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Title: What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown ISBN: 0884118924 Publisher: Amereon Ltd Pub. Date: December, 1976 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.71
Rating: 3
Summary: What Mad Universe
Comment: I'm a very big fan of Fredric Brown's mysteries. But I have never been able to wholeheartedly embrace his SF, and that trend continues even with this lively novel. I prefer his misplaced clues over his Martians.
Brown is known as a writer with a wild imagination. He can also send a shiver down the spine, or even get a giggle, usually with some bit of absurdity. In this novel, when a strange energy discharge from a rocket falling back to Earth sends Keith Winton to a parallel universe, half of it seems terrible, and half of it seems farcical. Cities are cloaked in mist overnight to stymie Arcturian missiles, but criminals roam throughout the mist looking for anyone senseless enough not to stay inside. Transgalactic flight was achieved on this parallel Earth when someone was fooling around with a sewing machine. An AI controls and consoles New York's frightened populace, but goes by the silly name of Mekky. Is it nightmarish, or just dopey?
Somewhere along the line--and this has happened before with Brown's science-fiction--a crazy plot seems to conflict with a serious style. I was never quite sure if Fredric Brown wanted me to take this book as a serious-minded parallel-universe book, or if I'm to assume it's all a big joke. If it's serious, why the goofy details, like sewing machines that can fly the cosmos, why the punnish names, why would the Arcturians be stupid enough to make phony Earth coinage that has the wrong dates on it, why are the monsters purple, why "Mekky", why is Winton making a million mistakes everywhere he goes? If it's a satire, why a style more suited to an action-romp, why the laughless dialogue, and most of all, why a conclusion that tries to sell the novel as straight-faced philosophical SF...an ending that contains no laughs, but rather a science lesson on infinite possibility?
So I cannot endorse popular opinion and call this must-read SF.
In Fredric Brown's mysteries, he seems to know how not to turn wild invention into uncontrolled frenzy. The inventiveness translates into unique puzzles, suspects with apparently unshakeable alibis can turn out to be guilty, a case where telepathy just has to be involved turns out to have a much saner solution! Brown grounds himself; the absurdities are, in a way, illusory. But in SF, when sewing machines do fly, and AIs are called Mekky, and women wear see-through space-gear, unless it's written as full-on riotous farce, I start to wonder how much of this stuff I'm supposed to take as serious SF. And just when I decide it's all malarky, Olaf Stapledon seems to step in and write the ending.
I didn't want it both ways. Amusing oddball novel...only.
Rating: 5
Summary: One of the top ten all time science fiction classics
Comment: This is a Wizard of Oz type parallel universe yarn for adolescents and adults. Unfairly neglected, it would make a stunning Disney animated film or Broadway musical. It's a delightful grab bag of satire on McCarthyism, science fiction fandom, the publishing world, and adolescent boys with out of control imaginations/hormones. Brown takes the blind tapper from Treasure Island and turns him into something utterly horrifying. He transforms Baum's Tik-tok Man into Mekl, the genius robot. The commies are transmuted into a race of interstellar invaders so horrific that humans can't bear to look at them and must shoot them on sight. The hapless hero just wants to get home (like Dorothy Gale in the first Oz book) but he ends up (like Dorothy in the later Oz books) with something better than home. The parallel world Brown creates is wacky but, like Oz (or Ratty and Mole's riverbank), totally believable if you enter into the spirit of it. I rate this book as one of the top classics of sf's Golden Age; indeed, it's on my personal list of the all-time top ten sf novels, along with Dick's Man in a High Castle, Lieber's The Big Time, Vance's Demon Princes quintet, Heinlein's Friday, etc.
Rating: 5
Summary: My surprise book
Comment: I read this book for the first time when I was 15 and I didn't think I was going to like it, because it is not one of my favorite genres. I consider this book, "my surprise book" for I was amazed by the idea. Unlike any other science fiction stories, I believe that this one has a completely different perspective of fantasy. The imagination of the author is outstanding. I'm 25 and I still love to sit down and read this book all over again, and feel like it is the first time.
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Title: From These Ashes: The Complete Short SF of Fredric Brown by Fredric Brown, Fredric Brown ISBN: 1886778183 Publisher: NESFA Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 2001 List Price(USD): $29.00 |
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Title: Martians, Go Home by Fredric Brown ISBN: 0345298535 Publisher: Baen Books Pub. Date: May, 1992 List Price(USD): $2.25 |
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Title: Dimensions of Sheckley : The Selected Novels of Robert Sheckley by Robert Sheckley, Sharon L. Sbarsky ISBN: 1886778299 Publisher: NESFA Press Pub. Date: March, 2002 List Price(USD): $29.00 |
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Title: Hunter and Hunted: The Ed and Am Hunter Novels by Fredric Brown ISBN: 0971818509 Publisher: Stewart Masters Publishing, Ltd. Pub. Date: July, 2002 List Price(USD): $29.99 |
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