From These Ashes: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Fredric Brown, Vol. 1

From Library Journal
From a tongue-in-cheek tale of a young boy's valiant effort to save the world ("Armageddon") to a dark tale of music and horror ("Eine Kleine Nachtmusik"), the stories of the late Brown represent a distinctive and unique voice in the sf community. This collection of more than 100 tales, many only a page in length, highlight the career of one of the genre's most incisive satirists and outstanding innovators. Most libraries should add this to their sf or short story collections. Last-Minute Mystery Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
One of the most durable writers of sf's golden age, Brown (1906-72) was a stalwart of the pulps, the cheap-paper magazines that published most genre fiction from the late '20s to the '60s. He contributed uniquely by virtue of also being a crackerjack mystery writer, for he brought the noirish atmosphere and seedy details of the era's crime fiction to sf. He also brought the sardonic humor of the newsrooms in which he learned the writing trade, and that was his finest gift. A Brown story typically takes an odd situation, develops it risibly, eerily, or suspensefully enough, and concludes with a surprise calculated to rouse chuckles, chills, or both. Famous characters from his stories include Mitkey, an ordinary mouse who becomes an interstellar explorer, and the last man on Earth, who hears a knock on his door. To read very many of his stories is to be convinced, rightly or wrongly, that Brown's manner and modus inspired such early TV shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
A collection of all 118 short science fiction and fantasy stories of one of the masters of the vignette, all his short works except two which were rewritten into parts of a novel. Introduction by Barry N. Malzberg. Dustjacket art by Bob Eggleton.

From the Publisher
The Fifteenth book in the NESFA’s Choice Series.


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A career retrospective of SF's master of the vignette. Unknown today, and unmourned when he died in 1972, misanthropic pulp-writer Brown achieved rapid fame in the 1940s and '50s with an enormous output of hard-edged, bitingly sarcastic stories that mocked the self-righteous superiority of the post—WWII Pax Americana and the paranoid Cold War years that followed. The space explorers in "And the Gods Laughed" and the carnival troupe in "Nothing Sirius" both stumble upon seemingly placid, simplistic alien cultures that they corrupt and exploit, only to find themselves made victims of their own naïveté. But Brown's forte, as Barry Malzberg observes in his introduction, is the short-short used by numerous pulp magazine editors as filler. In "Reconciliation," a bickering married couple forsakes their anger as nuclear holocaust fills the sky. No more than a few paragraphs, "The End" reverses itself in midsentence as a scientist discovers how to make time go backward. About a third of the 111 stories collected here are 200-word wonders in which people get exactly what they want and live long enough to regret it. In the most famous of these, "The Answer," a machine and its inventor pay the ultimate price for demanding to know if God exists. Not all of Brown's visions were dark: "Arena," later adapted as a Star Trek episode, and "Letter to a Phoenix" conclude that, in Malzberg's words, "humanity may be hopeless but it is absolutely unassailable." Gimmicky, sardonic, and sharply twisted: short, snappy gifts to contemporary fantasy that are still worth reading, if only to know how well, if not how often, Brown caught the brass ring.


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