Reading 1950s Science Fiction

George O. Smith,  The Fourth 'R' 

I picked this one up at a used bookstore, because it was cheap and the cover looked interesting.

This cover

I'd never read any George O. Smith before, though Wikipedia tells me he comes from the Golden Age of science fiction -- Isaac Asimov's buddy, contemporary of Heinlein, worked with John Campbell (and apparent ran away with Campbell's wife -- spicy!).

This book was published in 1959, and is about a kid whose parents invent a machine which educates the child from toddlerhood on, packing data into his young brain. This is apparently all it takes to give someone an education -- they just gotta know a lot of facts. Once you know a lot of facts, like the times table for instance, and a bunch of grammatical terms, and who Aristotle is, why, you're automatically a genius. That's all it takes: having facts crammed into you.

Smith doesn't think much of the educational system of his day, which he shares with many other SF writers from that era. When little Jimmy is sent to school, for instance, he runs into trouble with a "progressive" teacher who thinks all children were created equal, and "had to stay that way." In the early pages of the book, Smith also takes a swipe at John Dewey. 

Dewey had some influence on the educational system of the time, and pissed off a lot of conservatives. Dewey thought that for American democracy to work, we had to educate even people who weren't brilliant geniuses. As I recall, Harper Lee also hated Dewey's influence on education. In To Kill a Mockingbird, she has the young narrator react scornfully to her teacher's attempt to teach all the children in the class to read. Because Scout herself can already read, she's bored, and this is somehow a flaw in the educational system. Fuck them other kids, am I right? 

This is probably the weakest part of The Fourth R. Knowing facts doesn't make someone a genius, or turn a five year old into an adult. And that's what Smith is claiming here -- it's not that Jimmy Holden is a genius and the brain machine just educates him really fast. No, he's a typical kid, and the brain machine makes him a genius, the equivalent at five of someone in their early 20s. We know this is so because later in the book, Jimmy uses the brain machine to make an extremely ordinary seven year old, Martha, into a genius just like him.

Well, not just like him. Martha is a girl, see, so she's not that interested in math. Instead she's interested in learning all about how to run a home. Like sewing and cooking. You know, that stuff that girl geniuses really love.

Anyway, before Martha shows up, Jimmy is a victim of his evil godfather, Paul Brennan, who murders Jimmy's parents and then becomes Jimmy's guardian and the executor of his estate. Brennan mistreats little Jimmy by taking away his Meccano set and making him play with blocks instead. This is because Brennan wants the brain machine all for himself, so he can make money with it. The wanting to make money with it is not the problem, as Smith makes clear: the problem is that the machine belongs to Jimmy, because his parents invented it, so only Jimmy should be making money from it.

 Jimmy foils Brennan's plan by destroying the brain machine. Good thing Jimmy's parents didn't leave blueprints, am I right?

Anyway, Brennan is trying to blackmail Jimmy into building a new brain machine for him. Jimmy knows how to do this, because the machine taught him how. I guess you could say that's how Jimmy's parents stored the blueprints, in Jimmy's brain. 

There's some talk by Jimmy's grandparents into beating him into compliance, but Brennan doesn't want to use physical torture, since that would leave marks which Jimmy could complain about. So he sets out to bore him into submission instead. Clearly no court will care about Jimmy being forced to read Little Golden books instead of Aristotle, or being given blocks and finger paints instead of oil paints and canvases. 

Again, knowing facts in conflated with having knowledge -- even though Jimmy is five, he can and wants to read Aristotle, and paint with oils, simply because the brain machine put data into his brain. This is all it takes to make a genius, embedding facts. Later, when Jimmy is ten and his Pygmalion playmate Martha is nine, Martha's mother, Janet, is fine with leaving a nine and ten year old on their own for three or four months, because they've been made into geniuses by the brain machine. 

You gotta wonder if Smith had ever met a genius, never mind a ten year old genius.

Anyway, fleeing Brennan, Jimmy sets up housekeeping on his own, funding his existence by writing science fiction. (It was, in fact, possible to make a living writing in the 1950s, so I won't mock Brennan here.)

He needs to hire Martha's mother Janet as a housekeeper to act as cover; he chooses her because she has a young girl, which he knows will make her desperate enough to stay in the job. He convinces her to let him hook Martha up to the machine because he needs a companion, and also he thinks that will be yet another thing that will keep Janet working for him. He offers to hook Mom up to the machine, but she's not interested. All she wants to do is have the machine embed some "pet recipes" into her brain. Because (1) she's cooking without knowing those recipes and (b) that's what women like to do, cook and keep house.

The plot swerves a little when Janet starts dating a local guy. (Jimmy has set up housekeeping in a small town somewhere.) Now Jimmy, who's nine now, has to try to figure out sex. Remember this is before the internet. The local public library has nothing useful. He buys books through newspaper ads, but they don't really tell him what he wants to know, which is why Janet wants to have sex. It's a puzzler!

Anyway! Eventually Jimmy decides the time has come to settle with Brennan. So he makes himself into a lawyer by having the brain machine embed a bunch of law books into his brain. That's all it takes. No need to learn how to argue or think critically! You just gotta know the laws! There's a courtroom scene, and Jimmy gains control of his machine and his life and sets up academies where other children are made into geniuses with brain machines, but to be honest I just skimmed through the last 20 or 30 pages, because I had long since stopped caring about any of these characters. 

This is typical of 1950s science fiction, in my experience -- there's a cool idea, which is then used to explore the author's personal bugaboos. Pretty much no attempt at characterization, setting, or realistic dialogue. 4/10, only interesting for historical purposes.