Nice Girl With 5 Husbands by Fritz Leiber Episode #128
Fritz Leiber | October 22, 2023-
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Nice Girl With 5 Husbands by Fritz Leiber Episode #128
Fritz Leiber
NICE GIRL WITH 5 HUSBANDS
Episode #128 · Written by Fritz Leiber · Narrated by Scott Miller
A wandering artist stumbles into a strange desert valley and meets a beguiling young woman whose life — and marriage arrangements — defy everything he believes about love and time. As he follows her into a community both wondrous and unsettling, he discovers that some winds don’t just reshape the desert… they reshape entire eras.
In Nice Girl With 5 Husbands, Fritz Leiber transports us to a remote desert valley where sunlight, red stone, and eerie quiet mask forces far older — and stranger — than the modern world. Tom Dorset, an artist on a fellowship he can’t fully appreciate, walks into a dust devil and emerges in a place that feels both familiar and profoundly altered. There he meets Lois Wolver, barefoot, bright-eyed, and startlingly comfortable with him from the first moment. She speaks casually of her five husbands, her many “kwives,” and a household built on harmony, shared purpose, and social patterns Tom can barely understand.
What begins as fascination soon becomes an emotional pull as Tom is welcomed into a group living with effortless openness, advanced technology, and a rhythm of life that seems impossibly evolved. Their home glows with carved wood that surpasses anything he has seen, children with startling intelligence roam freely, and talk of rockets, Mars, and global labor exchanges flows like ordinary gossip. Yet beneath all this brilliance lies something uncanny — a mismatch between Tom’s world and theirs, and a subtle discomfort of being a stranger glimpsing a civilization from another age. When the truth reveals itself in a rush of wind and sand, the valley’s beauty becomes inseparable from its mystery.
Leiber’s story blends soft science fiction with social commentary, humor, psychological nuance, and a haunting temporal twist. It asks timeless questions: What does family mean? What does progress cost? And what happens when ordinary lives brush against the currents of time itself?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Over a career spanning five decades, Fritz Leiber penned classics such as The Big Time, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Ill Met in Lankhmar, and The Green Millennium. He won multiple Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and his influence can be seen in the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and countless others. His blend of insight, wit, and the uncanny continues to shape modern speculative literature.
Leiber’s stories remain compelling because he was never content with simple adventure or spectacle. His work questioned culture, the self, relationships, fear, hope, and the boundaries of possibility. In Nice Girl With 5 Husbands, he offers a tale that is warm, strange, and provocatively human — a glimpse of what the future might be if time itself could curve.
LISTEN TO THE STORY
Listen to Nice Girl With 5 Husbands by Fritz Leiber — a vintage science fiction adventure of time winds, strange communities, and unexpected connection.
FRITZ LEIBER SHORT STORIES
Fritz Leiber brought a distinctive voice to vintage science fiction. His short stories rarely rely on conventional space adventure alone. Instead, Leiber explored how ordinary people react when the universe suddenly turns strange—when time bends, when science changes daily life, or when survival depends on quick thinking in impossible conditions.
Many of his stories begin in familiar settings. A quiet home. A city street. A routine job. Then something slips sideways. A world freezes solid. Pedestrians gain absolute power over traffic. A casual decision triggers consequences that reach across time. Leiber excelled at placing human characters inside extraordinary situations and letting their choices drive the tension.
His science fiction often balances imagination with sharp observation. Some stories carry dark humor. Others deliver genuine dread. A few unfold as clever thought experiments that spiral into dangerous territory. Whether the threat comes from space, from technology, or from humanity itself, Leiber keeps the focus tightly on the people forced to confront it.
The stories below showcase a wide range of Leiber’s science fiction—from survival tales and strange futures to biting satire and time-bending paradox.
- The Last Letter by Fritz Leiber
- What's He Doing in There? by Fritz Leiber
- The Black Ewe by Fritz Leiber
- The Moon is Green by Fritz Leiber
- The Goggles of Dr. Dragonet by Fritz Leiber
- Nice Girl With 5 Husbands by Fritz Leiber
- Try and Change the Past by Fritz Leiber
- A Hitch in Space by Fritz Leiber
- A Pail of Air by Fritz Leiber
- X Marks the Pedwalk by Fritz Leiber
- Later Than You Think by Fritz Leiber
- The Foxholes of Mars by Fritz Leiber
ABOUT THE LOST SCI-FI PODCAST
The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast is the most listened-to vintage science fiction podcast in the world. Ranked the #1 Science Fiction Podcast in 34 countries and heard in more than 190 countries, the show has surpassed 3.8 million listens.
Each episode features carefully selected stories from the Golden Age of science fiction, professionally narrated. Timeless storytelling the way it was meant to be heard.
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Vintage science fiction. Professionally narrated. Carefully curated.
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