Damnation Morning

by Fritz Leiber

Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, “Look, Buster, do you want to live?”

Genres: Time Travel, Science Fiction

18 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 26, 2017

About the author

Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. was one of the more interesting of the young writers who came into HP Lovecraft's orbit, and some of his best early short fiction is horror rather than sf or fantasy. He found his mature voice early in the first of the sword-and-sorcery adventures featuring the large sensitive barbarian Fafhrd and the small street-smart-ish Gray Mouser; he returned to this series at various points in his career, using it sometimes for farce and sometimes for gloomy mood pieces--The Swords of Lankhmar is perhaps the best single volume of their adventures. Leiber's science fiction includes the planet-smashing The Wanderer in which a large cast mostly survive flood, fire, and the sexual attentions of feline aliens, and the satirical A Spectre is Haunting Texas in which a gangling, exo-skeleton-clad actor from the Moon leads a revolution and finds his true love. Leiber's late short fiction, and the fine horror novel Our Lady of Darkness, combine autobiographical issues like his struggle with depression and alcoholism with meditations on the emotional content of the fantastic genres. Leiber's capacity for endless self-reinvention and productive self-examination kept him, until his death, one of the most modern of his sf generation.

Used These Alternate Names: Maurice Breçon, Fric Lajber, Fritz Leiber, Jr., Fritz R. Leiber, Fritz Leiber Jun., Фриц Лейбер, F. Lieber, フリッツ・ライバー

Reviews

[Peter Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Damnation Morning by Fritz Leiber



This is a short story set in the same story universe as Leiber's classic "The Big Time." In that story, we discover that a Time War is being fought between two sides intent on changing history to their own unknown ends. The sides are the "Spiders" and the "Snakes." The operatives of both sides are people of various ages and worlds "cut out" of their timelines, usually prior to their imminent deaths. Prior to being cut out of their timelines, people are just "zombies" that go through the motions of an apparently self-aware existence but are otherwise puppets of history.

We don't know who the ultimate string-pullers of the two factions are, nor do we know why they are re-arranging history or to what end. The characters don't know either but go along with their missions for their sides, almost like spies during the Cold War, for which this scenario might be Leiber's metaphor. Likewise, the "puppet" theme was explored in a different - more chilling way - in "You Are All Alone."

That's the backstory that really isn't explored in this short story. The backstory is somewhat alluded to, and anyone with knowledge of Leiber would know the backstory. I think this story about the recruitment of someone for the Spiders - or was it the Snakes - might be enjoyable to a reader who lacked the backstory, but the story is far more enjoyable with knowledge of Leiber's Time War setting.