My first Leiber short story: I was nine. The story, “The Winter Flies,” was in Judith Merril’s huge anthology SF12. It was the most important book I read when I was nine, with the possible exception of Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer, for it was the place I discovered a host of authors who would become important to me, and dozens of stories I would read so often that I could have recited them: Chip Delany’s “The Star Pit,” R. A. Lafferty’s “Primary Education of the Camiroi” and “Narrow Valley” and William Burroughs’s “They Do Not Always Remember,” J. G. Ballard’s “The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D,” not to mention Tuli Kupferberg’s poems, Carol Emshwiller and Sonya Dorman and Kit Reed and the rest. It did not matter that I was much too young for the stories: I knew that they were beyond me, and was not even slightly troubled by this. The stories made sense to me, a sense that was beyond what they literally meant. It was in SF12 I encountered concepts and people that did not exist in the children’s books I was familiar with, and it delighted me.

What did I make of the “The Winter Flies” then? The last time I read it I saw it as semiautobiographical fiction, about a man who philanders and drinks when he is on the road, whose marriage is breaking down and who interrupts a masturbatory reverie to talk a child having a panic attack back to reality, something that, for a moment, brings a family, fragmenting in alcohol and lack of communication, together. When I read it as a nine-year-old it was about a man beset by demons, talking his son, lost among the stars, home again.

I knew I liked Fritz Leiber from that story on. He was someone I read. When I was eleven I bought Conjure Wife, and learned that all women were witches, and found out what a hand of glory was (and yes, there is sexism and misogyny in the book and in the concept, but there is, if you are a twelve-year-old boy trying to make sense of something that might as well be an alien species, also the kind of paranoid “what if it’s true?” that makes reading books such a dangerous occupation at any age). I read a 1972 issue of Wonder Woman written by Samuel R. Delany, featuring Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and was disappointed that it felt nothing like a Chip Delany story, but had now encountered our two adventurers, and, from the magic of comics, knew what they looked like. I read Sword of Sorcery, which was the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser comic that DC comics brought out in 1973, and finally found a copy of The Swords of Lankhmar at the age of thirteen, in the cupboard at the back of Mr. Wright’s English class, its cover (I would later discover) a bad English copy of the Jeff Jones painting on the cover of the US edition; and I read it, and I was content.