Nice Girl With 5 Husbands by Fritz Leiber Episode #128

Fritz Leiber | October 22, 2023

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.