Introduction to
GONNA ROLL THE BONES:

The field of speculative fiction, oddly enough, tends to make specialists of its writers. There are alien ecologists such as Hal Clement, and poetic imagists such as Ray Bradbury, and world-destroyers such as Edmond Hamilton and A. E. van Vogt. There are all too few "renaissance" writers who span the speculative gamut from gothic fantasy to grommet-and-nozzle stories of "hard" science. And among these few jacks-of-all-forms, there are only a handful who can handle the tale of terror in a context of modern society.

Fritz Leiber, who as a two-time Hugo winner truly needs no introduction, is certainly the most ambidextrous of that handful. Born in Chicago in 1910, son of Shakespearean actors Fritz and Virginia Bronson Leiber, he was educated at the University of Chicago emerging with a Bachelor's in psychology with honors and a third-year Phi Beta Kappa. He has been an Episcopalian lay reader and attended General Theological Seminary in New York, acted in his father's touring company in 1935, done editorial work from 1937 through 1956 with one year teaching dramatics at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He was associate editor of Science Digest from 1945 to 1956 and has been a free-lance writer since.

For the benefit of historians, Fritz Leiber's first accepted story was "The Automatic Pistol," which appeared in Weird Tales for May 1940. His first published (and paid for) story was "Two Sought Adventure," the first of his memorable sword-and-sorcery series of Fahfred and the Grey Mouser, which saw publication in the August 1939 issue of Unknown. Among his fourteen books Leiber fans will warmly remember Conjure Wife, Gather, Darkness!, the 1958 and 1964 Hugo winners, The Big Time and The Wanderer, Night's Black Agents, A Pail of Air and the recent Tarzan and the Valley of Gold.

It is, incidentally, fitting that, of all the possible choices for writers to pen a new adventure employing the world-famous Edgar Rice Burroughs character, the job should have fallen to Fritz Leiber. His ability to bring not merely expertise but genuine poetry to anything he writes has kept him in the forefront of imaginative writing for over two decades. As demonstrated in the Tarzan novel, his wild talent for fusing the imaginative with the realistic is nonpareil. And as his contribution to this anthology, nothing could be more appropriate than the story Fritz has chosen to tell. For it singlehandedly explains why lines of demarcation between fantasy and science fiction can seldom be drawn.

"Gonna Roll the Bones" is Fritz Leiber's first short story in two years, as this introduction is written. It shows the Leiberesque conception of the Universe being unified by magic and science and superstition, as well as blatantly displaying the man's love affair with the English language. It is uncategorizable though it bears traces of pure horror, science fiction, the psychological fantasy and the Jungian explanations for the personal madness of our times. Insofar as prerequisites were established for stories for this collection, it satisfies estimably: the authors were asked to present "dangerous" visions, and I submit there are few more petrifying concepts than the one Fritz Leiber here proffers in finally naming the name of the Prince of Darkness.