- BROWN, Fredric (William)
- (1906-1972) US writer of detective novels and much sf, and for many years active in journalism. He is perhaps best known for such detective novels as The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947), but is also highly regarded for his sf, which is noted for its elegance and HUMOUR, and for a polished slickness not generally found in the field in 1941, the year he published his first sf story, "Not Yet the End" for Captain Future. Many of his shorter works are vignettes and extended jokes: of the 47 pieces collected in Nightmares and Geezenstacks (coll 1961), 38 are vignettes of the sort he specialized in (they feature sudden joke climaxes whose ironies are often cruel); this collection was assembled with another, Honeymoon in Hell (coll 1958), as And the Gods Laughed (omni 1987). Typical of somewhat longer works utilizing the same professional economies of effect are "Placet is a Crazy Place" (1946), "Etaoin Shrdlu" (1942) and "Arena" (1944). The latter was among the sf stories selected by the SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA for inclusion in SCIENCE FICTION HALL OF FAME (anth 1970) ed Robert SILVERBERG. It tells of the settling of an interstellar WAR through single combat between a human and an ALIEN. FB is possibly at his best in these shorter forms, where his elegant and seemingly comfortable wit, its iconoclasm carefully directed at targets whose defacing sf readers would appreciate, had greatest scope.FB's sf novels are by no means without merit, however. His first and most famous, WHAT MAD UNIVERSE (1948 Startling Stories; 1949), is a cleverly complex ALTERNATE-WORLDS story in which various sf conventions turn out, absurdly, to be true history. The Lights in the Sky are Stars (1953; vt Project Jupiter 1954 UK) depicts mankind at the turn of the 21st century and on the verge of star travel; the true subject of the tale might, movingly, be thought to be the SENSE OF WONDER itself. Martians, Go Home (1955) describes the infestation of Earth by little green men who drive everyone nearly crazy, until the sf writer who has perhaps imagined them into existence imagines them gone again; however, he is himself a figment of a larger imagination, so that in the end it is reality itself that dissolves. In The Mind Thing (1961) a stranded alien attempts to get back home using its ability to ride human minds piggyback, even though the experience is fatal for those possessed.None of these novels is negligible, but it is perhaps the case, at least in his sf writing, that his short stories, with their natty momentum and the sudden flushes of humane emotion that transfigure so many of them, have proved more successful in the long run. The recent publication of a very large number of previously uncollected stories (see below) may intensify this sense of FB's central accomplishment.JCOther works: Space on my Hands (coll 1951); Angels and Spaceships (coll 1954; vt Star Shine 1956); Rogue in Space (1949 Super Science Stories; 1950 AMZ; fixup 1957); Daymares (coll 1968); Mitkey Astromouse (1971), a juvenile; Paradox Lost (coll 1973); The Best of Fredric Brown (coll 1977); The Best Short Stories of Fredric Brown (coll 1982 UK); the Detective Pulps series of collections, most of which contain some sf and fantasy, comprehensively surveying FB's career and comprising Homicide Sanitarium (coll 1984), Before She Kills (coll 1984), Madman's Holiday (coll 1984), The Case of the Dancing Sandwiches (coll 1985), The Freak Show Murders (coll 1985), Thirty Corpses Every Thursday (coll 1986), Pardon my Ghoulish Laughter (coll 1986), Red is the Hue of Hell (coll 1986), Brother Monster (coll 1987), Sex Life on the Planet Mars (coll 1986), Nightmare in Darkness (coll 1987), Who Was that Blonde I Saw You Kill Last Night? (coll 1988), Three-Corpse Parlay (coll 1988), Selling Death Short (coll 1988), Whispering Death (coll 1989), Happy Ending (coll 1990), The Water-Walker (coll 1990), The Gibbering Night (coll 1991) and The Pickled Punks (coll 1991), which closed the series.As Editor: Science Fiction Carnival (anth 1953) with Mack REYNOLDS.About the author: A Key to Fredric Brown's Wonderland: A Study and an Annotated Bibliographical Checklist (1981 chap) by N.D. Baird; Martians and Misplaced Clues: The Life and Work of Fredric Brown (1994) by Jack Seabrook.
Science Fiction and Fantasy Encyclopedia. Academic. 2011.
