Bread Overhead, Fritz Leiber

Image by California Cthulhu (Will Hart) via FlickrI had learned about Fritz Leiber from a Wikipedia article on weird tales. It was explained that he was a great contributor to the magazine. So, in the midst of a few authors listed that I did find in both the article and on Gutenberg.org. It is a short piece of fiction worth a few hours reading.

I am really glad I found his name and this was the first story of his that I read. Really, it's a brilliant story.

As far as I can tell, most of the characters are robotic. It is about a bread company that, in order to make its bread lighter, decides to imbue the bread with hydrogen gas. As a result, even as the robotic army that distributes the loaves to the public try to load the trucks, the bread floats away into the sky.

There is so much satire in this story it's really hard to know where to begin or end. There are bits and pieces all over the place. Just as an example, the bread factory itself is something of an oddball out of a nightmare: A mechanical centipede that eats wheat off the field, then treats, sorts, and bakes bread.

However, as was already explained, as the centipede tries to stack the loaves of bread, they rather float away into the sky. The mechanical stevedores do not notice that they are no longer stacking air rather than bread into their vehicles. It isn't discovered until a meeting that all the bread had floated away.

Over time, the public and the government get angry. But, as the bread crosses the Atlantic and then settles over the Ukraine, where the starving people grab the loaves, it loses its proponents and becomes a sensation.

The story is funny, nightmarish, weird, and science fiction all rolled into one. Quite a feat. Well worth the read. I look forward to reading more of his work, courtesy of Gutenberg.org.