Who Goes There?

Fritz Leiber has one of the most varied and compelling outputs of any SFF writer, and his influence on future generations is often easy to overlook by virtue of his versatility. There’s also the fact that while he would win two Hugos (actually three if we count the Retro Hugos) for Best Novel, he really was better at the short story, which is a form that usually doesn’t get you big sales and notoriety. Still, despite this as well as some personal-life issues (he had a recurring problem with alcoholism, which at a few points led him to give up writing for a time), Leiber was surely a legend. He’s an old favorite on this site. 1960 marked his 50th birthday, and by this point he had already won a Hugo for his short novel The Big Time, which in turn helped spawn an episodic series—not the first instance of a “time war” in SF, but certainly an early example with the Change War series. “The Oldest Soldier” is an entry in said series, although it can be understood perfectly as a standalone and indeed the term “Change War” isn’t even mentioned. More curiously this is an SF-horror hybrid, a fact I did not know beforehand, which thereby shows Leiber dabbling in the genre he was arguably best at: horror. Not gory horror or erotic horror, but a kind of bleak existential horror that could only come from someone who grew up in the city (in this case Chicago) and who seemed to fear it as much as he loved it.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1960 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was first reprinted in The Mind Spider and Other Stories, as one half of an Ace Double with The Big Time. For a more modern Leiber collection there’s Snakes & Spiders: The Definitive Change War Collection. For anthology appearances there’s Another World (ed. Gardner Dozois), Another Round at the Spaceport Bar (ed. Darrell Schweitzer and George H. Scithers), and Time Troopers (ed. Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio). It’s been reprinted more often than one would expect, given it’s good but definitely minor Leiber.

Enhancing Image

The first stretch of the story might lead you to think what you’re reading will not even be SF. We’re in a bar (Sol’s) in Chicago, and it seems to be sometime in the 1950s—certainly after the Korean War. The protagonist/narrator is Fred, who might well be a stand-in for Leiber. The two have very similar backstories, with Fred explaining his upbringing in Chicago in the early 20th century and having pacifistic sentiments in his youths, although by the time of World War II that gave way to something more pragmatic. Fred and Leiber seem to be of the opinion that when fascism knocks that militarism may well be necessary, although Fred might’ve taken this to a more extreme degree than his creator did. He went from being a pacifist to becoming fixated on soldiering and military “honor,” which of course led to him reading a ton of military-related fiction, even early examples of military SF like “Heinlein’s space cadets and Bullard and other brave rangers of the spaceways.” Leiber does this thing where he acknowledges the existence of his own contemporaries in the worlds he creates (he does this most obnoxiously in The Wanderer), and he’s especially fond of name-dropping Robert Heinlein. It’s worth mentioning that Leiber and Heinlein were direct contemporaries (they even made their genre debuts the same year) and that they both very much admired each other, despite having very different politics. Leiber’s pandering to the genre SF readership can come off as self-serving at times, and I’d be lying if I didn’t also get that impression here; but at least it provides context for Fred’s behavior.

Fred decided to hang out with some war veterans who drink together at Sol’s, like it’s fucking Cheers. There’s even a guy named Woody! Woody, Mike, Pierre, “the Lieutenant,” and of course there’s Max, who is our second main character. Max is the titular oldest soldier—but it’s not because of his physical age. If you know about the Change War series in advance then you can infer right away that Max is a time soldier, someone who jumps back and forth in time, often to alter the past in subtle ways—which side he’s on is left unclear. Anyway, the Spiders and Snakes of the Change War are more or less interchangeable, both of them being morally rather ambivalent; that’s the point. Leiber doesn’t think very highly of war. Max is a curious character and how Fred writes about him shows a bit of a problem that can (and often does) arise from writing in the first person. See, at the beginning Fred calls Max a “screwball,” although he doesn’t really mean it as an insult. He even goes on a monologue about the appeal of screwballs, which I suspect is an opinion Leiber shares. The problem more is that he calls Max a guy “with a dream or gag,” which given that he’s writing with hindsight (he knows something about Max we don’t know yet) is an odd thing to say. Max is a bit weird, sure, but his claims about fighting with Martians in the distant future turn out to be probably true. Of course we as genre readers are basically preconditioned to take Max’s claims at face value, so to hear Fred contradict himself like this is jarring if one thinks about it. It’s a fallacy with first-person past-tense narration that’s so common that even old pros like Leiber fall for it. Anyway, it’s more a quip than anything.

