Written in 1949, but I read the 1951 published novel and if this is cheating a bit I am glad I did because this was a great read. Brown was a master of the short story form that was the backbone of the 1940's pulp fiction craze. This was one of his few novel length stories and his hero Keith WInton is a pulp fiction short story writer. He can knock out a story in a coupler of hours of hard pounding on his typewriter. He collects three or four stories and hocks them around the various magazine publishers, he is an established name in the business and so he has little difficulty in getting his stories accepted, counting on a 50-50 success rate. He writes mostly science fiction or mystery stories and so when the first rocket is sent to the moon he finds himself a good vantage point to witness the landing: the rocket will produce a tremendous flash of light which the scientists say will be visible to the naked eye. The flash of light is in fact a lightning strike caused by the rockets descent to earth and Winton is knocked unconscious.

When he wakes up things are different: the large estate belonging to the owner of his favourite publishing house no longer exists, he hails a passing motorist who takes him into town, credit notes are used instead of money. A shopkeeper claims to be a collector of coins willing to exchange a large amount of credit notes for one of Winton's coins, but he is reported to the police who have a shoot on sight policy, he escapes and finds his name and address in the phone book, there is space travel and planet earth is at war with the Arcturians. The first part of the novel finds Winton adapting to his new situation and then trying to figure out what has happened to him. He books in at a hotel buys a typewriter and starts working on new stories to sell to earn a living.

Brown has fun with his novel that manages to include plenty of the tropes and plotting that one might find in the short stories published by the pulp magazines. There is more however, as he includes tension and mystery as well as irony in the adventures of Keith Winton on this different planet. Pulp fiction it maybe, but I enjoyed the invention and the fast pace of this fantasy science fiction novel - 4 stars ( )

An accident with a new technology catapults Keith Winton, the editor of a 1950's sci-fi magazine, into a parallel universe very like a sci-fi story in which Earth has colonies on Mars and Venus and is at war with Arcturus. His unfamiliarity with the society he finds himself in and his possession of obsolete money denominated in dollars rather than credits raises suspicion that he is an Arcturan spy, which means that his life is very much in danger: better that a thousand innocent people be killed than that one Arcturan spy survive. Moreover, in this universe, the woman with whom he was beginning to form a romantic attachment is even more beautiful, is habitually much more provocatively dressed, and is engaged to a super-genius and super-hero. So, after various adventures he contrives to get into a situation where a use of the technology that got him here will probably win the war and maybe send him back home.
Pretty trashy, but also satirises trash SF. Not great, but a reasonably entertaining quick read.

Imagine an astronaut in hotpants.

This is a story full of anomalies and sexism. There're Model T Fords driven while scientists have perfected the space warp drive, there're no cell phones, and people still write on typewriters. Alternate universes abound. ( )

review of
Fredric Brown's What Mad Universe
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 20, 2018


I'm still in the midst of my Fredric Brown spree. It's always fun to be excited about a previously unread author & to read a slew of their works in quick succession. So far, I've read 3 crime fiction novels of his: Night of the Jabberwock ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2452296089 ), The Lenient Beast ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2461372607 ), & Here Comes A Candle ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2462070437 ) & found them all inspiring & significantly different from each other.

Now I've reached Brown's SF, wch excites me b/c I generally like SF more than crime fiction. I've been enjoying Brown's SF & enjoying that he wrote both mysteries & SF but I'm already beginning to crash a bit from my Brown high. This one has an introduction by Philip Klass (William Tenn) that gets into substantial depth of explaining that What Mad Universe is parody inspired by the world of SF fandom & other elements of the SF world.

"The cover, by Bergey, gives us a fantastic strawberry blonde wearing the regulation crotch-tight shorts and metal brassierre who, in the course of fleeing from a bug-eyed monster with very grabby, grabby hands, is at this point poised between Saturn and Earth's moon and is about to make her last leap for safety out of the picture and into the reader's lap."

"the leaping girl in shorts also comes from the novel, although there she appears as a parody of such covers; but the bluish, sex-mad entity with the protruding hands, teeth, and eyes comes from nowhere but the cover artist's own warehouse."

That's what Tenn thinks. You've heard of blue balls.. well that monster is what I become after I've been deprived of sex for more than a day. Since it's been a bit longer than a day I dare not leave my house when I can be seen anymore & I can only go to bars where people are so fucked-up they don't notice.

