Bullshit, thinks Greta. They tune in Egypt and get ready to materialize. Illy talks to Greta and tries to explain his conception of the change war, not really a war at all, but an evolution. Snakes represent wisdom, spiders, patience. Adam and Cain were demons, and Illy's had a billion years to study terror and its history.
And there's a poem at the end, that's a really cool song that they all sing, and that's basically the end of the book.
So it's a very short novel, somewhat say, I guess, a novella nowadays. I think the audiobook version is about three hours long, so yeah. Really, really cool reading experience, I think, that I probably would want to visit again someday. I really like a lot of the hints that are given here, so why don't we sort of talk about, now that we've kind of done the, I guess, plot synopsis, we can talk about some of the things that are dropped into the text, lots of information dropped in, big lumps of exposition, but they seem pretty quite natural in the way Greta tells it.
Nate:
Yeah, so I guess one of the things that are dropped in about, you know, this whole story and the nature of change and all that is Greta herself. So what do you guys think about the idea that Greta is really Greta Garbo, but her past and history changed several times over to be Greta Forzane?
JM:
I don't know. She says specifically she refers to Greta Garbo at the beginning, says she's not as pretty as her or something like that.
Nate:
Yeah, and I mean, there's a couple references to her and some of the other stories and, you know, Fritz Leiber obviously had a thing for her, but it just kind of makes me wonder this whole thing of identity and history and the timeline and all that, you know, maybe. I don't know, that was just kind of one thing that was popping in my head when I was reading this.
JM:
Yeah, I definitely think that is a part of it. I mean, there is a lot about identity and how people can be changed by these things and not even know it. And that's, I actually made a list of all the horrible things that are alluded to in the book. And that was one of them, basically, is that, yeah, like your personality can change. And you might have a slight feeling that something is off, but you obviously not realize it because this is your new personality, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting part of the novel, even the idea of the zombies and this whole concept of you can be pulled from your timeline at the moment where it seems like you're about to die. But because of changes, you are partially helping to create that timeline completely shifts and alters. And you can die sooner or later than that point.
JM:
Yeah. There's actually a lot of different names that are mentioned, different categories, I guess, of individuals and different things that are pointed out. And one of them is that, okay, so there's demons and zombies and ghosts, and the demons can be active in and outside the cosmos. So I guess outside is eternity or the big time. And the zombies act dead when they were in the cosmos, since they have already died in the past. And the ghosts pilot the zombies.
So, yeah, Doc is the oldest inhabitant of the place. And he comes from this past that clearly doesn't exist in our current timeline. Again, there's like, basically this indication that a lot of elements of the Second World War happened earlier. And yeah, the Nazis took over Russia like a long time ago. Essentially, it seems like it's a means to an end kind of thing, because everybody kind of acknowledges, oh, Nazis are terrible, right? But we're the spiders, and we're supposed to represent the West in this story, right? Because it is a Cold War metaphor, kind of. And so the means to an end conception is that, yeah, we have decades of Nazi-occupied countries, but in the end, it'll be worth it because something better will emerge. And obviously, people living in that time period would, they would not think such a thing, considering how many people were probably butchered and how miserable it's described. Greta basically says she was on the run, and she was pretty much like a victim living in 1950s Chicago or something like that. And she has this really unfortunate Stockholm Syndrome thing going on with Erich. And that's really uncomfortable. And like, I'm not saying it's a negative quality of the book, but it's definitely an uncomfortable quality that makes you kind of, I guess, question Greta's psychology and how damaged she must really be.
Gretchen:
Yeah, and I believe it's Beau who is from a version of the past where the Civil War wasn't fought?
JM:
I think so, yeah. Something like that is mentioned, yeah. And there are these cosmissions as well, which are these kind of mythical beings from the way, way in the future who seem to be immune to all the changes. But like, nobody really knows anything about them. But there's also a speculation that they might be actually the generals in the change war.
So another horrible thing about this is that I don't really think like a war like this can ever end.
Nate:
No, I mean, there's no end in sight. I mean, there's like no goal, really. I mean, traditional wars, you try to take a piece of territory or defend against an enemy who's invading you, whereas this the fighting and grounds that they're fighting on are so abstract, they're just fighting to fight because always been done and always will be done, in a sense like the US and Soviet Union Cold War felt at times, I'm sure, to the people who were living through it for the decades that it was going on. You know, always the promise of brighter future while the superpowers are meddling in the affairs of everywhere else throughout the entire world to benefit their particular cause.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
And of course, after that, we have the forever wars of like the Middle East. So it kind of feels even more relevant than it did back then.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah.
JM:
And it does seem like there is like an end point that they know about, which is like billions of years of the in the future, where I guess the final decision is made. But it's so far in the future that they're always preparing for it. So it's like, yeah, there's no way to end it because as long as there is a little bit of one side or the other left, they're always going to be trying to alter things. And it seems like it's a lot of work to alter things too. It's pretty much specified here and in one of the other stories that there's always maximal resistance to everything that they try to do. That's, I guess, why it has to be such a massive struggle all the time. You can't just go in and alter something. You know, you have to do it with the heavy guns, so to speak.
