Fredric Brown: "It Didn't Happen," "Pi in the Sky" and "The Geezenstacks"

Let's pull up 1977's Best of Fredric Brown (edited by Robert Bloch!) from the world's greatest website, the internet archive, and check out three stories from among the 30 it reprints.  I'll skip the first, "'Arena'," which has those annoying quote marks like David Bowie's 1977 album, because I've read it multiple times, albeit before my private notes scribbled in now lost notebooks and reviews on my Amazon account metastasized and formed the excrescence that is this blog.  And we don't need to read "Star Mouse" or "Etaoin Shrdlu" because I read them in 2020, nor "The End," which we read in 2018 under its alternate title "Nightmare in Time," nor "Puppet Show," "Answer" and "Knock," three more 2018 reads.  But that leaves many more stories we have yet to grapple with; today let's pore over three of them that look like full-sized SF stories and not vinnies or what isfdb calls "non-genre."  

"It Didn't Happen" (1963)

This is a sort of Twilight Zone-type fantasy story in which we learn the world is not at all what we believe it to be; "It Didn't Happen" also includes topics we have seen in other of Brown's works, like a murder and amnesia.

A wealthy man of leisure type guy fancies a stripper and bribes his way backstage to visit her and suggest she have sex with him for money.  She is so offended she hits him hard in the face and he whips out a gun and shoots her down.

The cops catch up to him and in his cell he tells his lawyer a crazy story about how one day he ran over a bicyclist and her body vanished, leading him to take an intellectual journey which concluded with him coming to believe that only he was real, that the rest of the universe was just his imagination, that other people simply did not exist, but were the creation of his own mind.  This diminished his inhibition against killing people, and when the stripper struck him he just reflexively destroyed her.  Today he has to admit that some people besides himself are real, as the stripper turned out to be.  

At night in his cell, the murderer has a dream in which the real people who run the world have a file card corresponding to each person, and the cards of real people are kept in one drawer and those who are just imaginary in another drawer, and if a card is moved from one drawer to another, the status of the person to which the card applies will change.

This dream turns out to be a reflection of a reality of which the murderer's subconscious mind is aware.  The murderer's lawyer and psychiatrist are real people who figure out that the murderer is also real, but years ago received a blow to the head while playing polo and suffers amnesia; one of the things the murderer has forgotten is all this business about there being both real and imaginary people and how he is supposed to not let the imaginary people in on the secret.  The lawyer contacts the people who manage the local files and has the murderer's card removed from the "real" drawer so he can kill the murderer; the imprisoned man's body disappears and along with it disappear all memories of him in the minds of other imaginary people, including the cops and officers of the court familiar with his case.

If you spend any time thinking about it, this story doesn't make a lot of sense and it doesn't have much by way of human feeling, either--it is meant to entertain by blowing you away with its crazy scenario.  I'll generously call it acceptable.  

"It Didn't Happen" debuted in Playboy and was later included in an anthology of SF from Hugh Hefner's magazine and various Brown collections.

"Pi in the Sky" (1945)

Here we have a satire that uses the same gag we have seen three or four times; the examples that are coming to mind are Robert A. Heinlein's 1950 "The Man Who Sold the Moon," Arthur C. Clarke's 1956  "Watch This Space" and Arthur Porges' 1956 "Masterpiece," but I swear there are more stories in which the sky becomes a canvas for advertising.  Congrats to Brown for getting their first.  Besides satirizing the ubiquity of advertising and the susceptibility of people to it, the story pokes fun at scientists, suggesting many of them talk a lot of rot to fool people into thinking them smarter than they are, as well as suggesting that ordinary people often have more common sense than scientists.  "Pi in the Sky" is over twenty pages long, and Brown integrates into its length a shaggy dog story (a guy goes through many adventures trying to get to Washington, D.C. but ends up in Washington state), accents that are supposed to be funny, and a bunch of jokes about how guys are horny and women are manipulative.  And that old perennial, jokes about how people act differently when they have been drinking.  

"Pi in the Sky" has a chummy colloquial narrator, a guy I guess living in the distant future, who relates to us the story of something that happened in the near future of the 1980s.  Brown's tale features a bunch of different characters who don't interact with each other much if at all--"Pi in the Sky" is a series of connected (sometimes loosely) comic anecdotes, each one more outlandish than the one before it--the first anecdote is almost a straight SF tale.

