May I Recommend?
This classic American SF novel remains a great read.
When I was a boy growing up in Taunton, Massachusetts, we lived in a house that had an unusual feature: a detached tower room that was reached from the second floor via a narrow flight of stars. It was a small room, perhaps eight or ten feet square, with a window in each wall. There my father knocked together some rough-and-ready wooden shelves, which he filled with the paperback books that he read for pleasure and relaxation. Dad was no intellectual; most of those books were thrillers and, especially, science fiction. But no matter. Seeing that my father valued reading, I came to value it myself. And in that tower room was all the reading that a boy of twelve or thirteen could desire.
The science fiction that Dad collected was mostly that of the genre’s Golden and Silver Ages. Many familiar names were to be found on the covers of those 35¢ to 50¢ paperback originals: De Camp, Van Vogt, Asimov, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Anderson. It’s a novel by the last named, Poul Anderson, that I reread recently and am now recommending.
Brain Wave was first published in 1953 as a serial in Space Science Fiction, one of the numerous SF pulps of the time. A year later it was released by Ballentine Books as a paperback original novel. It was Anderson’s third published novel, and he later rated it as one of his five favorites.
At its best, SF proceeds from a provocative speculative premise, What would happen if… then goes on to develop that premise using the techniques of imaginative literature. And the speculative premise embodied in Brain Wave is indeed provocative: What would happen if some natural phenomenon suddenly quintupled the intelligence of every brain-bearing species on Earth? Anderson posits that life on Earth developed as the planet was moving through an energy-damping field in space, which had the effect of inhibiting brain activity. As the novel opens, Earth is moving out of the field, and the intelligence of every species with a brain begins to accelerate. Within weeks, average human intelligence stabilizes at the 400-500 IQ range.
Brain Wave is particularly good in its depiction of the impact of this great change on human society. Suddenly, the fabric of civilization, its politics, economics, social conventions, popular and high culture, is rendered obsolete. To a person with an IQ of 450, Tolstoy reads like a dime novel, Bach’s musical architecture seems childish, representative democracy is a charade. Language begins to evolve in new and strange directions. Humanity is effectively cut off from its own past; individual men and women find that they’ve become strangers to their former selves. Nor are all people capable of coping with the change within themselves. Many succumb to terminal depression, paranoid schizophrenia, irrational delusions, religious mania.
We witness all this mainly through the eyes of a group of scientists on the staff of a research institute based in New York City. As they grapple with the Change, the city slowly dies around them: For many people, doing the old jobs, keeping the old systems functional, seems pointless. Slowly but steadily, New York and all the world’s cities empty out.
But when the scene shifts to a farm in upstate New York, we’re shown another aspect of the Change. First, the animals: Like humanity, they’ve become five times more intelligent than they once were. In scenes reminiscent of Animal Farm, the pigs rebel. Other animals become far harder to manage. Most of the farm workers depart, leaving in charge a young man once retarded but now possessing an IQ of perhaps 200. In the changed circumstances of the world, however, he still rates as a moron (Anderson’s word; the novel was written in the early Fifties, remember).
Brain Wave does exhibit some shortcomings. Given the epic scope of its premise, the novel could well have been longer. We get only a few glimpses of its worldwide ramifications. No doubt the demands of magazine serialization determined its length, and the author seems not to have made any revisions prior to book publication. Still, in the space allotted he accomplished a great deal, and there are passages in Brain Wave that haunt the imagination.
Poul Anderson (1926-2001) was active as a professional writer from the 1940s to his death. Besides Brain Wave, he published numerous other novels and short stories, including two more favorites of mine: The High Crusade (1960) and Tau Zero (1970). He was a three-time winner of the Nebula Award and a seven-time winner of the Hugo Award, SF’s capstone honors.
Brain Wave is available from Amazon in a Kindle edition and several paperback editions, mostly in used condition. I commend it to your attention as a fine example of classic American SF and a great read.
Just finished Brain Wave. For a short book there’s a lot packed in.
I second the recommendation of “The High Crusade”