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A review by gluckenstein
The Best Short Stories of Fredric Brown by Fredric Brown
adventurous
dark
funny
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.0
After finishing this, I can say rather definitely that I've read many of these stories in Russian translations on separate pages of lib.ru or some such site. It's notable that the shorter the story the more likely it was to seem familiar, which checks out with my usual way of skimming through such collections.
This time, as with all fiction I encounter, I decided to be more thorough. I cannot say it was very rewarding to complete this. Most stories can be more or less grouped into two camps: comic stories, witty riffs on stock concepts of the sci fi genre alternating with, possibly indebted to John Collier, more supernatural funny stories, and light adventure. Some of comic ones, especially flash fiction, are quite ingenious, and the hit ratio is much, much lower on the adventure stuff. Even his most famous story, Arena, is, in my opinion, actually pretty slack. But it can't hold a candle (of terribleness) to something like Nothing Sirius, with its main dramatic conflict of "will an overserious pilot man notice how hot main character's daughter is for him?", an obvious corny disaster.
Somewhat of an anomaly are two fairly long and straight-faced horror stories (a genre which a couple of others also toy with but not quite to the same extent) Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and Come and Go Mad. The former, although not necessary influenced by Lovecraft, possibly just sharing a part of his romantic, gothic literary ancestry, feels very much like one of the weaker, the least distinctive Lovecraft short stories, like The Hound. The latter, on the other hand, is pretty cool, one of the wildest and the most inventive stories here narratively and stylistically, which ends on that sweet note of horror in the face of revelation of the true order of the universe (although, where a certain another writer could err on the side of being too frustratingly vague, Fredric Brown cannot help it but describe that order a little too precisely for the story's own good).
I think Brown's higher success rate with flash fiction is not accidental because he strikes me as a better idea man than a wordsmiths. In one or two pages he has no opportunities to dilute his concepts with extraneous detail. But even in stories as short as a dozen pages there's often a sense of the lack of consiceness that can make or break such material. And compared to Robert Sheckley, another writer of similar profile, he is less sure to imbue his tales with either a humanistic pathos, or a seductive cynicism that will give them an appearance, at least, of a satirical edge. Often Brown is more than satisfied enough to just relate a kooky plot he came up with — and so when the plot or the leanness in its telling is lacking it looks especially damaging. Although I have to shoutout to Pi in the Sky as rare very amusing longer story.
An advantage of vintage popular fiction, though, is that even if it isn't that good it can teach you something new about the era of its first publication. And in this sense the collection is fairly generous. Yehudi Principle and Etaoin Shrdlu, both not so good stories, are good examples of this: the former revolves around a meme apparently originally conceived on a Bob Hope-hosted radio show, the latter deals in detail with the job of using a Linotype.
This time, as with all fiction I encounter, I decided to be more thorough. I cannot say it was very rewarding to complete this. Most stories can be more or less grouped into two camps: comic stories, witty riffs on stock concepts of the sci fi genre alternating with, possibly indebted to John Collier, more supernatural funny stories, and light adventure. Some of comic ones, especially flash fiction, are quite ingenious, and the hit ratio is much, much lower on the adventure stuff. Even his most famous story, Arena, is, in my opinion, actually pretty slack. But it can't hold a candle (of terribleness) to something like Nothing Sirius, with its main dramatic conflict of "will an overserious pilot man notice how hot main character's daughter is for him?", an obvious corny disaster.
Somewhat of an anomaly are two fairly long and straight-faced horror stories (a genre which a couple of others also toy with but not quite to the same extent) Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and Come and Go Mad. The former, although not necessary influenced by Lovecraft, possibly just sharing a part of his romantic, gothic literary ancestry, feels very much like one of the weaker, the least distinctive Lovecraft short stories, like The Hound. The latter, on the other hand, is pretty cool, one of the wildest and the most inventive stories here narratively and stylistically, which ends on that sweet note of horror in the face of revelation of the true order of the universe (although, where a certain another writer could err on the side of being too frustratingly vague, Fredric Brown cannot help it but describe that order a little too precisely for the story's own good).
I think Brown's higher success rate with flash fiction is not accidental because he strikes me as a better idea man than a wordsmiths. In one or two pages he has no opportunities to dilute his concepts with extraneous detail. But even in stories as short as a dozen pages there's often a sense of the lack of consiceness that can make or break such material. And compared to Robert Sheckley, another writer of similar profile, he is less sure to imbue his tales with either a humanistic pathos, or a seductive cynicism that will give them an appearance, at least, of a satirical edge. Often Brown is more than satisfied enough to just relate a kooky plot he came up with — and so when the plot or the leanness in its telling is lacking it looks especially damaging. Although I have to shoutout to Pi in the Sky as rare very amusing longer story.
An advantage of vintage popular fiction, though, is that even if it isn't that good it can teach you something new about the era of its first publication. And in this sense the collection is fairly generous. Yehudi Principle and Etaoin Shrdlu, both not so good stories, are good examples of this: the former revolves around a meme apparently originally conceived on a Bob Hope-hosted radio show, the latter deals in detail with the job of using a Linotype.