For health reasons he moved to Taos, New Mexico, and then to California, where he worked briefly and unsuccessfully on screenplays for Hollywood producers. Brown eventually settled in Tucson, Arizona, where he died in 1972. His last collection,
Paradox Lost (1973), was published posthumously. In 1976, Robert Bloch edited a retrospective volume,
The Best of Fredric Brown.
Using many of the conventions of science fiction, including bug-eyed monsters, time-travel, and alternate worlds, Brown created situations in which he could probe human foibles with a humorous or ironic twist. His progress as a writer of short stories reflects the development of science fiction over three decades, from the early 1940s to the late 1960s, from space opera through dystopia to absurdist fantasies. Brown's novels show a similar progression, from the satire of What Mad Universe (1949) to the horror of The Mind Thing (1961), but they are usually more conventional and less intense than his short stories and vignettes.
Although the point of a typical Brown story sometimes seems to be a simple joke, often the works are more complex. While a reader may find that the bewildering array of Brown's plots resists easy categorization, he often finds a fascination with the workings of the human mind under stress, serious or playful considerations of the question "what is reality," romantic wish fulfillment, and (especially in the later work) exploitation of the absurd for effects of black humor and horror.
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