Who Goes There?

Fritz Leiber is one of the great chameleons of 20th century genre fiction, being more or less equally talented in writing SF, fantasy, and horror, with Leiber’s use of the genres not being mutually exclusive. That he was also one of the great prose stylists among genre writers in his lifetime is made more impressive by the fact that he was one of the “old guard,” having debuted in the field in 1939. He had a short but intense correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft shortly before the latter’s death, making him one of the last members of the Lovecraft circle to have known the man himself; and indeed Leiber wrote a few Cthulhu Mythos stories. His jack-of-all-trades approach, combined with his prolificity and longevity, make him a favorite on this site. I will never even come close to running out of Leiber stories to talk about. Today’s story, “A Bad Day for Sales,” is brief but potent, being grim but still humorous social commentary of the sort that H. L. Gold, the first editor of Galaxy, loved. Leiber had a streak of productivity in the early ’50s that coincided with Galaxy’s launch and arguably its very best years, even appearing in the first issue. This is quite a short story, only about 2,250 words, so I won’t keep you long today, but I very much recommend it.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in Shadow of Tomorrow (ed. Frederik Pohl), Second Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction (ed. H. L. Gold), Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales (ed. Isaac Asimov and Groff Conklin), Nightmare Age (ed. Frederik Pohl), Science Fiction of the Fifties (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph Olander), The Arbor House Treasury of Science Fiction Masterpieces (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Silverberg), Robots Through the Ages (ed. Bryan Thomas Schmidt and Robert Silverberg), and really too many times to count. It’s also out of copyright, so you can read it on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

New York City in the future is different, but not so much; really in some ways it’s more recognizable to us now than it would have been in 1953. In Times Square, advertisements take up the whole sides of buildings—only they’ve gone digital, with people “watching the fifty-foot-tall girl on the clothing billboard get dressed, or reading the latest news about the Hot Truce scrawl itself in yard-high script.” That “Hot Truce” will come into play later, although given the brevity of the story one is unlikely to forget about it. In the first few paragraphs we’re introduced to three major themes in Leiber’s fiction: sex, death, and post-war consumerism. Then there’s the latest advancement in advertising technology, a Roomba robot named Robie, a sentient vending machine with legs—or rather treads. Robie is not humanoid, but rather looks like a tortoise had sex with a tank. “The lower part of Robie’s body was a metal hemisphere hemmed with sponge rubber and not quite touching the sidewalk. The upper was a metal box with black holes in it.” Robie is the first in what may become a line of sales robots like himself, assuming the investors are impressed enough; he doesn’t go around selling cars or property, but small things, including fashion items and even candy for children. A crowd quickly gathers around Robie and this is where the action is set, as if on a stage. Leiber’s background in theatre figures into several of his stories, most notably his Hugo-winning novel The Big Time, but “A Bad Day for Sales” also feels like a one-act play.

Robie offers treads to come kids who come by, a boy and a girl at different times, although in maybe the funniest bit in the story Robie, apparently unsure at first as to the girl’s gender, offers her a nudie magazine. Also a “polly-lop,” which at first I thought was a typo but it’s repeated a few times consistently so I guess not. The girl’s mother is looking for her. Robie’s attempts at appealing to his customers depending on age and gender very much feel like a precursor to what have become “personalized” ads in the internet age. Companies asking to know your age, gender, tracking your location so they know where you are on the map, etc. It’s creepy, no doubt, but also Robie is by no means a malevolent robot; he’s merely doing what he was programmed to do, which is to pull in customers. Certainly he’s not as invasive of people’s privacy as his real-world descendants would become. This portrait of NYC is, on the one hand, very of its time, but it also tracks rather closely with how consumerism will progress (or maybe devolve) in the US, with an increasing reliance on AI and machinery, because I guess for companies it costs less time and money in the long run to do things this way than to hire real people. Leiber’s doing what conventionally a good SF writer ought to do, which is to observe cultural trends in his own time and place, and then extrapolate on them.

It’s hard to talk about this story too much without getting into spoilers, or more specifically the abrupt change in tone it goes through—although tonally it’s not that big of a change. What started as a satirical slice-of-life narrative soon turns into something quite different, which honestly I should have expected but somehow did not. The title clearly has a double meaning, since for one Robie has a hard time selling his junk to people in the crowd, but also his day (or rather the day of everyone around him) is about to get much worse. Leiber’s very clever about all this.

There Be Spoilers Here

Leiber does something he could’ve done in 1953 but probably not 2003 (because he was dead by then, but also because of 9/11): he bombs New York. Specifically the “Hot Truce” mentioned at the beginning apparently fell through, because the enemy (whoever it is) has a nasty surprise for these New Yorkers. Get a load of this:

(But way, way up, where the crowd could not see, the sky was darker still. Purple-dark, with stars showing. And in that purple-dark, a silver-green something, the color of a bud, plunged down at better than three miles a second. The silver-green was a newly developed paint that foiled radar.)

And yes, it is in parentheticals, the only paragraph in the story to be designated at such. I’m not sure if the bomb is a nuke or not, but it does enough damage that Times Square gets turned into rubble seemingly in an instant, with Robie being surrounded by the bodies of the dead and dying. Robie himself is fine, of course, albeit damaged. The little girl mentioned earlier is fine too, thankfully. “A white dress and the once taller bodies around her had shielded her from the brilliance and the blast.” This is… grim. At least she’s reunited with her mom at the end, so it’s not totally bleak. There are a few survivors, a rescue team arrives at the very end, and a little inconvenience like a bomb dropping on Manhattan doesn’t stop Robie from doing what he does best—indeed the only thing he knows how to do. Even with fewer customers, on account of mass murder, the machinery of modern capitalism will keep trudging onward.

A Step Farther Out

The fact that I very rarely see Leiber books in the wild, even in used condition (a lot of his books, from what I can tell, are out of print), is depressing. The conventional narrative is that Leiber wasn’t as good an SF writer as he was with fantasy and horror, but once we take out The Wanderer (it’s quite bad), Leiber was still one of the best SF writers of his time. He had a sense of humor and a keenness of perception, along with a fluidity of style, that put him head and shoulders above most of his peers. (This sharp eye for cultural trends shows through even when he isn’t writing SF, see “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes,” which is ostensibly horror but reads as kin to his socially conscious SF.) “A Bad Day for Sales” is a very good introduction to what Leiber’s SF—a view of the future that continues to feel bleak, specifically because it feels true.

See you next time.