Nightmares (brown)
Nightmares is a collection of short and shortest stories in science fiction genre of the US-American Fredric Brown , the American original 1961 entitled Nightmares and Geezenstacks and in German in 1965 in the translation by B. A. Egger in Wilhelm Heyne Verlag published . In contrast to the German edition, the original contains eight other short stories, which are also arranged in a different order.
Shape of the collection
The collection consists of 39 short and shortest stories from half a ( The End ) to sixteen and a half ( Consciousness Trap ) pages in length. The foreword - ( Imagine! ) - is from Brown's Honeymoon in Hell collection ; In it the reader is challenged to think further based on what is known to him and thereby to understand the seemingly or really fantastic - living beings as such, the universe , spaceships, mythical creatures - as less improbable.
Action of the short and the shortest stories
Nightmare in gray
While taking a nap on a park bench, an elderly gentleman slips back fifty years to the time he freed his bride, mistaking his granddaughter at the front door for a sister of the courted girl.
Nightmare in green
William is inferior to his wife in every way and struggles to separate from her in order to switch to the delicate Laura, but has to experience that his wife even comes before him in turn.
Nightmare in white
On the way back from his honeymoon, a newlywed spends the night with his sister, who in the dark, initially unrecognized, slips completely into the role of the bride.
Nightmare in blue
The non-swimmer George rushes to his wife Wilma before their five-year-old son Tommy drowns anyway and it turns out that the water was only three feet deep.
Nightmare in yellow
A real estate attorney wants to disappear in financial distress with misappropriated money and insists on murdering his wife the minute he turns forty, but when he opens the front door, he is surprised by friends who say the dead holds in her arms, secretly as a surprise for him.
Nightmare in red
The hero of the story is awakened at three o'clock in the morning by tremors and outside his house, between the ringing of bells, ghostly stakes and other tremors, he finds himself in an unreal spectacle of doom.
The yeti
Sir Chauncey Atherton searches the Himalayas for the film actress Lola Gabraldi, who is said to have been caught there by a Yeti . When he shot a specimen of the Snowman, he was seized by another, which told him his story and that of his fellow species. With the help of a special medicine, they emerged from an ordinary mountain people, but because of the danger of extinction, they were forced to complement each other with appropriately treated people, which now, after Chauncey had killed the transformed Gabraldi, to the delight of the speakers with him again Manne will meet.
Returned
The crook Larry Snell discovers that there is an insurmountable power in his words, kills a number of enemies with cursing speeches and prepares for a business triumph when he dies on an Echo Hill in the Catskill Mountains with his own high-spirited exclaiming catches up.
Grandma's birthday
At Grandma Halperin's 80th birthday party, one of her clan kills one of the only two guests to whom one is not related. At the instigation of the jubilee, the person who became delinquent, a professional boxer, prepares the second guest from outside the family in such a way that a collision between the two victims can be simulated.
He only stole cats
A burglar relieves the citizens of Midland City in many ways about their cats and is lured into a trap, but receives only a very mild sentence for using the animals to come up with the formula for the ready-to-use dry cat.
Great Lost Discoveries I - Invisibility
In 1909, the envoy of Edward VII to Sultan Abd el Krim, Archibald Praeter, discovered a remedy that made you invisible, but was slaughtered by a eunuch in the pitch-dark bedchamber of a terrifying Circassian of the harem because he did not know that the holder was the ladies do not usually go to them at night.
Great Lost Discoveries II - Invulnerability
Lieutenant Paul Hickendorf discovered the secret of invulnerability in 1952, but was thrown into space together with the force field protecting him, where he suffocated and fell into the sun because he stalked an exploding hydrogen bomb on Eniwetok in order to demonstrate the usefulness of his new apparatus close.
Great Lost Discoveries III - Immortality
In 1978 Iwan Iwanowitsch Smetakowski developed a drug that made you immortal, but did not take it until he fell ill into a coma.
Letter from the beyond
The confidante Laverty ignores the warnings of the deputy Quinn and shoots him, but dies of shock when, as announced, a letter held ready is delivered. The messenger does not seek out the authorities or another third party, but Laverty himself and is a perfect doppelganger of the murdered person.
