Dr. Simon Reads Appendix N Part Four: Fredric Brown

Dr. Simon Reads Appendix N: Fredric Brown

This is an ongoing sporadic series, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. Appendix N is the bibliography of Gary Gygax's original Dungeon Masters Guide, and lists a range of classic SF and fantasy authors that influenced his interest in the fantastical. See the first part of this series for more information.

This time around, I have reached the works of:

Fredric Brown

I hadn’t heard of Fredric Brown before, and the information on him is pretty scant. Evidently his profile was modest. Born 1906, died 1973, Brown’s bibliography spans 1938 (The Moon for a Nickel) to 1965 (Eine Kleine Nachtmusik) plus some posthumous publications in the 80s and 90s.

According to his Wikipedia Bio he was not fond of writing, engaging in lots of avoidance techniques to do otherwise, but considering that he was highly prolific, a master of short stories, often short in the extreme. I find a lot of similarity between many of his works and those in the BBC 500 Words competition (which I also review I these blogs). Some of the stories are a paragraph long or so, such as “The End”, which is a simple palindromic work wherein Professor Jones creates a time manipulating machine, presses the button and then the few sentences are basically the first few sentences in reverse. Some of the stories even sound like they could be 500 Words stories from the titles – “The Cheese on Stilts”, “The Discontented Cows”, “The Star Mouse”, “Me and Flapjack and the Martians”.

The Stories

The original Appendix N has no specific recommendations, whereas the 5^th Edition version suggests What Mad Universe and Hall of Mirrors. I ended up getting the Fredric Brown Megapack (vol 1) on Kindle which consists of 33 of his stories including Hall of Mirrors , Arena (more on which below), as well as The End and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik mentioned above, but not What Mad Universe.

Because each story is generally pretty short, I’m not going to go in to too many plot specifics. Brown’s subject matter is more what I would think of as “weird tales” than usually Science Fiction outright (and rarely touches anything that could be classed as fantasy except the occasional curse). He likes a kind of noir-ish murder or gothic tale with a twist, as evidenced by many of his stories with “Murder” or “Death” in the title. In this he is similar to Jonathon Carroll, with occasional traces of HP Lovecraft or Lord Dunsany;  stories set in the real world with either minimal or no fantastic elements. Nightmare in Yellow, for example, about a man planning to murder his wife, is more akin to a shaggy dog story with a darkly entertaining punchline.

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is a moody atmospheric piece about a musician searching for The Sound, and finding himself in a fog-enshrouded town in Germany. After almost being lured into drowning himself by the sound of the river, he winds up in a mysterious Beerkeller where he meets a charismatic musician. The opening line shows Brown’s style that, to me, evokes partly Fletcher Pratt and partly Dunsany (both of whom will feature in later instalments of this series). “His name was Dooley Brown and he was One of Us, by which I mean that he was partly a paranoiac, partly a schizophrenic, and mostly a nut with a strong idée fixe, an obsession.”

He also evokes feelings of Philip K Dick in some of his stories, mostly ones that use time travel as a plot device. It Didn’t Happen, for example, or Of Time and Eustace Weaver. Both involve protagonists stuck with the inherent paradoxes of time travel. The SF elements are used purely as a means to weave the story and construct the twist. I like how Brown veers between genre and style. Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is moody and dark throughout, but others are pure joking caper (Pi in the Sky, for example, a parody on advertising. Of Time and Eustace Weaver is more like what would happen if one of Damon Runyon's characters had time travel). His protagonists can be brooding, light-hearted, cowardly or delusional. Throughout there is an indefinite “Fredric Brown” tone that can be picked out, but he’s not so easily pinned down most of the other comparisons I’ve mentioned above. Lovecraft, or Dick, or Dunsany, or Carroll, or Pratt; all have a particular authorial style that is unmistakable, especially if you were to read thirty three consecutive works by any of those authors. Brown, less so, which makes reading an anthology of his works in many ways more enjoyable. It’s like Forrest Gump’s proverbial box of chocolates, except that someone has replaced some of the chocolates with fruit or cheesy puffs.

Arena

Although this isn’t one of the recommended tales from the Dungeons and Dragons appendices, it’s probably the one story most people will be familiar with in at least some form. The protagonist, Bob Carson, is a fighter pilot in an interstellar war between humans and a race known as Outsiders, who are revealed to be red spherical creatures with clawed appendages.

Carson is snatched from his one-man scout craft outside the orbit of Pluto and awakens on blue sand in a strange enclosed area, along with an Outsider; the two kept apart by an invisible forcefield that doesn’t allow living matter to pass through. It turns out that an advanced race has captured the two to fight it out, and the losing side will be wiped out in order to prevent a destructive war.

Sound familiar? 

Yes, it’s the basis is the Star Trek episode, also called Arena. The Outsider is more alien than the Gort (and I don’t think 60s TV effects would have done justice to it), and Carson doesn’t win by constructing a rudimentary cannon out of found objects, but he does use his cunning to win in the end. Any moral quandaries we may have about the Outsiders being wiped out are ameliorated by the waves of hatred described as emanating from the Outsider, and its casual torture and dismemberment of a hapless lizard creature.

Hall of Mirrors

Hall of Mirrors is written in second person, addressing the reader, who is later identified as being Professor Norman Hastings, suddenly extracted from his old life by a mysterious force and appearing in a strange room. He discovers a note written to himself by an unknown author who seems to know him well. What follows is a very Philip K Dick style story of identity, constructed around a framework of time travel. Anyone who knows the Doctor Who episode Heaven Sent may have an inkling of what is going on.

I really liked Brown’s work, and when I’ve got time I’ll probably get the Megapack volume 2; each story takes little time to read and so one can work through it at odd moments when there are a few minutes to spare. There was nothing in these stories where I saw a direct influence on D&D, especially as Brown does very little one would call fantasy. I think probably his main gift is in style and a way of looking at things. From the creepy presentation of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik to the disturbing but entertaining satire of Etaoin Shrdlu (in which a printing press gains sentience), there are ways in which game elements can be employed with variety and style.