FROM THESE ASHES

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.