until I read this novel, I had only read a few of Frederic Browns short stories some very short, He is funny, creative and very economical with wordage many of his contemporaries, great authors of the long novel format such as Heinlein, Asimov and such claim that this is a most challenging thing to do and often cite Brown as the master of the short short form.
This, perhaps his most well know full length novel my paperback edition haspages is funny, creative and still very economical with wordage.
It is a sort of Wizard of Oz type adventure story that is lighted hearted and entertaining there are no big lessons to be learned here, no soap box ideals or insights, its just good pulp from one who knows the genre well.
Printed above the title of myBantam edition with intro from Philip Kylas aka William Tenn is, “THE TERRIFYING CLASSIC OF A MAN TRAPPED IN AN ALTERNATE REALITY”, well, I wouldnt quite put it as “terrifying” exactly but our protagonist had one desperate hardship or jam to get out of after another which was exciting enough to keep this reader flipping pages.
The “writes what you know” rule is applied here as the protagonist, Keith Winton, is a pulp magazine editor and much of the business of magazine publication is featured here which I found interesting.
Overall, this was a worthwhile read, deserves its praise as a pulp classic and will get me to read more of his work primarily his short story compilations as he is not based on this novel a big idea sort of writer.
A charming goldenage scifi tale that isn't afraid to poke fun at its own genre why, of course space girls are scantily clad, Why wouldn't they be. Perhaps funniest of all, though maybe unintentionally is the fact that the main character is whisked away to a parallel universe where everyone wants to kill him and his main concern is that his parallel universe girlfriend is engaged to someone else.
Although better known for his extremely brief short stories, Frederic Brown was also an extremely accomplished novelist, The solidity of his prose style is remarkable: he was just a very good writer, able to express sometimes quite complex ideas very clearly indeed.
This novel was published inand it's a mark of how sophisticated the SF field was becoming in the hands of such writers as Brown and Sprague de Camp and a few others that they were able to twist their imaginations around to deal with the SF field itself.
In its own way, this novel is a good example of critical fiction: a prepostmodern work that affectionately lampoons the trops of props of pulp SF.
Amusant mélange d'humour et de sciencefiction comme seul Brown savait le faire, La sátira puede esconderse en cualquier rincón del humor,
Género. CienciaFicción.
Lo que nos cuenta, Un accidente durante la prueba de un cohete experimental transporta a nuestro protagonista, editor de cienciaficción, hacia una realidad paralela que presenta desarrollos técnicos mucho más avanzados otros no tanto y en la que estamos bajo la amenaza de los arturianos, alienígenas con malas intenciones.
Quiere saber más del libro, sin spoilers Visite:
sitelink blogspot. com/ “it seemed suddenly to Keith, a onedimensional world, There was only a forward and backward in it as long as each of themhe and the unknowngroped their way along the building fronts.
Like ants crawling along string they must meet and pass unless one of them turned, ”
Purple monsters, mistouts, parallel universes, computer brains named Mekky: What kind of mad universe is this
Browns What Mad Universe harkens back to the classics scifi films, which oftentimes pitted humans against creatures and beings from the vast beyond, and Browns book seems to be as much of homage as well as a satire of this genre, with prototypes of the genre running rampant throughout the plot.
While reading, I felt like I was in a prolonged episode of The Twilight Zone, and this made for quite an entertaining ride,
The plot involves Keith Winton, an editor for a science fiction magazine, being transported to a parallel universe when a rocket launch blast propels him into another dimension.
Although there are many likenesses to the world he knows, he suddenly finds things are quite different, and he quickly becomes a fugitive on the run.
Keith will try to stay alive long enough to find his way back to the world he knew,
This book is fun, imaginative, humorous and quite creative and clever, I also thought the “story within a story” aspect was quite ingenious, I probably liked the first half of the bookwith the initial set up and conflicta tad better than the second half, That is only a very minor flaw to an otherwise impressive book,
Over all, What Mad Universe very fun book and Im looking to reading more from Frederick Brown, Real Rating:.of five
These old Golden Agers are novellas! Just realized it, Need to cogitate. Keith Winton is an editor of pulp science fiction magazines, Things are going well the job is good. His boss likes him. He's making headway in romancing a lovely editor of romance magazines, And then a freak accident from a failed rocket launch thrusts him in to a different reality, . . one that, upon further review, bares a striking resemblance to one of the space opera's from the stories he edits, Now Keith Winton has to try to survive in a world where he can be shot on sight for being an alien invader, Where the Earth is united in an intergalactic war, And he has to hope he can survive this mad universe and find a way home,
This is a reread but, honestly, I didn't remember anything but the very basics of the story, This is a very early use of parallel universes and an explanation of the classic multiverse in SF, A good book and historically important, It breezed along, which was nice, I have seen this sometimes described as humorous and I have to wonder if that's solely on the basis of Brown's reputation for writing humorous SF.
