Brain Wave (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

The title on the cover of the paperback is, "Brainwave / His Enduring Masterpiece". The title that appears at the top of the Amazon US listing is, "Brainwave: The Greatest Masterpiece by the Science Fiction Grandmaster". I have real problems with both versions. I am fairly sure that Anderson would be dismayed to find that "Brain Wave" actually was regarded as his enduring masterpiece, let alone his greatest.

Poul Anderson was distinguished in two ways from his peers among John W. Campbell's hand-picked corps of science fiction luminaries. Of them all, he was the most likely to work out all the permutations and ramifications arising from any initial premise. Among other things, that led to entertaining and informative essays on such things as how to construct an alien world for literary purposes and how not to write heroic fantasies ("On Thud and Blunder".) The other way in which he differed from Asimov, De Camp, Van Vogt and Heinlein was his inclination toward the downbeat. There are precious few heroic triumphs in the collected works of Poul Anderson and even less true joy.

As an author, I don't think he had much of a sense of humor. That may be why the earlier tales of the Hokas, the ones contained in "Earthman's Burden," are so wildly hilarious. Given the premise--which I'd be willing to bet originated with his collaborator, Randall Garrett--Anderson worked out exactly what would happen when space-faring humans smacked into a race of intelligent, infinitely suggestible, role-playing teddy bears. The first stories were wonderful. The later entries in the series were simply variants on the early ones and burdened with an increasing sub-text of Andersonian gloom.

"Brain Wave" is a classic type of Anderson book. In the beginning is the premise: over a period of a few months every thinking mind on earth becomes more intelligent by an unspecified but quite large factor. A rabbit calmly sits down and reasons out how to escape from a trap. A man born with subnormal intelligence begins functioning in the high-normal range. A woman rejects the burden of super-genius. Transcendent humans exploring the universe accidently find themselves deprived of their new-found transcendence and become helpless before their own meant-to-be self-explanatory technologies. And so on, through all the permutations and ramifications.

The point of the book is the working out of the consequences of the initial, quite arbitrary and wholly unexplained premise. Well-developed characterizations and memorable uses of language are irrelevant to such a point and in such a book; you will find neither here. What you will find is Poul Anderson manipulating his human puppets by use of competent, if not especially memorable prose along a series of very, very cleverly thought-out paths to a satisfactory and self-consistent ending.

Worse books than this have been cited as mid-Twentieth Century science fiction classics. It's well worth reading, but "Brain Wave" is neither Poul Anderson's "enduring" nor his "greatest" masterpiece.

Four suddenly much brighter stars.

The book speculates on the extraordinary phenomenon that man and all sentient creatures on Earth suddenly become more intelligent. This is certainly an intriguing concept, though personally I found the idea more interesting than Anderson's attempts to explore all the implications. It may have been better to have presented the idea as a short story rather than the longer development required of a novel. As the cataclysmic events unfold, the book follows the lives of several individuals from differing walks of life from semi-moronic to top scientist. Interestingly, Anderson's depiction of the flowering of intelligence in the moronic and in animals is better described, and more sympathetic, than what occurs in the minds and lives of the scientists and intellectuals. Anderson seems better at developing the story line, and describing events, rather than human emotions which, in my view, he presents in an overly sentimental way. The book is very much of its 1950's time - which is part of its charm, of course. I was astonished how much everyone smoked. They seemed to be lighting up all the time!!!