One of the top ten all time science fiction classics

books:

	• What Mad Universe Fredric Brown Amereon Limited, 1976 average customer review:based on 10 reviews
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Once Fashionable

Outdated science fiction. Some parts are original and enjoyable, others naive. Read this book in the same mind as you'd read a book by Jules Verne or H.G. Wells.

Incredibly funny ...

... and not really all that dated, given the plethora of sf adventure movies being made since Star Wars. Oh, maybe the totally gorgeous heroine who mostly stands around is a bit retro, but that's what sci fi guys expected of women when it was written, and not the only ones either. I wonder if anyone could catch the spirit of this book in a movie. I doubt it.

for more information click here

One of the top ten all time science fiction classics

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.

for more information click here

What mad delight!

This is the finest novel that ever slummed on the pulpy pages of the old Startling Stories magazine. It was written by a consummate professional, a master wordsmith whose avowed artistic goal was making a more-or-less honest living

It's the story of a very strange couple of days in the life of Keith Winton, an underpaid editor of a hack science fiction magazine rather remarkably like Startling Stories. As the book begins, Winton is engaged in the drudgiest of drudge work, editing the letters to the editor column, all of which come from youthful, pimply, passionate fans such as Joe Doppelburg, whose latest letter he is trying to fit into the monthly paste-up.

It's about 1950, a time when both a pulp science fiction magazine and a good cheeseburger cost about $0.25. In Winton's retro-precocious world, the first unmanned lunar probe has recently been launched. Laying aside Joe's letter aside for the moment, he goes outside to see if he can spot the anticipated landing. It will be marked by a humongous flash, you see, from a new kind of on-board generator that is supposed to be visible to the naked earthside eye. The flash, it turns out is not all the difficult to see, for the probe has been a colossal failure and is falling back to earth even as Winton peers upwards. It so happens that the impact point is the top of his head....

After which, he finds himself in a strangely altered New York, a New York in which pulp SF magazines cost 2.5cr and in which the nighttime streets are actually a little bit more dangerous than ours today. Women go into space in revealingly transparent spacesuits. Moonies trace their origins to the moon, not to Korea. Interstellar ships are powered by wholly unexpected developments in sewing machine technology. And the mysterious hero guarding all mankind against the space armadas of the dreaded alien invaders is brave, dashing, glamorous Doppelle.

I first read this story more than fifty years ago and still own a battered, second-hand first edition (sans dust jacket, alas, 10¢ at Miss Eilis' Book Emporium on 16th Street, San Francisco). One of the earlier Amazon reviewers wrote, "This book is one of the best SF books I ever read." Yes, I'll agree with that. I'll go even further, it is one of the finest pulp novels ever written, better than 99% of the genre novels being written today, better than 99.9% of the literary novels.

for more information click here

It'sa mad, mad, mad universe...

Keith Winton, a Pulp SF magazine editor, was minding his own business, answering a fan's letter, when the first moon rocket exploded right on top of him.
Next thing you know he is on a strange Earth, where having coins minted after 1935 will get you shot as a spy, aliens from the Moon work and play along side Earthlings and mankind is fighting for its very survival against battle fleets from Arcturus.
This is a classic sci-fi story. First printed around 1949 this story has held up very well and is a delightful read on a lazy day afternoon or a few slow hours on a train.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2

hot