Because this is not a particularly funny book, It's light, but you're not getting anything like Brown's "Martians, Go Home, " It is a recommended read, particularly if you are looking for seminal SF, This old classic SF deserves to be called a classic, : Even now, it feels fairly unique and very interesting, a solid riff off of the golden age SF and a nearly seamless conjunction with alternate reality with all kinds of BEMs.
Bug Eyed Monsters.
SF in our universe, and Fact in the other, Aliens everywhere! War of the Worlds, Mars, Venus, Teleportation, Motherships, subjugation, it's all here,
So what is this professional in the SF field going to do when faced with a reality that is everything he'd been publishing
Why not.
BE A HERO!!
This happens to be one hell of a fun book! Full of lowtypes, shady individuals, telepathic entities, spaceships, and an infinity of universes.
I keep thinking that I should have read this EARLY EARLY in my first forays into SF, I would have immediately placed this one as one of my absolute favorites of all time if not just for nostalgia's stake, but because it's smooth and so cool.
:
As it is now, I'm just extremely happy to have finally gotten around to it and say to all of ya out there wishing you knew a very good early SF title to where you could dip your beak.
. . This one is pretty damn fantastic and I think it holds up very well even now, There really isn't that many Golden Age SF I can truly say that about,
Or at least none that I can say that I unequivocally enjoyed from the first to the last pages without some sort of major or annoying complaint.
:
. Very impressive. : review of
Fredric Brown's What Mad Universe
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE July,
I'm still in the midst of my Fredric Brown spree.
It's always fun to be excited about a previously unread author amp to read a slew of their works in quick succession, So far, I've readcrime fiction novels of his: Night of the Jabberwock sitelink goodreads. com/review/show , The Lenient Beast sitelink goodreads. com/review/show , amp Here Comes A Candle sitelink goodreads. com/review/show amp found them all inspiring amp 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 amp enjoying that he wrote both mysteries amp 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 amp other elements of the SF world.
"The cover, by Bergey, gives us a fantastic strawberry blonde wearing the regulation crotchtight shorts and metal brassierre who, in the course of fleeing from a bugeyed 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, sexmad 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 amp I can only go to bars where people are so fuckedup they don't notice.
Fanzines, or just plain zines probably originated in SF subclture way back when, such as in thes back in what used to be a really cutting edge century commonly known as theth.
Of course, thest century has made theth evaporate in preplanned obsolesence, Of course, thest century became obsolete on thest day so I'm not even sure where we're at anymore, In the meantime, let's clutch at the security of ath century fanletter:
"Lookit, Rocky, get the Uranium bugjuice 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 dogstar anyway, I'll be in town, so I'm going to see if you're as ugly
as they say you are.
" pp
How many of you readers out there know what BEMs are Raise yr skirts amp yr kilts if you do.
"What he saw looked like normal traffic on a normal small city's main streetfor a moment, Then, walking arm in arm, two of the purplefurred 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 wereaccepted, 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 sciencefiction magazine cover" p
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
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 topranking motion pictures brought him enabled him to own his own private space cruiser and his own laboratory whereduring his last two years of collegehe 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
Yes, I'm an old man now amp, 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 amp other examples of P, N. T. Perverse Number Theory was made into the blockbuster called "Is this a Black Theorem" amp the internet had to be rebuilt just to accomodate the hits: sitelink be/gwjIhoS, Who cd believe that now when people are too busy having sex w/ their notonlysmartbutsexyphones in the back of robot cabs Back then, Mekky amp Betty amp I were like this hologram of middle finger amp 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
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 lovewhen he was in New York" going to bars at closing time w/ blue balls.
p
Now Mekky has callblocker on my telepathy amp 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 wayand 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
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
"According to his wife, Fredric Brown hated to write, " sitelink wikipedia. org/wiki/Fredric
I reckon there might be a whole subgenre of spoofs of fandom, Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun sitelink goodreads. com/story/show/ comes to mind. What Mad Universe definitely deserves a stellar place in that subgenre, .
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Fredric Brown