Daymare

Daymare by Fredric Brown
from The Mammoth Book of Golden Age Science Fiction ed. Asimov, Waugh, Greenberg
Carroll & Graf, 1989
Originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Fall 1943
Price I paid: $3

During the 1940s, the great names emerged in an eruption of talent. They formed the mould for the next three decades of science fiction and their writing is as fresh today as it was then.

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“Answer”

“Answer” by Fredric Brown
from The Metal Smile, ed. Damon Knight
Belmont Science Fiction, 1968
Originally published in Angels and Spaceships, 1954, E.P. Dutton
Price I paid: none

“DO NOT FOLD, BEND, OR MUTILATE”

marked the beginning of our cybernetic society. How will it end?

The varied answers to that question have proved to be fertile ground for some of the greatest science fiction imaginations. But perhaps we shouldn’t look too closely into the future of cybernetics. It may be that the survival capacity of the thinking machine is greater than that of its maker…

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Martians, Go Home

Martians, Go Home by Fredric Brown
Ballantine Books, 1976 (Original copyright 1955)
Price I paid: none

Luke Devereaux was a science-fiction writer, holed up in a desert shack waiting for inspiration. He was the first man to see a Martian…but he wasn’t the last!

It was estimated that a billion of them had arrived—one to every three human beings on Earth—obnoxious green creatures who could be seen and heard, but not harmed, and who probed private sex lives as shamelessly as they probed government secrets.

No one knew why they had come. No one knew how to make them go away—except, perhaps, Luke Devereaux. Unfortunately Devereaux was going slightly bananas, so it wouldn’t be easy.

But for a science-fiction writer nothing was impossible…

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