For more than thirty years, Fritz Leiber has been giving his readers glimpses of Heaven and Hel in his own special time machine/spaceship theater. One might describe it, if the metaphor is not too conventional, as the theater of his imagination. Such a metaphor is more accurate than usual in the case of Leiber, since he often designs his stories according to theatrical conceptions. (p. v)

The influence of theater upon his work is more than just a simple costuming of his fantasy and science-fiction stories in the paraphernalia of the stage, more than just the fact that his characters often perform plays or put on little shows or gather together for poetry and song recitals in the course of their adventures. The ideas, structures, and machinery of the drama, as practiced from the time of the ancient Greeks right up to the present, are such basic...