Fanzines, or just plain zines probably originated in SF subclture way back when, such as in the 1930s back in what used to be a really cutting edge century commonly known as the 20th. Of course, the 21st century has made the 20th evaporate in pre-planned obsolesence. Of course, the 21st century became obsolete on the 1st day so I'm not even sure where we're at anymore. In the meantime, let's clutch at the security of a 20th century fan-letter:

"Lookit, Rocky, get the Uranium bug-juice ready and iced because I'm going to beard the lyin' in his den, some day this week. Not coming to Spaceport N'Yawk just to see you, Rocky, don't flatter yourself on that. But because I got to see a Martian about a dog-star anyway, I'll be in town, so I'm going to see if you're as ugly as they say you are." - pp 6-7

How many of you readers out there know what BEMs are? Raise yr skirts & yr kilts if you do.

"What he saw looked like normal traffic on a normal small city's main street—for a moment. Then, walking arm in arm, two of the purple-furred monsters went by. Both of them were slightly bigger than the one that had attacked him in the drugstore.

"The monsters were strange enough, but there was something even stranger: the fact that the people before and after them paid no attention to them. Whatever they were, they were—accepted. They were normal. They belonged here.

"Here?

"That word again. Where, what, when was here?

"What mad universe was this that took for granted an alien race more horrible looking than the worst Bem that had ever leered from a science-fiction magazine cover?" - p 25

I've been reading so much that the bks are blurring together. They're intermingled in the mistout.

"Odorless, harmless to all forms of animal and vegetable life, it was imprevious to light and to epsilon ray. It was inexpensively made from coal tar; one plant could turn out enough in a few hours each evening to mix with the air and blanket a city. And at dawn sunlight disintegrated it within the space of ten or fifteen minutes.

"Since the discovery of the mistout, other Arc ships had been through the cordon but no major city of Earth had been attacked. The mistout worked." - p 62

One thing I'm pretty sure was in this bk was something about beardin' the lyin':

"The wealth these books (all of which, of course, were made into top-ranking motion pictures) brought him enabled him to own his own private space cruiser and his own laboratory where—during his last two years of college—he had already made several improvements in the techniques of space travel and space warfare.

"That was" tENT "at the age of seventeen, just an ordinary young fellow, comparatively speaking. His career had already started then." - p 101

Yes, I'm an old man now — &, like Tesla, I'm all but forgotten. Even my pigeon left me. But, still, I'll never forget when my bk Paradigm Shift Knuckle Sandwich & other examples of P.N.T. (Perverse Number Theory) was made into the blockbuster called "Is this a Black Theorem?" & the internet had to be rebuilt just to accomodate the hits: https://youtu.be/gw48jIh0oS4 . Who cd believe that now when people are too busy having sex w/ their not-only-smart-but-sexy-phones in the back of robot cabs? Back then, Mekky & Betty & I were like this [hologram of middle finger & forefinger intertwined]:

"Mekky could read minds and could speak to people, individually or en masse, telepathically. He could even, at close range, read Arcturian minds. Human telepaths had tried that, but invariably had gone insane before they could report their findings." - p 102

If only they had listened to me.

"Meanwhile Miss Hadley continued to keep her job as editor of the world's most popular love story magazine, the job she had held when she and" tENT "had met and fallen in love—when he was in New York" going to bars at closing time w/ blue balls. - p 102

Now Mekky has call-blocker on my telepathy & I got bar balls from Betty.

"Why, though, did Betty Hadley wear that costume, even at the Borden offices? He hadn't seen any other women dressed that way—and surely he'd have noticed. It was one of the most puzzling of the minor mysteries he'd encountered. He wondered how he could find the answer without asking." - p 114

Look in the mirror guy.

"Yes, it felt good to be the hunter and not the hunted, and to be taking some more positive action than writing stories merely to survive. He'd always hated writing, anyway." - p 145

"According to his wife, Fredric Brown hated to write." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredric_Brown

I reckon there might be a whole subgenre of spoofs of fandom. Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun ( https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/456433-bimbos-of-the-something-or-another ) comes to mind. What Mad Universe definitely deserves a stellar place in that subgenre. ( )

I vaguely remember this being really cool because he's transported into someone else's idea of what the future looks like. Hope I'm remembering the right book when I'm logging this. ( )