author

Maurice Baudin

A mid-20th-century writer remembered today for a sharp, offbeat science-fiction story, he mixed everyday settings with strange, unsettling ideas. His surviving work suggests a taste for satire and for the anxieties of modern technology.

1 Audiobook

Hystereo

Hystereo

by Maurice Baudin

About the author

Maurice Baudin was born in 1892. Reliable details about his life are scarce, but public catalog records connect his name to both literary scholarship and fiction from the first half of the 20th century.

He is most easily traceable today through Hystereo, a science-fiction short story first published in Amazing Stories in November 1961 and later made available by Project Gutenberg. The story centers on sound technology and obsession, using an ordinary social setting to build an eerie, darkly comic mood.

Because so little verified biographical information is readily available, his career has to be sketched from the works that remain visible rather than from a full published life story. Even so, Hystereo gives a clear sense of a writer interested in modern life at its most absurd and uncomfortable.