Loucura no Universo - Coleção Argonauta nr 29

Fredric Brown

[Lisboa] Editorial Livros do Brasil

1956

185 páginas

6h 10m

ISBN-1: 0

Português

What Mad Universe (1949). Capa: Cândido Costa Pinto '-' Keith Winton estava sentado tranquilamente no jardim. De repente um relâmpago, um choque! Levantou-se, aturdido... e a paisagem tinha mudado! "Estou a sonhar", pensou. E, no entanto, quase era preso e morto como espião, ao pagar simplesmente uma bebida! Teria o dinheiro mudado? Em Nova Iorque, tudo diferente! Ninguém nas ruas à noite, a não ser os criminosos que assassinavam e roubavam ao abrigo da "ocultação total". Nesse estranho mundo que lhe parece completamente louco, acaba por ter de se refugiar junto da esquadra sideral que combate nos confins do sistema solar contra os monstruosos invasores de Arcturus. Conseguirá Winton voltar ao seu universo familiar? Ou ficará perdido para sempre num universo em completa loucura?

Keith Winton - an editor of a sci-fi pulp magazine - is accidentally transported to a parallel universe where space travel is common, Earth is at war with creepy aliens, New York City isn't safe after dark, and his girlfriend is with someone else. Regularly appears on "Greatest Science Fiction" lists.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Mad_Universe
|...| Keith is alone in his friends' garden, deep in thought, when, suddenly, the rocket's generator (whose launch has been a failure) crashes on his friends' residence and dissipates its gigawatt electrical charge right on the spot Keith is standing on. The massive energy discharge allows his physical form to 'shift' through dimensions, taking him to a strange but deceptively similar parallel universe.

At a superficial glance, the streets look the same, there are the same kind of cars and the people wear the same kind of clothes (and he also knows some of the people, though sometimes they don't know him), and the radio broadcasts familiat tunes from the Benny Goodman Orchestra. But there are many incongruous elements in this seemingly familiar reality. Wild-eyed, Keith is astonished to see how credits have replaced dollars; is amazed when he encounters some scantily-clad pin-up girls who are, at the same time, astronauts; is driven to stupor when he encounters his first lunar native vacationing on Earth. Then, he discovers, to his cost, that such an innocent activity as coin collecting could lead to being suspected of being an Arcturian spy—and since Arcturians possess awesome mental powers and are bent on exterminating humanity, any such suspicion is liable to lead to being shot on the spot. And managing to escape the spy scare, he finds that New York has no night life; there is a total, impenetrable darkness, and wandering the completely dark Times Square could lead to a fatal encounter with the terrible Night Men...

Having as a science fiction editor rather despised space opera, he finds himself living in a "Mad Universe" where the most cliché aspects of that subgenre are an actual, daily reality. In order to have any hope of getting back to his own world, he has to get in touch with the impossibly 'larger than life' hero who leads Humanity's struggle against the Arcturian menace and his "artificial brain" sidekick Mekky, getting involved in a desperate last-minute plan to thwart the onslaught of a fearsome alien superweapon against the Solar System and Earth....