truggling science-fiction writer Luke Devereaux holes up in a desert cabin, ostensibly to finish a novel, but really to drink himself blind upon the breakup of his marriage. He is just getting good and plastered when he's visited by an abrasive little green man from Mars. The Martian, who insists on calling him "Mack," seems to have nothing in mind beyond insulting and humiliating him. When the Martian also proves intangible, and thus safe from all of Luke's attempts at retribution, Luke can only consider his extraterrestrial visitor a hallucination.
But there are actually a billion Martians, appearing at once all over the world, bothering and harassing everybody they meet, calling every human being they encounter some local variation of "Mack" or "Toots." They have no agenda beyond heckling stage plays, ridiculing political speeches, breaking up card games and watching from the sidelines as frustrated honeymooners attempt to consummate their marriages in defiance of constant off-color commentary. Almost all human endeavor, from criminal to noble, becomes impossible in the face of such nonstop annoyance. Some people go crazy. Others struggle to cope.
Luke himself suffers a mental breakdown under the stress ... but since he suffers no lasting effects beyond an inability to either see or hear the obnoxious green men, his doctor wonders whether he should be considered crazy or blessed.
An artfully inane alien invasion
Fredric Brown, who wrote sharp and witty mysteries every bit as accomplished as his science fiction, is best remembered these days for his many short stories. Some of those were very very short stories, which culminated in stunning surprise endings; and while he's arguably best remembered for those, he was equally adept at greater length.
Martians, Go Home, recently reprinted as part of NESFA Press' indispensable two-volume compendium of Brown's work, is an excellent place to start. A rollicking depiction of what might be the damnedest alien invasion in science-fiction history—the sudden arrival of a billion little green men who eschew bloody conquest in favor of flat-out constant heckling—it uses that most zany of all possible premises as the starting point for a tale that mixes farce, satire, slapstick, illustrations of human nature and even a genuinely touching reconciliation between estranged lovers. Between the absurd situation, Brown's snappy dialogue and the many skillfully rung variations on the theme of imps who delight in abusing us but won't accept any inducements to go away, it emerges as one of the funniest science fiction stories ever written. But he also devotes serious consideration to the likely consequences of such a horrid mass visitation. Governments fall; economies col!
lapse; theater and broadcast media go silent; people go mad and even die. It shouldn't be funny. And yet it is.
Admirers of Brown's skill at great endings might wonder how even this master could possibly come up with a satisfying punchline to all this madness. In fact, he comes up with three, each of which contradicts the other two—and then for good measure adds an authorial postscript which tops them all.
