Fritz Leiber is one of the durable masters of science fiction. For forty years he has been delighting his readers with a wide range of stories--from hard science fiction to widely acclaimed fantasy. Fritz Leiber, Jr., was born in Chicago and lived...

The element of change and the effect it has on human society is a persistent theme in Leiber's fiction, and he is one of the few science-fiction writers of his generation to consistently stay abreast of the cultural changes around him. Leiber, above all, has been aware that change—or evolution—is not only inevitable, but necessary to human growth. It is a theme that is most obvious in his Change War stories, but it can be found in subtler forms throughout his fiction. (pp. 13-14) Gather...

[Adept's Gambit], built around the characters of The Grey Mouser (personifying Harry Fischer) and the seven-foot sword-wielding giant Fafhrd (the romantic incarnation of Fritz Leiber, Jr.), is beyond question not only the first but the best of the entire series Leiber was to write about these characters…. From the moment that the spell is cast upon Fafhrd that temporarily changes every woman into a pig the instant he kisses her; on to the Grey Mouser's consultation with the seven-eyed N...

[In The Golden Bough Sir James Frazer deduced] that in essence primitive magic was not like primitive religion, as most observers had assumed, but was instead similar to science, in its belief that the universe was subject to "immutable laws, the operation of which can be foreseen and calculated precisely". The Golden Bough makes this claim overtly…. [And] it is a relatively short step from saying that magic is very like science to saying that it is actually a form of science. It is thi...