Friends and Enemies

In a blasted future where super-bombs, local strongmen, and anti-intellectual panic have warped ordinary life, Fritz Leiber turns a feud between art and science into a savage, funny, and unsettling satire. Two exiled professors—Madson, a former nuclear physicist, and Ellenby, a poet who has spent years denouncing science—are driven from Ozona by a gun-toting authority figure who claims to defend decency while policing thought, sexuality, and imagination. Forced to walk toward New Angeles, the two men spar, then slowly discover that each has tried to suppress the very wonder the other represents. Their uneasy reconciliation is interrupted by danger, eccentric allies, and comic absurdity: a toxic fungicide attack, a sharp-witted young woman with violet hair, a faded 3D celebrity, and a bizarre future social scene of relic cars, strange pets, and decayed glamour. But the journey turns deadly when an anti-science mob strips them and prepares to destroy their books and instruments. A sudden cataclysm appears to confirm the world's worst fears, until the truth emerges: the destruction was an earthquake along the San Andreas Rift. What follows is a darkly ironic, fast-moving tale of survival, revelation, and the possibility that poets and physicists may yet share a future. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.