Fredric Brown (October 29, 1906 – March 11, 1972) was an American science fiction, fantasy, and mystery writer.
He is known for his use of humor and for his mastery of the "short short" form—stories of one to three pages, often with ingenious plotting devices and surprise endings. Humor and a postmodern outlook carried over into his novels as well. One of his stories, "Arena", was adapted into a 1967 episode of the American television series Star Trek.
Fredric William Brown, the only child of Karl Lewis and Emma Amelia Brown (née Graham), was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 29, 1906 (and often wished he had been born two days later, on Halloween); he found a sad, piquant pleasure in recalling that 1906 was the year of the San Francisco Earthquake and the Atlanta Race Riot. His father Karl Brown was born in 1871 in Oxford, Ohio, son of Waldo Franklin Brown (1832–1907), a nationally familiar progressive agricultural writer and lecturer who edited the farm pages of The Cincinnati Enquirer and published articles under the name Johnny Plowboy. Karl was something of a get-rich-quick schemer, taking jobs in sales and secretarial correspondence, as well as serving as what one biographer calls "accountant—in the shady business enterprises of a substitute father figure, William P. Harrison, a pioneering if not overly scrupulous entrepreneur of direct mail marketing ... headquartered in Columbus and later, after Columbus had gotten too hot for him, Cincinnati." When Fred was little, Karl Brown was arrested for fraud and Harrison bailed him out. A few years later, Harrison was put on trial for further frauds which gained nationwide headlines and was imprisoned. Biographer Curtis Evans suggests that these childhood experiences led to the shady and downright corrupt figures who appear in Fredric's mystery novels.
Brown attended Hughes High School, where he was (following his father) a member of the Commercial Club and the Salesmanship Club, among others. Fred spent a year at Hanover College, Indiana, before returning to Cincinnati. There, he studied for a semester at the University of Cincinnati. His mother died when he was a teenager; biographers say it is likely that he worked for his father, who died when he was 19. His uncle Linn is thought to have given him an allowance from the life insurance money.
Brown was descended from Presbyterian families of Massachusetts and Vermont on his father's side, and from Scots-Irish in Pennsylvania on his mother's. His mother Emma was the daughter of a railroad mail clerk. His uncle was Linn Waldo Brown, a schoolteacher in Oxford, Ohio, whom Fredric often visited and would later name his second son after.
In 1929 he married and relocated to Milwaukee, working various jobs before settling into a career as a proofreader. Other work included writing for newspapers and magazines in the Midwest.
Duane Swierczynski wrote, "According to his wife, Brown hated to write, and did whatever he could to put it off: play his flute, challenge a friend to a game of chess, or tease Ming Tah, his Siamese cat." When Brown would have trouble with a certain story, he would take a long bus trip in order to sit and think for days on end. When he would finally return home to sit himself in front of the typewriter, he produced work in a variety of genres: mystery, science fiction, short fantasy, black comedy.
Many of his books make use of the threat of the supernatural or occult before the "straight" explanation comes at the end. For example, Night of the Jabberwock is a humorous narrative of an extraordinary day in the life of a small-town newspaper editor.
Brown began to sell mystery short stories to American magazines in 1936. His first science fiction story, "Not Yet the End", was published in the Winter 1941 issue of Captain Future.
Brown's first mystery novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947), began a series starring Ed and Ambrose Hunter, depicting how a young man gradually ripens into a detective under the tutelage of his uncle, an ex–private eye now working as a carnival concessionaire.
His science fiction novel What Mad Universe (1949) is a parody of pulp science fiction story conventions.
The Lights in the Sky Are Stars (1952) tells the story of an aging astronaut who is trying to get his beloved space program back on track after Congress has cut its funding.
The short story "Answer" (1954) is thought to be the earliest representation of the "Yes, now there is a God" science fiction trope of a supercomputer that releases itself from human control. The story was originally published in Angels and Spaceships and the entire collection was later re-published as Star Shine for paperback adaptation.
Martians, Go Home (1955) is both a broad farce and a satire on human frailties as seen through the eyes of a billion jeering, invulnerable Martians who arrive not to conquer the world but to drive it crazy.
His 1945 short story "The Waveries" was described by Philip K. Dick as "what may be the most significant—startlingly so—story sci-fi has yet produced". Brown was one of three dedicatees of Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land (the other two being Robert Cornog and Philip José Farmer). Philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco in his book On Ugliness describes Brown's short story "Sentry" as "one of the finest short stories produced by contemporary science fiction" and uses its twist ending as an example of how ugliness and aesthetics are relative to different cultures.
In The Annotated Alice (1960), Martin Gardner refers to Brown's Night of the Jabberwock as a "magnificently funny mystery novel ... an outstanding work of fiction that has close ties to the Alice books."
In his non-fiction book Danse Macabre (1981), a survey of the horror genre since 1950, writer Stephen King includes an appendix of "roughly one hundred" influential books of the period: Fredric Brown's short-story collection Nightmares and Geezenstacks is included, and is, moreover, asterisked as being among those select works King regards as "particularly important".
Brown's first mystery novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint, won the Edgar Award for outstanding first mystery novel. His short story "Arena" was voted by Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the top 20 science fiction stories written before 1965.