Fritz Leiber was an innovator. If he wrote in a genre, he always tried to do something to improve that type of storytelling. This desire to do more than the same old thing won him many awards (five Hugos, a Nebula, and a World Fantasy Award, as well as the Gandalf for Lifetime Achievement) and accolades in the decades after the old pulps had crumbled to dust. But during the 1940s and ’50s, originality had a price.
Take Weird Tales for example. Leiber’s most famous early horror story did not appear in “The Unique Magazine.” “Smoke Ghost,” which featured a spirit of evil created by a modern city, appeared in Unknown Worlds (October 1941) where John W Campbell pushed the definition of modern fantasy. Leiber wanted to write horror fiction using some of the same ideas as HP Lovecraft (though never in a slavish pastiche kind of way), taking the boogie men out of the haunted castles and European forests and bringing them to the streets of America. There was only one problem. Innovation courts rejection.
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