The novel “The Green Millennium” by Fritz Leiber was published for the first time in 1953. In this novel Phil Gish is an ordinary person who one day comes across a green cat. Because it seems to him that his presence makes him feel good he calls him Lucky but very soon the cat disappears. Gish starts looking for him but as if a green cat wasn’t strange enough in the apartment across the street he sees a famale faun.
Phil Gish thinks his mind is having a meltdown and goes to a psychiatrist, however the doctor seems strangely interested in the green cat and tries to lock Gish in his studio. The psychiatrist’s daughter helps Gish to escape but it’s just the beginning of a runaway from various people who want the green cat.
Fritz Leiber wrote “The Green Millennium” at a time when the U.S.A. started really feeling the weight of the Cold War and as a consequence there were the dark years of McCarthyism. The setting of the novel, about half a century in the future from the time it was written, is satirical because the nation is in fact governed by the Federal Bureau of Loyalty and Fun Inc. while the president is described as a drunken and bigoted farmer.
Fritz Leiber was a liberal and a pacifist so the situation of those years, with war after war and constraints on freedom, must have horrified him. He projected half a century into his future some ugliness he saw in his present such as a widespread paranoia and alienation in ordinary people, more and more distant from a power often using lies to self-sustain. In some ways the elements of his novel seem uncannily a satire of the U.S.A. at the beginning of the third millennium.
Despite the science fiction and satirical elements however “The Green Millennium” is fundamentally a comedy centered on the vicissitudes of Phil Gish, an ordinary man who ends up in the middle of search for the green cat. Gish must tell his friends from his enemies among many colorful characters who are involved in the search for the strange pet. Some are looking for him to worship him, others because they consider him a kind of secret weapon.
Because it’s a comedy its plot is quite loose, fragmented in various episodes with a series of twists and turns until the final discovery of the nature of the mysterious green cat and the female faun. Considering the fact that Fritz Leiber grew in the world of theater and you can often see this influence in his stories it wouldn’t be a surprise if writing “The Green Millennium” he had thought of a comedic stage play. In fact today they could easily make a movie out of this novel.
“The Green Millennium” isn’t the best novel by Fritz Leiber because it brings together many different elements that go beyond comedy but without really going deep into any of them however the author gives us a shining example of his humor. The reader looking for a science fiction novel could get puzzled as science fiction elements are purely functional to the story, but those who already know Leiber are aware that this author wrote his stories without worrying about framing them into a certain genre. An average Fritz Leiber’s product is better than most novels so it’s worth reading this one.