She says, "all things meet with maximal resistance always. Otherwise, the first change at the beginning of time would have wiped out everything, like the birthplaces of all the people in the room." Also, the change war makes people stare all apparently and women no longer can give birth. And there's no menstrual cycles. And there's all these horrible surgeries that the spiders do. But, I mean, it's pretty cool, I guess. You can turn somebody inside out and put all their insides on the outside, but it's probably pretty nightmarish to think about.
Nate:
I would imagine so, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah. I don't blame Greta for being very disturbed by it.
JM:
Oh, yeah. Because apparently this was done to her once.
Gretchen:
Was it something that she just witnessed or was it something that happened to her?
JM:
I guess she must have witnessed it, but there was something that was done to her when she came back, I think. And she doesn't really go into it, I guess, because she doesn't like remembering it. It seemed like something was done to her, and that's part of the reason why it's just like, I don't know. They probably did give her anesthetic on like what they threatened to do with Lili, but yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, that's just another thing of this kind of story is a timeline is so fluid, you can never really be sure of what has actually happened. Which I think is a neat, neat part of it too. I mean, it really takes the unreliable narrator aspect to an extreme in a way.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Oh, yeah. Even that extending to the quotes that start the chapters for me, I'm like, okay, is he just giving it like that because it might not be a real quote? I did find, I think, pretty much all of them, but I wasn't familiar with some of the source material. There's a lot of a lot of them. Let's see, there is Shakespeare, of course, somebody named Hodgson, who is not in fact William Hope Hodgson, but a poet named Ralph Hodgson, who wrote a poem called "Time You Old Gypsy Man". And the quote is "last week in Babylon, last night in Rome", which I don't know, for some reason, it's a very minimal quote, but it sounds like a song title or something like that. I picture it being like the name of a David Bowie song or something like that or just like that. Yeah, I don't know. Yes, Robert Graves, John Webster, Edgar Allan Poe, Henrik Ibsen, something called Aucassin et Nicolette, which is apparently a 12th century French medieval song poem, which is a really cool quote in here about, what's it? It was my favorite one. Hang on, I'll just, that is pretty short, I'll read it out. It's really interesting the way he picks out the excerpts to begin the chapters, because sometimes they really reflect in an interesting way what's going on in the story. There's everything from like an excerpt from a report on the atomic bomb to, yeah, like mostly poetry and plays and stuff like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, I know one of the people also quoted with Spenser, which part of "The Faerie Queene" for one of my classes, because he is so vague with the attribution, I was wondering, did I read that part in the section we read or was that from another part?
JM:
And he quotes "The Duchess of Malfi", which you read last year, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah.
JM:
The quote from the French medieval song poem goes, "hell is a place for me for to hell go the fine churchmen and the fine knights killed an a tourney or in some grand war, the brave soldiers and the gallant gentlemen. With them will I go. There go also the fair gracious ladies who have lovers two or three beside their lord. There go the gold and the silver, the sables and ermine. There go the harpers and the minstrels and the kings of the earth."
Yeah, I don't know, I like that one a lot for some reason. The Poe one was from one of his detective stories when they're going to, they're basically tearing the place apart trying to find the maintainer. And although in his autobiography, Leiber doesn't really talk a lot about Poe, I definitely feel in many of his stories that he must be a major influence. He actually had a whole piece inspired by the essay Poe wrote about the automated chess machine.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
Maelzel's Chessman. Yeah, yeah. I can't remember the name of this. I think the story is called Poor Superman or something like that. And he really gets into it. It's cool. And just kind of doing this made me remember a lot of the Leiber stories of right over the years and how neat a lot of them are. And so yeah, after finishing this, I did read a bunch more stories, some that I had read a long time ago and some that were new to me. And definitely wanting to reread some of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stuff too.
Nate:
Yeah, that's something I want to check out. I mean, it certainly sounds like a lot of fun, short and sorcery stuff. But yeah, I mean, this one would definitely benefit from a reread for my perspective for all the reasons that we've mentioned. I mean, the fluid timeline and the unreliable narrator in particular. I mean, this is all about the character moments and all the weird stuff he shoves in here. I would think more so than any of the themes or any kind of plot that we have going on. I don't know. It feels like a golden age version of "No Exit" or something like that. It's a very cool book.
JM:
Yeah. And so much of it is implied, right? So again, that's kind of one of the reasons why it's such an awesome thing to, I guess, get into more of the ones. But a lot of it, of course, is dialogue. I really like Bruce's impassioned speeches. And he brings up a lot of cool points. And I like how he's talking about the platonic dialogues. And he's like, they're kind of assuming that there's some sacred things from the past. But how would they even know if they forgot them, right?
And I don't know, like the ending of the book is to me really sad, even though there's kind of, you know, hope in what Illy is trying to tell Greta. I don't think Greta is entirely convinced. And she's mostly thinking about her people, right? And her people is the people that she knows now in the place. And okay, yeah, she was very cynical about Bruce's scheme and Lili's, like, happiness about the little group that they're going to have there and their own private cosmos and everything like that. And she's like, not too happy about it. But at the same time, it's like, she really feels the sadness at the end, Lili is not like, I don't know, she's kind of disillusioned because Bruce has gone back with his war buddies after all, and all the talk of peace and goodwill and stuff like that. In the end, everything just kind of goes back to the way it was before.
