A pair of newlyweds travels to the moon to try to have a male child, as all recent Earth-based births have been female. But the problems they face are both emotional and practical—and more challenging than they ever could have predicted.
HONEYMOON IN HELL appeared in the second issue of GALAXY dated November 1950. (Brown's THE LAST MARTIAN had appeared in the first issue a month previous.) Brown's name on the table of contents of the first two issues, along with the names of other major contributors to ASTOUNDING--Clifford Simak, Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Anthony Boucher--made clear that Gold was going directly after John W. Campbell's audience and the stories which he had printed were of a different order from what these writers had sold ASTOUNDING. They were darker, more socially aware, in cases (Fritz Leiber's COMING ATTRACTION) sexually frank in a fashion inconceivable in Campbell's magazine. This novelette, dealing frankly with copulation and its desired consequences, was managed in a way far less euphemistic than had been the Campbellian norm and Brown, as he was to do often in the stories to follow, used a satirical attack which if it did not question magazine taboos certainly parodied them. The covers of pulp magazines such as PLANET or STARTLING depicted monsters putting near-naked females in peril, but the narratives under the cover by design offered no equivalent. Brown's hastily married couple, sent to the Moon to see if they could breed a male child (all births on Earth over recent months have been female), encounter problems emotional as well as practical. Difficult as it may be to understand sixty years later, the employment of the word "hell" in a magazine cover title was also an act of provocation. The story was a provocation in its entirety, although, of course--and as Paul di Filippo suggests in his introduction--perhaps you had to be there.
Fredric Brown
Fredric Brown (1906-1972) was the only writer to achieve equal prominence in the mystery and science fiction. NIGHT OF THE JABBERWOCKY (1947) won the first MWA Edgar for first novel and all of his mysteries remain much in demand overseas where he has always been very popular. Several of those mysteries (THE SCREAMING MIMI, 1958) were adapted for film. Brown’s science fiction includes novels (WHAT MAD UNIVERSE, MARTIANS GO HOME!) and shorter work regarded as classics of the form (ARENA, THE STAR MOUSE, PLACET IS A CRAZY PLACE). He was also the acknowledged master of the short-short story; a famous collection, NIGHTMARES AND GEEZENSTACKS (1954) demonstrates his consistent mastery of a form self-limited to a top wordage of 500. ARENA (1944) was the basis of a famed Star Trek episode, MARTIANS GO HOME! was adapted for a 1992 film; THE LAST MARTIAN was adapted for Serling’s THE TWILIGHT ZONE and starred Steve McQueen at the start of his career. Poor health (weak lungs) forced Brown into Arizona retirement in 1963 and he published only one short story in collaboration in his last eight years. His work, forty years after his death, is increasingly prominent.