So Fred and Max strike up an odd friendship wherein the former feeds into the latter’s tales of military exploits, the “time-and-space-soldier gag,” since at first Fred didn’t believe Max’s stories. Who would? But on walking to Max’s place one night Fred realizes… they’re being followed. Out of the corner of his eye he can see a black dog with flaming red eyes. The malicious dog is a motif that appears from time to time in Leiber’s horror fiction, and actually this isn’t even the first time on this site that I’ve reviewed such a story. In the case of “The Oldest Soldier” it’s much more unexpected, because, this being SF, we’re led to believe there wouldn’t be anything so mystical or Faustian as a black dog stalking Our Heroes™ on the street. They know they’re being followed, Max perhaps even more aware than Fred of this. Before we know it we’re halfway through the story, and it’s at this point that I have to confess something: this is a bit of a hard story to summarize. Not a great deal happens, but it’s hard to complain in the moment because, as tends to be the case, simply reading Leiber is a pleasure in itself. I have a few reasons for believing Fred is something of an author avatar, one of them being his way with language. Take this passage, for example, after Our Heroes™ have changed course and gone to Fred’s place, where Max is working on something that might get him out of this situation, Fred reflecting on his own unbelief in Max being a time-traveling soldier—an unbelief which in fact hid an intense belief in his friend’s stories:

I realized fully then that my first skeptical thoughts had been the sheerest automatic escapism and that, just as I’d told Max, I believed with my whole mind in the black dog. I believed in the whole business insofar as I could imagine it. I believed that there are undreamed of powers warring in this universe. I believed that Max was a stranded time-traveller [sic] and that in my bedroom he was now frantically operating some unearthly device to signal for help from some unknown headquarters. I believed that the impossible and the deadly was loose in Chicago.

Fred’s language oscillates between a slangy, kind of Beatnik dialect, and a shocking capacity for poetic description that manages to avoid sounding overly flowery. Incidentally I refuse to believe Leiber wasn’t at least slightly influenced by the Beatnik movement in the late ’50s. Indeed the opening stretch of the story reads like it could be not SF but instead a literary type of story, about down-to-earth veterans taking comfort in each other’s company in the years following the Korean War. Max would not be the only eccentric veteran by any means. In this sense it’s a very of-its-time story, technically published in 1960 but culturally indicative of the ’50s, which after all did not actually end in any meaningful sense until maybe 1963. The world of “The Oldest Soldier” is decidedly pre-Vietnam, pre-hippies, pre-Beatles, but is also very much the same world in which Joseph Heller was writing Catch-22. You may notice this has a lot more to do with the atmosphere, heightened via Leiber’s prose, than with the actual plot, which on its own is rather simple, if also ambiguous since Fred is an outsider who’s only able to tell us what he’s able to understand. Which brings us to…

There Be Spoilers Here

Max is able to escape whatever was following him, although Fred has no clue how this could’ve happened—at least at first. Max had given Fred a slip of paper that reveals writing on it only after the fact, through some method Fred can’t figure out (it may as well be magic to him), saying that thankfully Max did manage to vanish—into the past or the future is anyone’s guess. Something interesting about the climax is that while Max is working on his escape, Fred keeps watch and tries to ease his nerves by sitting at his typewriter, just outside Max’s room, and starts typing away—not anything coherent, but just phrases and passages that come to his mind, devoid of context. He’s not physically strong enough to fend off a black dog, but he can write. I have to think Leiber is trying to say something with this, that Fred is able to stall for Max and keep eye on him by doing the thing Leiber did for a living. If nothing else, you should write—even if it’s your suicide note. Someone said that, I forget who now. Fred being a writer is another thing that connects him to Leiber, and taking all this into account I have to think this might be—oddly enough—one of Leiber’s more autobiographical works. You get to know a good deal about Leiber if you read enough of his fiction: his penchant for drinking, his way with the ladies, his fondness for cats and chess, his aforementioned pandering to SF fandom which seems to come from a genuine place. You can find little cookie crumbs of Leiber’s inner life in his fiction—even in a story like this, which is little more than a mood piece, although average Leiber is pretty good by most writers’ standards. I enjoy average Leiber more than most authors.

A Step Farther Out

Like I said at the beginning, “The Oldest Soldier” is an unexpected hybrid, fusing the Change War continuity with a kind of urban terror Leiber had been cooking to perfection for about two decades at this point. We don’t talk about Leiber nearly enough, but we especially don’t talk enough about him as a horror writer. His skill for building a sense of dread is unparalleled when he’s on the ball. Actually I would say that between SF, fantasy, and horror, that he’s most consistent with that third genre. “The Oldest Soldier” is perhaps nominally SF (we don’t see any time machines or blasters), but the latter half is an effective urban thriller.

See you next time.