His hobby
A pharmacist has a poison that cannot be detected in the body, has their cases described by murderers or those who want to become one, and takes money from them for giving them the antidote after he has poisoned them himself .
The retaliatory fleet
In the year 2830 a fleet takes off from Mars to prevent an attack on Venus in the year 2810 from being followed by something similar. A hundred years later it is discovered that those who never returned home wandered back in time because they exceeded the speed of light and, after traveling across the universe, launched the attack on Venus they wanted to avenge.
Fatal
Walter Baxter plans the perfect murder of his uncle, but is arrested for the burglary, which he undertakes for the accessories, while he forgot to kill the victim because he was worried about the details and was watched by him.
The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver I - III
Eustace Weaver jumps with his time machine to the moment when his employer's safe opens, but is suddenly eyed curiously by his colleagues and hurries back (I); he is more successful when he travels in the evening of the next day and back again (II); his machine is neutralized by the temporary police from the future of the 25th century and he himself is mowed down for theft when he is preparing to make a quick buck at horse races with the bills from the safe.
The expedition
Due to a corresponding lottery decision, the crew of the first major expedition to Mars is made up of twenty-nine women and the "great Maxon" as the only man. In the history lesson it is later emphasized that the captain was only able to get his nickname because the next expedition, faster than planned, reached Mars after nine months and two days and already encountered a sixty-strong crew from Maxon's spaceship there.
Red beard
Rotbart catches his wife when she opens the forbidden cupboard with the particularly powerful radio through which he is in radio contact with his people from Venus , and reveals to her that his beard is actually blue and she, like all her predecessors, only color-blind while he didn't put all of them in the closet, but buried them in the cellar.
Pago
Dr. Walter Ralston and Dr. Henry Graham created a human for the first time through parthenogenesis in 1980 and are frightened twenty years later when the oldest of fifty million people conceived in this way, all of whom are male, turned water into gin at a party and claims that he does not water-ski when he is water-skiing need.
The contact
The Martians Dhar Ry and Ejon Khee are happy when a first sight shot of their planet is fired from Earth, because they hope that they can teach people psychological things and learn technical things from them. But the shot wipes out the last city of its declining and unknown culture on earth.
Got away again
The relentless people of Xandor look for slaves for their perishing people in the solar system, but at night they only pick up two monkeys in a zoo, which they attribute to the race that rules the earth and, in view of their lack of intelligence, they adjust to it, only here with us to be able to count on usable workers in the very distant future.
Three little owls
Three little owls disobey their mother's command to stay in the eyrie during the day and experience amazing things.
They let you run into nowhere
The last Tyrannosaurus Rex cannot find anything to eat because the "little fellows" have learned to fly or run away from it with their short legs.
Murder made easy in ten lessons
Duke Evans alias Morley Evans goes through a criminal career until the Little Red Devil can book him to his boss at his entrances when Evans dies in an assassination attempt on his former leader Harry Callan.
Dark Interlude (in collaboration with Mack Reynolds)
Jan Obreen travels four thousand years back into the poorly documented twentieth century and marries a peasant girl, but is shot by her brother when he casually mentions that, as in so many of his time, he had at least a quarter of African blood in his veins .
Awareness trap
American soldier Johnny Dix was seriously injured in a 1981 war between the United States and China. A spiritual being from a non-material plane of existence gets caught in his already wounded body. In the end, she remains trapped in his severed and buried head with all its memories, which she keeps alive and slowly reassembles a human body from the atoms of the surrounding earth. "This gives rise to a mentality that is a strange mixture between the powerful spirit of a strong entity and the narrow-minded views and prejudices of Johnny Dix." Dix instigates a revolution, becomes president of the United States, pulls the people in an epidemic of madness and cannot be eliminated with bullets. A resistance group finds a clairvoyant boy who can read minds and, during a speech by the demagogue in a nearby hiding place, followed the ultimately successful attempt of the extraterrestrial entity and two of its conspecifics to detach themselves from Dix's body and mind.
Lamb
The painter Wayne Gray is looking for his wife Lambeth called "Lammchen", who does not come home for the night, finds her naked in the closet on a painting of his competitor Hans Wagner and shoots Wagner. After that, a missing memory of the paranoid first-person narrator Gray partially returns: Lambeth's voice tells him that he had shot her that afternoon.
