Reading 20th Century SF: Brain Wave Chapter 4 -

This is a new idea I'm trying out. Basically, I'm going to read SF written from about 1940 to about 1970 -- see here for more details.

We're starting with Brainwave, a book published in 1954 by Poul Anderson. The first three chapters are covered here, but to recap, everything on Earth with a brain has been abruptly uplifted. Everything, and every human, is now five times as intelligent as they were a week ago. For some characters, such as the "moron" Archie Brock, this means they have a genius IQ -- they're smarter than our smartest humans, with an IQ somewhere between 250 and 300. Others, such as our genius physicist Peter Corinth, are now scoring in the neighborhood of 800.

Note: the text used the term moron, which was in standard usage in those days, to describe someone with an IQ of between 50 and 70.

So on the one hand, this is just the word that was proper then. On the other hand, moron and the entire notion of classifying people by IQs was then and is now closely linked to the eugenics movement. Inferior people (morons), according to the thought of people in that era, and according to many, many people still today, should not be encouraged or allowed to breed; only "good" people (people who score well on IQ tests and people who are rich and people who are the right "type") should be encouraged or even allowed to breed. This led to the sterilization of "inferior" people, which was commonly practiced at the time this book was published.

This book has a strong eugenics component, which will lead to its disturbing conclusion. More on that later.

Chapter Four

This starts -- as do several later chapters -- with assorted headlines from The New York Times. We learn that the stock market is tumbling, that there are mutinies in China (and later in the Soviet Union), and that both the Iowa and the Oregon senators have reversed their "isolationist stance," giving speeches to that effect in the Senate. Also a new religion has been founded in LA.

These are all effects of the huge increase in intelligence, we are meant to assume. More intelligent citizens would not put up with communist governments, apparently, and also no one with any brains would be an isolationist. The stock markets are falling -- as is later made clear -- because Super Intelligent people aren't interested in capitalism. No one with an IQ of 500-700 is going to work in a factory, or sell potatoes, or run an elevator.

The loss of elevators is the first big change in Peter Corinth's world, by the way. At first the elevators are being run by eight year olds, who are too bored to go to school but not too bored to run elevators. Later, no one will run the elevators. And apparently someone with an IQ of 800, like Peter, is not clever enough to figure out how to run an elevator himself.

Automatic elevators haven't been invented yet, obviously, but also no one in this brilliant future is smart enough to invent them.

This is a feature of science fiction written before the 1990s, by the way. Things like handheld computers and automatic elevators and the internet had not been invented yet, and very few writers (almost none with the internet) guessed that they ever would be invented. So we have Heinlein famously sending out space ships in which the navigators have to use books filled with logarithms and who work navigation problems with slide rules; and we have books like this, where super-geniuses are forced to climb 17 stories to their apartments because there is no one to run the elevator.

Back to Chapter Four!

After the newspaper headlines, we move to Peter's apartment, where a "conference" is in progress. Sheila has "insisted on putting out her usual buffer of coffee and sandwiches." Then she retires to a corner with the other wife, and they talk quietly, though they continue to keep an eye on their menfolk.

Ah, 1954: when women knew their place.

The "conference" is between Peter Corinth, Felix Mandelbaum, Helga, and Nate Lewis, Peter's buddy from work. They're here to decide what they should do about this new world.

First Mandelbaum points out that smarter doesn't necessarily mean people will act right, or even wisely.

"Basic personality does not change, right? And intelligent people have always done some pretty stupid or evil things, just like everybody else."

Peter thinks intelligence matters most -- he says a higher IQ means people are better able to grasp data and reason, so of course they'll do the smart thing, which is to say the right thing. He says if everyone had been this smart before the war, Hitler could have been stopped before he was even started.

Mandelbaum scoffs. He says IQ tests don't measure the ability to reason for anyone except educated WASPs, and that being smarter doesn't mean as much as your general nature does anyway. He talks about what's being going on with the union workers, who want to go on strike and demand that they be put in charge of the government; or have "crank" ideas about rebuilding society. (Mandelbaum himself has such an idea, as we'll remember from Chapter Two, but we're not supposed to think he's a crank.)

"People think a lot more today," he notes, "but they aren't thinking straight."

Mandelbaum makes a better argument, but it's undercut by those sample headlines, which seem to be meant to support Peter's point of view.

Helga, who is as upset and emotionally fragile as Sheila (women, you know), tells the others that John Rossman (owner of the institute and also Archie's farm) has gone to D.C. to advise the government about how to weather this catastrophe. Also, that he wants the men at the Institute to work on finding the cause of the change.

Meanwhile, the group discusses how to keep society going.

"The janitor and the elevator man...quit yesterday," Helga said. "Said the work was too monotonous. What happens when all the janitors and garbage men and ditch-diggers and assembly line workers decide to quit?"
"They won't," said Mandelbaum. "Some will be afraid, some will have the sense to see that we have to keep going...I agree we're in for rough period of transition. What we need is a local interim organization to see us through the next few months. I think the unions could be a local nexus. I'm working on that."

Sheila, meanwhile, is having (very quiet and well behaved) hysterics through all of this. That's her job in this book, to fall apart, as your typical woman does. Helga doesn't fall apart, but she's your genetically superior woman; and of course Mandelbaum's wife is a comfortable, happy old woman -- which is to say invisible. She might as well not be in the book, for all she does on the page.


Chapter Five

More sample headlines. Revolutions continue. The economy is crashing because people are quitting their jobs. A tiger (its intelligence quintupled) escapes from the zoo and eats a zookeeper. The US Government is considering resigning en masse, since (after all) governments are useless and stupid. (Unless they're local, I guess? Anderson is a libertarian, remember.)

Chapter Five moves to Archie Brock on the farm. He's five times smarter than he was, but so are all the farmhands who didn't start out with IQs of 50, and they're all quitting. They're going back to college, or taking off to travel, or just bored with farming. Only Archie and another farmhand, Voss, who also started off with a mental disability, are staying.

Voss is spending his time reading novels about murder and sex, and Brock is contemptuous. He thinks that Voss might have a "better" mind, but the rest of him hasn't changed. "He just doesn't want to think," Archie tells himself.

Meanwhile all the animals have gotten smarter too. The pigs have escaped and set up their own society in the woods, and Joe the dog is brilliant -- but still loyal to Archie, since that's his nature.

And the bull -- true to its nature -- uses his intelligence to attack Archie, and almost kills him, except Joe attacks the bull and saves his master. (Joe is all right, don't worry.) Archie shoots the bull just in time.

Voss is so upset by this that he quits too. Archie is left alone on the farm with Joe and the remaining animals.

The next chapter jumps ahead in time a bit, so we'll quit here.  More later!