Leiber at Troynovant:
spectral stagecraft of Fritz Leiber (1910-1992);
by, about, tangential, or quoted,
listed by Type and Title
  

A monster is a symbol of the secret and powerful, the dangerous and unknown, arousing dread and curiosity, exaltation and frightened laughter. An old geographer looks at the large blank spaces of his finished map and inks in "Here Be Monsters." Perhaps his imagination is stirred and he draws a little picture of ... something. ...

A symbol of this sort has a thousand meanings and more. So a monster, symbolizing that about which we can only speculate and wonder, is a master symbol suggesting the remotest mysteries of nature and human nature, the most dimly-sensed secrets of space, time, and the hidden regions of the mind. ...

This vivid picture [in H. P.Lovecraft's "The Outsider"] of the confrontation of the conforming crowd by the "inner-directed" deviant points up one of the chief trends in fantasy writing during the last three decades: the compulsion to understand the monster.

This trend is one of the marks of the transition from the contrast between the extraterrestrial beings of Lovecraft and those of, say, Weinbaum or Heinlein or Smith, with the monsters of van Vogt somewhere in between. You can even say that one writer sets a problem by creating a monster. Then another writer may attempt to solve the problem by explaining the monster, sometimes by speculations about the physics and chemistry of alien planets and sometimes by showing us what the first writer has or may have projected into his creation from himself and the world. This process is crucial in the growth pattern and life history of monsters in the realm of art.

One of the clearest indications that the monster symbolizes the deviant individual is the frequency with which he appears in the guise of scapegoat ...

"Monsters and Monster Lovers"
Speech at Pacificon II / Westercon 17:
22nd World Science Fiction Convention
Oakland, 5 September 1964

Fritz Leiber
The Book of Fritz Leiber (1974)

Fritz Leiber
Fafhrd & Me (1990)