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On Fredric Brown

A reserved little guy, made a living on the linotype machine (read "Etaoin Shrdlu") in Wisconsin before he became a fulltime writer, drank too much, virtually every male writer (and many women too) of his time did, dealt with writer's block by riding Greyhound buses through the continent, just booking a couple of weeks, sat in the back of the bus, the shadows and night tableland whisking by, his unconscious off its leash. Offered to teach one of his two sons everything he knew about the writing of fiction, give him a full-time, exclusive course of instruction. His son declined. (A wise choice.) Said to Phil Klass around the time that What Mad Universe, that great and sour fan novel, was published, "They're taking over, Phil." This was in 1948. "The fans, they want in, they want to write it and edit it, they're going to overwhelm us, they'll own it all in twenty years. There's nothing we can do to change it." What Mad Universe, of course, dumps its protagonist into the structured fantasies of a science fiction fan, takes the lead through alien landscape and plenty of trouble. Talk about projection fantasies! But Brown was a personable and understated guy, stayed away from the conventions and the social rubric generally, didn't have much to do with anyone outside the group of Milwaukee writers from which he had emerged and later a few of the Mexican expatriates like Mack Reynolds, with whom he occasionally collaborated. Not exactly a recluse but certainly an iconoclast and among a small group of prominent science fiction writers of whom there is little personal detail.

Those are a few random facts about Fred Brown (1906-1972); he remains, interestingly, perhaps the only writer I can bring to mind of equal prominence in mystery and science fiction. Many science fiction writers have written mysteries (beginning with Isaac Asimov and Harry Harrison) and many mystery writers have written science fiction (Bill Pronzini, Larry Block, Donald E. Westlake, Evan Hunter) but their reputation, most significant accomplishment, level of recognition lie clearly in one field or the other. Brown is the exception. His first novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint, won an early (1947) Edgar for best first mystery novel and he published more than a dozen in the genre, some highly regarded; What Mad Universe, "Arena," Martians Go Home (a poor movie only a couple of years ago) are important science fiction novels. Brown published stories other than "Arena" which were famous—"The Waveries," Martians Go Home in a shorter version, "Placet is a Crazy Place," "Letter to a Phoenix"—and is generally regarded as the best short-short story writer in the history of science fiction; his mastery of the vignette was absolute and there are tiny pieces like "The Weapon" or "The Solipsist" whose plots and payoff seem known to everyone, whether or not the author can be attributed. (Most famous of all, of course, that 200-word story in which the new computer addresses the question: "Is there a God?" with a bolt of lightning fusing its off-switch closed and the pronouncement, "Now there is!" Validating my statement, I don't remember the title, it's in one of these collections, of course, and I don't have to look it up in Contento to assure one and all that I've remembered this story for more than forty years . . . that story and "The Weapon" are probably the two Great Warning science fiction stories.) (Parentheses after a parenthesis: the title is "Answer.")

That Brown was equally effective, equally prominent in two genres as to be ultimately unclassifiable as a prime practitioner in one or the other is a powerfully interesting, salient fact; it makes his work and his contribution probably unduplicable, certainly incalculable. Like almost every science fiction writer of his generation, barring the five to ten most prominent, he has in the last few decades fallen almost completely out of print; his short stories have been anthologized now and again (most notably by Greenberg & Asimov in their 25-volume GREAT SF 1939-1963 series which was issued between 1979 and 1992) but the novels have not been exposed for a long time. (What Mad Universe was published by Bantam in the late 1970s, Martians Go Home by Baen in 1992, nothing since and nothing between the 70s and that Baen reissue.) Martians Go Home was filmed, unsuccessfully, in the mid-1990s in a version which appeared to have left the bitter, even savage treatment of its absurd premise somewhere at the post (thereby turning the story into another installment of Mork and Mindy) and an astonishing number of the short stories have been used for student films and short subjects in foreign countries; Brown's concepts are perhaps too sardonic and depersonalized to work as drama but this opinion has never interfered with the attraction his work has always had for young film directors and screenwriters.

Like nearly all satirists, Brown was deeply embittered, no fan of humanity or human possibility; this opinion comes through in almost all the work from "Hall of Mirrors" to "Honeymoon in Hell" to "The Weapon" ("Letter To a Phoenix" is an exception; this 1949 ASF story holds that humanity may be hopeless but it is absolutely unassailable, something like Phil Klass's cosmic cockroaches in Of Men and Monsters) and can be noted in its purest and most frightening version in the 1949 "Come and Go Mad" about a mental patient who might in a previous existence have been Napoleon, overtaken by dreams and seizures indicating the paradox of this possibility and which ends the debate in the author's voice with those remarkable lines, "But don't you see: it doesn't matter. Nothing matters!" That couplet didn't make a great deal of sense to me when a friend put the story under my nose in 1952 but it sure does now.

Does Brown's career itself make sense? Prophet of absurdity, he had a severe heart attack in the early sixties, published no more after the tiny collaboration with Carl Onspaugh in 1965, descended into silence in Taos, New Mexico: silence with exile if not cunning. As with the rest of them, his work remains to be rediscovered; brave and noble NESFA has done what it could; now it is your responsibility. If nothing matters, then everything matters. "The Weapon" gives that hard and rigorous lesson, a lesson beyond the arena, careless of the Martians, centered within that pulverized and extinguished heart.

 

New Jersey: April 1999

 

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