The joke
Jim Greeley makes joke articles, shows the hairdresser a particularly lifelike mask before a rendezvous and is made up as a nightmare in view of his planned surprise coup. He scares the beloved to death and flees. Only now does he notice his made-up face in the window of the barber shop, the coincidence of his name with that of the dead and the hanged figure of the owner on a chandelier.
Be careful with cartoons (in collaboration with Mack Reynolds)
The cartoonist Bill Garrigan has been earning some money again for a long time. His latest work depicts the grotesque-looking inhabitants of a strange planet in their bias because of the appearance of the people. The figures in the picture seek Garrigan in person and win him over for a trip to their world. Garrigan gets a well-paid job there, begins to feel like strangers and falls in love with his yellow-skinned, multi-headed secretary.
The Giesenstecks
Richard, the uncle of little Aubrey Walters, gives him a set of wax dolls that inexplicably turned up. Father Sam notices that the girl experiences family events in detail in the play with the "Giesenstecks". The mother, Edith, has the toy removed when Sam's brooding gets too bad. When a funeral is planned at one of Aubrey's last games with the set, Sam intervenes with a ban. You decide to take a trip to distract yourself. When they ride through hell together by taxi through the fog walls of the night, Edith is shocked that she recognizes the mysterious little mother in the turning driver, whom she has just given the dolls to in the hallway of the house.
The misunderstanding
The spaceman Ralph NC-5 learns from his manual that the inhabitants of the planet he is heading for near Arcturus are not human, but speak English and fulfill every wish, but are burned at the stake by them because they face certain difficulties with the grammar and he asked her to fry him something.
Floppy Ear and the Martians
The narrator tells of his sly but cheeky mule floppy ear, who, in the capacity of a representative of the race ruling on earth, made an apparently ingenious suggestion to four-legged Martians via a mysterious speaking device how they could survive without an invasion of Earth Breed should secure, while the strangers regarded the watching biped as a pet and treated accordingly unscrupulously.
Tomorrow at the stadium
After the extinction of humans in the 21st century, the robots replayed a baseball game five hundred years ago as closely as possible in 2459 out of piety for their predecessors. Usually the historic winner wins too, but this time it's the other way around.
The waves of the sea and love
Robert Palmer falls in love with a mermaid and agrees to be transformed by Triton in such a way that he can marry the fishtail, but is not even able to drown himself in grief when his bride teaches him about the sex life that the two and it must be just like the fish.
The end
Professor Jones shows his daughter a machine that begins to let time run back, including the brief history it represents.
Shape as a whole
Brown encounters the astonishing and the surprising without delving into the question of how the wonderful worlds that are breaking in could be scientifically explained. It is in such a confluence of the naive and the cheerful that what is proper emerges in the short and shortest stories combined in nightmares . The editor of the German edition emphasizes the difficult to grasp of the horror that they conjure up and asserts that one will ultimately only get to the track of this through one's own experience. A comparison with the English-language original edition shows that some stories with sexual content and a low level were not taken over into the German version. However, it remains incomprehensible why The House and Death on the Mountain were omitted.
The essence of the collection is oddity ( Great Lost Discoveries , The Brief Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver ) and the refreshing lack of seriousness ( Pago , He only stole cats ). The border to fantasy is crossed in particular in the short story Die Giesenstecks , who owns the doll set has power over the family. Dark Interlude is one of Brown's most famous short stories.
Content and structure of the original edition
- Nasty : 65 year old Walter Beauregard tries to fix his impotence with old magic spells. One of them conjures up the demon "Nasty" (nasty, mean), who fulfills a wish by giving Walter a magical bathing suit. His masculinity returns and he manages to take a blonde beauty into his hotel room. But as soon as he takes off his magic pants, his old problem returns.
