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Imagine by Fredric Brown

Imagine ghosts, gods, and devils.

Imagine hells and heavens, cities floating in the sky and cities sunken in the sea

Unicorns and centaurs. Witches, warlocks, jinns, and banshees.

Angels and harpies. Charms and incantations. Elementals, farmiliars, demons.

Easy to imagine all of those things: mankind has been imagining them for thousands of years.

Imagine spaceships and the future.

Easy to imagine; the future is really coming and there’ll be spaceships in it.

Is there then anything that’s really hard to imagine?

Of course there is.

Imagine a piece of matter and yourself inside it, yourself, aware, thinking and therefore knowing you exist, able to move that piece of matter that you’re in,” to make it sleep or wake, make love or walk uphill.

Imagine a universe-infinite or not, as you wish to picture it- with a billion, billion, billion suns in it.

Imagine a blob of mud whirling madly around one of those suns.

Imagine yourself standing on that blob of mud, whirling with it, whirling through time and space to an unknown destination.

Imagine!

Written by Fredric Brown, 1955

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Jewel August 5, 2019, 8:38 AM

    Better by far than the commercial jingle quality drek that John Lennon wrote.

  • Tom Loosmore August 5, 2019, 10:52 AM

    I still remember his “Nightmares and Geezenstacks” and others on my Dad’s bookshelves when I was a kid. I read them all, dated then though they were. I don’t remember his poetry, so this was a nice refresher. Have to read him all over again, I see.

  • Eskyman August 6, 2019, 12:37 PM

    Fredric Brown has long been one of my favorite authors, due to his wit & sense of humor.

    As an avid devourer of pulp sci-fi, his “What Mad Universe” hit my funnybone & just kept hammering at it- it’s like a pulp novel that includes a funhouse mirror showing how silly pulp fiction novels are! Now it’s time for a re-read, it’s been far too long. I also very much enjoyed “Martians, Go Home” and “The Mind Thing,” and another story whose title slips my mind, but it had something to do with a mouse on a spaceship and was quite hilarious!

    Anyone who hasn’t savored Fredric Brown should remedy that deficiency!

  • Jaynie August 7, 2019, 6:49 AM

    Outstanding ‘Imagine’! And, I shall now go follow Eskyman’s advice re Frederic Brown.