Gretchen:
Yeah, and honestly, even worse with how suspicious they all are of Greta, especially Sidney, it feels, it's very lonely. It's a very lonely ending.
JM:
Yeah, I do feel like there should have been ghost boys as well as ghost girls though. Probably.
Nate:
Yeah, you'd probably get that nowadays. I don't think in the 50s, a lot of people were pushing that element too hard. But you never know, we might find something that yeah.
JM:
But again, like, I think, I mean, I think that the concept is pretty well expressed in last story. I mean, we're, we're talking about the 1950s here and like, Leiber is definitely, especially in his essay, which was written in the 80s, you know, his autobiography, he's like, really expresses a lot of, a lot of open mindedness about stuff. And definitely he's aware of a lot of his social changes that have been going on. And he doesn't really make excuses for himself. But he says, you know, his upbringing was like, his parents were really into this theater thing, and they were cosmopolitan their way. But they were also quite conservative. And, you know, he's trying to learn about different things. And I guess when he finally did meet the person that was to be his wife, he hadn't really had a lot of experience. And he's still kind of trying things out, I guess, and learning about the world. And he relates a lot of fun anecdotes. And I think there's a, it's an interesting contrast between him and de Camp, who we read about sometime back last year. And, you know, I read his autobiography, and it was a lot longer than this. It also had fun anecdotes. But I was certainly a less charmed, I guess he could say. I mean, I was, I was kind of amused by him. And I would be, I guess, forgiving of old uncle de Camp or something like that. But you kind of get the feeling that when he is coming across as being a little bit, like his sense of humor comes off pretty misogynistic. And he kind of means it. Whereas, I don't think Fritz is like that. I think he's really trying. And I think a lot of the time when he, he does like to write things from the woman's perspective. And he does like to do crazy things like suggest that, Hey, there's a lot of witches in this world, you know, and he's trying to understand, you know, he's trying to work it out in his own way. I think, I think he does it from a place of sympathy and understanding at least where he's coming from.
Gretchen:
I don't necessarily think that comes across as much in "Lest Darkness Fall", when we kind of talked a little bit when we read that about the portrayal of women in that work.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah.
JM:
Yeah, he does like definitely in comparison to some of his contemporaries, I think he does seem, at least by the time he's an older person, especially he does seem a lot more attuned to, I guess, the struggles of not just women, but minorities and even the LGBTQ community and stuff like that. He does mention that a bit in his autobiography and talks about how he was trying to understand a lot of things in the 30s and trying to figure out his own sexuality and stuff like that and talking to gay friends and getting their advice and stuff like that and wondering what kind of person he was and what it would be like to change his identity and stuff like that. And I think that he works a lot of this out in his writing. And again, you know, it's just like, yes, he writes a whole atmospheric horror story set in an urban setting, he writes fantasy, he writes science fiction about time travel and the future and stuff, but you always get that sense that there's a lot of him and everything that he's writing.
It's not just making up stuff, you know, he's got his own personal interests that always come to the fore and pretty much in everything. The tone can vary a little bit. Fafhrd and Mouser, yeah, it's like wacky fantasy stuff, but it's also it has a lot of his fun loving side to it, which has a destructive side as well because of the alcoholism, especially those characters are always drinking.
And you read "Our Lady of Darkness" talks about him as an older fellow that narrator of "Our Lady of Darkness" is a writer named Franz Weston or something like that. So sounds a lot like Fritz Leiber. And he's living in San Francisco in an apartment, his wife's died like the year before. And he's basically been drunk the entire year and doesn't remember anything that happened. And so the book is that him trying to pick up the pieces and meanwhile discovering that he's coming to possession of a diary of Clark Ashton Smith. And he doesn't remember acquiring it, but it kind of ties into his fascination with urban horror and the idea that I guess a million people all congregated together in one place, thinking various thoughts, and power lines and subways and gas lines and all these different things that are interconnecting, but transmit power and which people who have certain knowledge can use to their advantage.
So again, it's witchcraft and curses and things like that are all fascinating to him. And I don't think I've ever read anybody quite describe what it would be like to be placed under a curse as well as Fritz Leiber can. He's done that in a number of stories that pretty unique take, you know, is something like, I guess you take for granted when you read fantasy and horror, it's like, oh, they're under a curse. Now they're going to have some problems. Because I would say 90% of his stuff is first person narration, like most of these stories as Gretchen pointed out. So you really, really get into the heads of his characters and what they're thinking. And yeah, they all have a bit of the Fritz voice. It's got a distinctive ring to it. Anyway, it's I have a really good time with it. Anyway, and I'm glad you guys really enjoyed this book too.
Nate:
Yep, definitely a lot of fun.
JM:
Cool.
Nate:
So should we check out the other things that are happening in the change war?
JM:
Yeah, why don't we go to the theater then?
Nate:
All right.
No comments:
Post a Comment