One night, a few hundred of the brightest stars start moving independently across the dark sky, to the  astonishment and confusion of astronomers.  We witness the international crew (here is where we get the comic accents) of a ship whose radio has broken flummoxed by how they cannot navigate by astrolabe anymore.  We witness the frenzied reactions of various scientists.  One scientist figures out the truth and does the goodest job he can to get to the White House to enlist the President's aid in saving the world from a terrible fate, but as already noted he ends up on the wrong side of the country and accomplishing nothing after many trials.

The terrible fate is revealed to be the work of a reclusive business tycoon who is also an amateur engineer of remarkable ability.  This genius has invented a device that by transmission of energy waves can bend light.  He has set up a battery of hundreds of these devices in the mansion in which he resides under a false name, to refract the light of prominent stars in a precise way, making them appear to move across the sky.  After a few days the mobile stars converge at their final destinations and stop--they are seen to spell out a simple advertising slogan that prods people to buy the soap manufactured by the genius's company.  This magnate may be a genius engineer and a talented entrepreneur, but he spelled his own name wrong (btw, the story is full of joke names like Sniveley and Phlutter) and dies of a stroke upon realizing his error.  Two months later the electric company cuts off the juice to the (pseudonymously-owned) mansion and the stars snap back into place.  The experiment may be considered a success, however--the last line of Brown's story reports that, while the ad was in the sky, sales of the soap in question increased "915%."

People who think they are smart hate advertising and have contempt for the common people upon whom advertising is said to work, and here we have another story in which these tired and boring attitudes are expressed, mixed up in a stew that includes a ton of additional jokes on topics related and unrelated to this central tent pole satire of our society.  "Pi in the Sky" is too long and is not funny; way too much of it just goes nowhere; the only likable or compelling character is the villain, and the only human feeling it inspires (in this reader, at least) is sympathy for the brilliant amateur inventor whom Brown chooses to humiliate.  Am I supposed to be glad a genius inventor who sells soap dies after committing a typo--providing soap to people is a good deed!

(As both an undergrad and a grad student I met left-wing professors who thought people don't really need soap, that the capitalists had tricked the vulnerable populace into thinking they smelled bad, but, come on, guys.)  

Thumbs down, I'm afraid.  A lot of people seem to like "Pi in the Sky," though, and, since its premiere in Thrilling Wonder alongside stories by Murray Leinster and Frank Belknap Long, it has been reprinted many times in multiple foreign languages as well as in English.                

"The Geezenstacks" (1943)

This story debuted in Weird Tales during the editorship of Dorothy McIlwraith, alongside stories by Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and Ralph Milne Farley and an illustration by Hannes Bok that I can't get out of my head.  "The Geezenstacks" would go on to be one of the title stories of a 1961 Brown collection which would be reprinted in many languages over the decades.

This is the best story of today's three, one which enjoys internal consistency and a welcome lack of dumb jokes or banal social commentary, and even offers the reader real human feeling.  

A man and woman have a little girl.  The wife's brother often comes to visit and is practically one of the family, regularly going out to dinner and the movies and whatever with them.  This uncle brings to the little girl a gift one day--a box of four wax dolls he acquired by mysterious happenstance.  There is a little girl doll, an adult woman doll, and two adult male dolls...just like this family group.

The girl dubs them "the Geezenstacks" and plays with them earnestly.  Dad pays more attention to daughter's play than does Mom, and notices a series of eerie coincidences: the little stories his daughter acts out with the Geezenstacks seem to presage similar events in real life.  If Mr. Geezenstack skips work because of illness, it isn't long before the father feels ill and has to stay home.  If Mrs. Geezenstack goes shopping for a new coat, soon enough Mother decides she needs a new coat and goes out to buy one.

Mom and Uncle don't notice these coincidences, but they do notice Dad seems worn out and is acting weird, as if he is obsessed with his daughter's dolls.  Should they urge him to see a shrink?  Or maybe they should somehow get rid of the dolls when Dad isn't looking?  Will the family manage to get through this episode of the dolls and resume normal life, or will a horrendous fate befall them?

A good solid black magic story.  The pacing and structure of the story are admirable--there is no fat, no extraneous distractions, which makes "The Geezenstacks" a smooth read, while the behavior and dialogue of the characters is perfectly believable, making it easy to identify with all four of them.  I also admit to a weakness for voodoo doll stories.  So, thumbs up!  

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Brown's body of work, like Bloch's, contains way too many pun stories and lame satires and dopey joke stories, but among the mass one can find some real effective fantasy horror stories, and "The Geezenstacks" is one of them.  I plan to keep looking for them, so we will probably return to The Best of Fredric Brown here at MPorcius Fiction Log.