What Mad Universe: Frederic Brown

One of the benefits of the rise of ebooks is that publishers can find it profitable to dig into their back catalogues and republish old classics. That’s what Gollancz are doing with their SF Gateway website. So I’ve been on a bit of a nostalgia kick recently. Some of these old titles don’t hold up very well today (I’ve been finding Philip Jose Farmer rather disappointing, for example). But others, like the novels of Bob Shaw, are still very readable.

And so is this book. What Mad Universe (1949) is a kind of self-referential, tongue-in-cheek story in which the editor of a pulp science fiction magazine is thrown into a parallel universe in which the kind of material he has been publishing is cold hard fact, though he takes a long time to understand and come to terms with this. Earth is at war with an alien species which threatens the existence of humanity; flying to the Moon is unremarkable; great purple monsters walk the streets; “space girls” really do wear the kind of skimpy costumes featured on the covers of pulp SF magazines, without any sense of self-consciousness. There’s a nice section at the end where Brown explains all of this with a remarkable appeal to the idea of an infinity of multiple universes (pretty advanced thinking for 1949).

A lot of fun to re-read.

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Originally published at rightword.com.au on October 4, 2015.