The Man Who Never Grew Young is the story of an eternal in a world where time flows backward: all around him, he sees people grow young and go back into their mothers’ wombs, but he is destined live for ever. Interestingly, Leiber says that both these stories “almost wrote themselves”. The story is a wonderful paean to mankind, determined to survive no matter what.Ī couple of stories are surreal vignettes, disturbing in their dark intensity. The story is told by the young son of the scientist, who has been born on this dismal dead planet. A scientist and his family have managed to survive by creating an almost-hermetically-sealed-room with a fire which is never allowed to go out: they replenish the oxygen periodically scooping the frozen layer from outside and allowing it to evaporate. The atmosphere has frozen in the absolute zero of space, the different constituents each freezing at a different temperature and forming layers atop the soil, with water at the bottom and oxygen at the top. Earth has been “abducted” by a passing dark star, pulled into its gravitational field and taken away from the Solar System. The story nearest to a hard SF story in the volume, A Pail of Air, is also my personal favourite.

The author uses the world of the future and imagined scientific advances as a prop to hang his stories on, which are mostly fantasy. Leiber calls himself a “Science Fantasy” writer in the introduction: it seems an apt term, because there is nary a hard SF story in the whole volume, and many of them are outright fantasies.

I do not know whether the present book includes his best (since the author has endorsed it himself, it should), but it does have some fantastic stories. Fritz Leiber is a legendary name in science fiction and fantasy, up there among the stars with the likes of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C.

The best of fritz leiber