Destiny Times Thress Paperback – June 5, 2023

Today, it is almost considered an insult for SF writers to not be able to kill at least a small mammal by using their 800 or 900 pages books as a weapon. So, Destiny Times Three is a refreshing and interesting dive in the lean, fat-free world (actually 3 worlds) of Fritz Leiber. And bizarre as it may sound, I believe that this is an underdeveloped novel which could have been much better had it been twice or three times its size.A Probability Machine falls into the wrong hands and begins churning out alternative universes. A Bad Guys and a Good Guys Universe start interacting with each other and this is where the story starts. There is suspense, there is 1945 gloom, there is 1945 hope, there are bizarre amateur gods, there is a third Universe that deserved 200 pages on its own and there is subtronic physics (which sounds pretty cool even today). On the downside there is a notable and inexplicable lack of female characters.I hope that one of today's greats would take this novel and rewrite it into a 500 page SF feast. I just cannot start to imagine what Ian M. Banks would do with the Probability Machine. But since Ian M. Banks has much better things to do than read my reviews, I wholeheartedly propose to anyone who comes across Destiny Times Three to read it. 4 stars for Mr Leiber's 3 worlds.

This terrific short parallel-worlds novel from 1945 anticipates many of the same ideas and themes that Leiber later developed in his Hugo-award-winning 1958 novel 'The Big Time', and the associated set of change-war short stories.The 2010 review here by 'Adman' astutely comments that the story seemed as if it could have been longer, and also notes the lack of female characters. Both features are explained in the 'Afterword' that Leiber added to the 1978 Dell reprint of this novel in 'Binary Stars #1', along with 'Riding the Torch' by Norman Spinrad. In this short-lived Dell reprint series, each author was invited to contribute a comment on the other author's story. After commenting on Spinrad's story, Leiber continues:"I don't know why 'Torch' is such a short novel, but I sure know why 'Destiny Times Three' is. I wrote it during World War II, while I was a precision inspector at Douglas Aircraft, Santa Monica plant,and in the months immediately thereafter. I'd been successful with my three-part serial, 'Gather Darkness!' in the magazine 'Astounding Stories', and this new one, originally titled 'Roots of Yggdrasil' after the Norse Legend of the three worlds of the Gods, the Frost Giants, and Man, was going to be my masterpiece, a four- or five-parter at least -- a big canvas to fit a big subject."But before I began writing it I sent my plans and outline to Astounding's editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., for his approval and any helpful advice he might be able to give me. (I'd profited greatly from his astute suggestions on my earlier novel ['Gather Darkness', Astounding 1943] and also on 'Conjure Wife', which had sold to his 'Unknown' [also 1943].)"If I'd asked my question a few months earlier or later, it would have been all right, but at that particular time many of Astounding's readers were among the American servicemen fanned out across the world, and some of them had been writing him asking him not to publish any serials, because they could never be sure of getting the next issue. So he told me, "Make it a two-parter, at most.""And so in the course of one feverish, miserable, long castrating night, I spread my vast outline on the cleared dining-room table and ruthlessly pared it down. (I and my wife needed the money!) My God, I even cut out all the female characters -- something had to go and they were a shade less central to the plot. You see, in the threefold world of that story each major character had to exist in triplicate (amount to three major characters); otherwise the whole different-destinies point would be lost. At only 40,000 words or so, I couldn't handle over a dozen major characters. A drastic simplification to a manageable six was required, though I'm sure now it was a mistake to sacrifice the women. As a result, the diminished novel has a ghostly, cold, lonely male quality to me, peopled by the resentful, unseen feminine presences of all those cut characters. I don't think my Anima ever forgave me."I'm sorry about that, for at the time I greatly loved that world of giant skyscrapers known by their colors and cross sections -- the Black Star, the Scarlet T, the Mauve H, and so on. It's not good to pull in your sights, scale down your concepts. For the next five years I had a lot of trouble writing anything at all. My vengeful Anima, perhaps."I'm not the only one to have suffered that way. In the early days of science-fiction paperbacks (the late 1940s and 1950s), publishers considered a science-fiction novel over 60,000 words to be unthinkable, out of the question. James Blish, for instance, had to pare down 'A Case of Conscience' to get Ballantine to publish it."I'm glad that my 125,000-word 'The Wanderer' (happily with the aid of Ballantine) was one of the books that helped break that straitjacket. [1964, also won the Hugo award for Best Novel that year.]