Harry Otto Fischer

Who was Harry Otto Fischer?

Harry Otto Fischer was an American science fiction fan best known for helping his college friend Fritz Leiber create the sword and sorcery heroes Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and their imaginary world of Nehwon.

The fictional heroes were loosely based on their creators, the barbarian Fafhrd on Leiber, and the thief The Gray Mouser on Fischer. In 1937, Fischer and Leiber designed a board game set in this fantasy world and each began composing a story with the same setting, Fischer's being "The Lords of Quarmall" and Leiber's "The Adventure of the Grain Ships." Neither story was finished until much later; Fischer's work on "The Lords of Quarmall" amounted to the first 10,000 words of the story.

1939 saw the first professional publication of a story featuring the heroes and their setting, "Two Sought Adventure", in Unknown magazine. This and most subsequent stories featuring the pair were written by Leiber, and all but one were set in the fantasy world Leiber and Fischer created.

The original tales begun by Fischer and Leiber on the pair were completed by Leiber and published in the 1960s. "The Adventure of the Grain Ships" was finally published in the magazine Fantastic as "Scylla's Daughter" in 1961, and was later expanded into the novel The Swords of Lankhmar; "The Lords of Quarmall" was finally published, also in Fantastic, in 1964. He also wrote "The Childhood and Youth of the Gray Mouser," published in 1978 in The Dragon #18.