Popularity and Influence
The depiction of aliens who are completely alien mentally as well as physically and are completely bent on humanity's destruction is similar to that of the Arcturians in Brown's earlier What Mad Universe.
His short story "Arena" was voted by Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the top 20 SF stories ever written before 1965. His 1945 short story "The Waveries" was described by Philip K. Dick as "what may be the most significant—startlingly so—story SF has yet produced." "Knock" is well known for its opening, which is a complete two-sentence short-short story in itself.
Ayn Rand singled out Brown for high praise in her book The Romantic Manifesto. The famous pulp writer Mickey Spillane called Brown "my favorite writer of all time". Science fiction and fantasy writer Neil Gaiman has also expressed fondness for Brown's work, having his novel Here Comes A Candle narrated by the character Rose Walker in the collection The Kindly Ones of The Sandman.
Brown also had the honor of being one of three dedicatees of Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.
Read more about this topic: Fredric Brown
Famous quotes containing the words popularity and, popularity and/or influence:
“A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of “spirit” over matter.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“A more problematic example is the parallel between the increasingly abstract and insubstantial picture of the physical universe which modern physics has given us and the popularity of abstract and non-representational forms of art and poetry. In each case the representation of reality is increasingly removed from the picture which is immediately presented to us by our senses.”
—Harvey Brooks (b. 1915)
“I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way. But in this water there are countless objects at different depths; and certain influences will give certain kinds of those objects an upward influence which may be intense enough and continue long enough to bring them into the upper visible layer. After the impulse ceases they commence to sink downwards.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)