Фредрик Браун: Ғылыми-қияли және детектив жанрларының шебері

American novelist and short story author
the science fiction and mystery writer

Fredric Brown (October 29, 1906 – March 11, 1972
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 to a 1967 episode of the American television series Star Trek.

Fredric Brown was born in Cincinnati. He spent a year at Hanover College, Indiana, before returning to Cincinnati. In 1929 he married and relocated to Milwaukee, working various jobs before settling into a career as a proofreader. 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. The 1944 short story "Arena" was used as the basis for the episode of the same name in the original Star Trek series. 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.

Brown's first mystery novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint, won the Edgar Award for outstanding first mystery novel. 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 1943 short story, "Madman's Holiday", was adapted into the 1946 RKO film Crack Up. His novel The Lights in the Sky Are Stars gives its name to the final episode of 2007 anime Gurren Lagann. It is also referred to in Taishi Tsutsui's manga We Never Learn, at the end of Chapter 39. Celebrated crime novelist Lawrence Block published The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown in 2022.