Leiber und Einstein

Of course, in a hole in my father's library, there lived a hobbit. Over time, he became a bad hobbit of mine, progressively more dog-eared as I grew older and then got brained by the ultra-fat one-volume Lord of the Rings. But Tolkien has never been all of fantasy to me, and while he was doing the high stuff, one Fritz Leiber was doing the low stuff.

Leiber died not too long ago, wise and full of years. Although he did weird and wonderful jobs with books like A Spectre is Haunting Texas and Our Lady of Darkness, it will always be for Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser that he must be remembered. Who?

Fafhrd was the archetypal Northman berserker type, except that he had grown up a singing skald, which made him a sort of berserk choirboy whom everyone underestimated in matters of culture and knowledge - often to their detriment. The Grey Mouser was his partner in crime, the archetypal Southerner rogue, all charm and curiosity - except that he was also a romantic who fancied himself as a bit of a sorcerer.

In one of their adventures - I forget which - Leiber describes their world of Nehwon (a parallel to Butler's Erewhon one has to suspect) as a bubble rising through the depths of space forever, a bubble among many other bubbles.

Fade and dissolve... cut to this month's issue of Scientific American - the Einstein issue. Well, whaddya know... There's an article titled The String Theory Landscape: the merger of general relativity and quantum mechanics posits bubble universes within bubble universes. And suddenly, I'm reading Leiber again.