What Mad Universe

Keith Winton, a Pulp SF magazine editor, was minding his own business, answering a fan's letter, when the first moon rocket exploded right on top of him. Next thing you know he is on a strange Earth, where having coins minted after 1935 will get you shot as a spy, aliens from the Moon work and play along side Earthlings and mankind is fighting for its very survival against battle fleets from Arcturus. This is a classic sci-fi story. First printed around 1949 this story has held up very well and is a delightful read on a lazy day afternoon or a few slow hours on a train.

This is a Wizard of Oz type parallel universe yarn for adolescents and adults. Unfairly neglected, it would make a stunning Disney animated film or Broadway musical. It's a delightful grab bag of satire on McCarthyism, science fiction fandom, the publishing world, and adolescent boys with out of control imaginations/hormones. Brown takes the blind tapper from Treasure Island and turns him into something utterly horrifying. He transforms Baum's Tik-tok Man into Mekl, the genius robot. The commies are transmuted into a race of interstellar invaders so horrific that humans can't bear to look at them and must shoot them on sight. The hapless hero just wants to get home (like Dorothy Gale in the first Oz book) but he ends up (like Dorothy in the later Oz books) with something better than home. The parallel world Brown creates is wacky but, like Oz (or Ratty and Mole's riverbank), totally believable if you enter into the spirit of it. I rate this book as one of the top classics of sf's Golden Age; indeed, it's on my personal list of the all-time top ten sf novels, along with Dick's Man in a High Castle, Lieber's The Big Time, Vance's Demon Princes quintet, Heinlein's Friday, etc.

I read this a Looooong time ago and always hoped I could find it and read it again. It is about more than just parallel universes and chilling "monsters", it is about courage and hope and never giving up. Brown adroitly pulls you into a compellingly crafted story (using some admittedly lagging-edge technology), but you soon forget about that as the hero plunges into a world sort of like ours, but sort of not. Along the way he spins out a theoretical construct about nested, parallel realities, each complete in itself, and varying from its "neighbor" reality by only one tiny detail..... Read it. You'll love it!

This book is one of the best SF books I ever read. I know Brown from "Martians Go Home" and some of his crime books - but this one is the best. I mixes humor with the idea of a parallel universe, is a bit sexy and you can really BE Keith Winton, the protagonist of the story. Read it! It's worth the money!!!

One of the first sci-fi books I read as a kid was a paperback copy of "What Mad Universe" from the 1950's, and I have never forgotten it. It is an imaginative, humorous story about parallel universes where bug-eyed monsters are real.