- Abominable (The Yeti)
- Rebound (Returned)
- Nightmare in Gray (nightmare in gray)
- Nightmare in Green (Nightmare in Green)
- Nightmare in White (nightmare in white)
- Nightmare in Blue (nightmare in blue)
- Nightmare in Yellow (Nightmare in Yellow)
- Nightmare in Red (nightmare in red)
- Unfortunately (the misunderstanding)
- Granny's Birthday (Grandma's birthday)
- Cat Burglar (He only stole cats)
- The House : A man enters a lonely house. The door closes behind him without any sign of an exit. He follows a trail in the layer of dust on the floor through abandoned rooms. Music is playing in one room, but there is only a corpse hanging from the ceiling. Even notes in a bedroom do not give any clues as to the aim of his search. In the singing of a male voice he hears the word Ragnarok (“Götterdämmerung”). Finally he discovers a sign with his name on a door. He walks into the room, the door slams and he knows he is trapped forever. Before the candlelight goes out, he recognizes the resemblance to his birth room, which has now become his grave.
- Second chance (tomorrow at the stadium)
- Great Lost Discoveries I - Invisibility ( Great Lost Discoveries I - Invisibility )
- Great Lost Discoveries II - Invulnerability (Great Lost Discoveries II - Invulnerability)
- Great Lost Discoveries III - Immortality (Great Lost Discoveries III - Immortality)
- Dead Letter (letter from beyond)
- Recessional : In a bitter battle between a white and black army, one of the participants reports on the course of events and the losses. In the end the white army wins and the word "checkmate" sounds from the sky and the desperate figure is packed in a box.
- Hobbyist (his hobby)
- The Ring of Hans Carvel : The jeweler Hans Carvel fears that his young wife might be unfaithful. In a dream the devil promises him a magic ring, which as long as it is worn will ensure the loyalty of his wife. When Carvel wakes up, he experiences a "devilish" surprise.
- Vengeance Fleet (The Retribution Fleet )
- Rope trick : Elsie Darnell and her husband George see the rope trick of a flute playing fakir on a trip to India. Elsie purchases the magic flute in order to reawaken George's manhood. But only the string of his waistband reacts to the flute.
- Fatal Error (Fatal)
- The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Review I (The short happy life of Eustace Weaver I)
- The Short Happy Lives of Eustace II Review (The short happy life of Eustace Weaver II)
- The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver III (The short happy life of Eustace Weaver III)
- Expedition (The Expedition)
- Bright Beard (Rotbart)
- Jaycee (Pago)
- Contact (The Contact)
- Horse Race : A race of equine planet dwellers occupy more controversial asteroids than they deserve. (The story is based on a non-translatable play on words with the saying: “Why is it there are so many more horses' asses than there are horses?”).
- Death on the Mountain : A prophetically gifted mountain dweller sees things beyond the material world. Eventually it is no longer noticed by people living nearby, since it only exists in the other world itself.
- Bear Possibility : Jonathan Quinby can turn people into animals and back again. When visiting the zoo, his wife rushes into the bear enclosure. He immediately transforms her into a she-bear for her protection. A grizzly bear mates with this before Quinby succeeds in transforming himself back safely. When his wife subsequently becomes pregnant, he fears that a baby bear will be born.
- Not Yet the End (Got away again)
- Fish Story (The sea and the waves of love)
- Three Little Owls (A Fable )
- Runaround (they let you run into void)
- Murder in Ten Easy Lessons (murder made easy in ten lessons)
- Dark Interlude (Dark Interlude)
- Entity Trap (consciousness trap)
- The Little Lamb (lamb)
- Me and Flapjack and the Martians (floppy ears and the Martians)
- The Joke (The Joke)
- Cartoonist (be careful with caricatures)
- The Geezenstacks (Die Giesenstecks)
- The End (The End)
literature
- Frederic Brown. Nightmares and Geezenstacks . Corgi Books, Transworld Publishers Ltd., London (1962), 137 pp.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Fredric Brown: Nightmares . Utopian and fantastic stories. Heyne , Munich 1965, cover sheet
- ↑ a b Brown 1965, p. 4
- ↑ Brown 1965, p. 91
- ↑ a b Brown 1965, p. 94
- ↑ David Pringle : The Ultimate Science Fiction Lexicon. Stories, films, TV series, biographies, heroes and villains, magazines. Translated by Sabine Schmidt. Battenberg , Augsburg 1997, p. 183
- ↑ Brown 1965, back cover
- ↑ Hans Joachim Alpers u. a .: Reclam's Science Fiction Guide. Reclam , Stuttgart 1982, pp. 63-64