Fredric Brown

I may or may not have mentioned on this particular blog that back in the sixth grade, we had Read magazine. This sometimes put out classic short-stories, like "Harrison Bergeron". (The later Reagan years were a high water for antiprogressivism; the 1980s decade explains perhaps everything about Gen-X.) One issue, Read devoted to an author whose name I'd forgotten since. I recall two stories in particular: "Rebound", and "The Weapon".

Last night I found the author: Fredric Brown. His most-famous story is certainly "Arena" which became an iconic Trek episode, even keeping the title. I don't know how many know it was Brown's.

I am ashamed to confess that, after forgetting Brown's name and most of the story's content, I rewrote "The Weapon". My main change was to step back from the Weapon premise; my macguffin was a total-conversion energy source (itself inspired by another forgotten Asimov story, who had it from Einstein). That made my protag more sympathetic than Brown's, but also more naïve. Still, TC like fusion could only be used as a weapon in the meantime - and my punchline was regrettably near-identical to Brown's, which words were just that memorable. I submitted this patchjob as a GCSE English Language project (so, tenth grade). I was not called on the four-year-old plagiary-by-memory - but I suspect it was caught, since I ended up with a B in that GCSE where I was expecting an A (I had an A in Literature). I reckon with more work it could have been less Brownian and more focused on Good Intentions Gone Awry. But what to do with the punchline?

That aside, and from the perspective of adulthood and many decades of intervening adaptations, Brown was something of a hack as a writer. He was most pleased to deliver Shaggy Dog Stories. His stories were very short, as exist to deliver The Punchline. I think his less-effective stories have The Punchline as a coda. Think less Trek, more The Scary Door I mean, Outer Limits. (The Twilight Zone is, at heart, more 1960s-bien-pensant than Brown, the cynic, would prefer.)

Also when Brown steps from fantasy-horror or noir, into science fiction, his science fiction is simply not scientific. I mentioned "Arena" here but the parasitic decorative earrings in "And The Gods Laughed" relies on ridiculous assumptions about our solar system's planets. We can allow for life on Mars, but on Ganymede? Really? At least we now know whence the brainslugs so-common in Futurama and now Stellaris. Probably by way of Puppet Masters more than Trek this time.

To the extent I have a fiction writing style, I often cop to Dunsany, Poe, and Ashton-Smith. But now that I know Brown's name, I can at least add him too.