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!

Reading 20th Century Science Fiction

This is a new idea I'm trying out -- I'm going to read Science Fiction written from about 1930 to about 1970 (when the Second Wave more or less began) and critique it for your reading pleasure.

Some of these books will be written by women. But I have to be able to access copies of the texts, and science fiction written by women before, well, 2010 or so, all too often is allowed to go out of print. So a larger percentage will be written by men.

I'm not going for the low-hanging fruit. These will (almost all of them) be books that have won critical acclaim, and even awards. I imagine they will all supply lots of fertile ground for our critical pleasure, though.

We'll be starting with Brain Wave, by Poul Anderson, published in 1954. This book starts with the premise of a uplift, if you know the term, for every creature with a brain that possesses a brain. An uplift is a massive gain in intelligence. There's some sciency stuff about how the uplift occurs (lots of sciency stuff in this book), which seems fairly handwavium to me.

I've never read any Poul Anderson before, so I'm new to his writing. According to Wikipedia, he started as a liberal and became a libertarian/conservative in his later years. He seems to have written a heap of SF adventure novels, though this isn't one of them.


Chapter One:

This is an effective chapter. Anderson gives us several vingettes, ranging from a rabbit in a trap to a 10 year old kid, of beings whose intelligence is increasing rapidly. The rabbit figures out how to escape from the trap; the kid invents calculus. We're interested.

Chapter Two: 

More vingettes, but we focus on the main character, a physicist named Peter Corinth. He suddenly understands how to solve a major problem that has been plaguing him. He works for the Rossman Institute, which seems to be an NGO of sorts, dedicated to solving technological problems, with the aim of helping industry. (Rossman's industry, mainly.) Cornith has been working on a way to analyze the structures of crystals. He explains all this to his wife, Sheila, in tedious detail.

The wife, Sheila, like all the women in this book, makes me wince. Sheila is -- at least before the change -- stupid. Sweet and pretty, but dumb as a rock. Why has Peter Corinth, who is a certified genius, who worked on the Manhattan project, who makes his living doing super-genius physics, why has he married someone who is just barely bright enough to wash dishes?

I mean, I guess because women are all stupid, so what else was he going to do?

In this chapter, we get interplay between Peter and Sheila, in which she demonstrates that she knows nothing about Greek mythology, and worships Peter, though she doesn't understand a single thing he's saying.

As for Peter, he's very fond of his stupid wife:

She was kind and merry and beautiful, and she could cook -- but she was nothing of an intellectual....He had sometimes thought she lived in a child's world, with nothing very well known, but all of it bright and strange.

We get Sheila's point of view after Peter leaves for work. She's delighted to be an "ordinary" housewife.

Her friends before had always been ready for a good laugh at the shibboleth-ridden boredom that was bourgeois existence, but when you got right down to it, they had only traded one routine and one set of catchwords for another, and seemed to have lost something of reality in the bargain.

This is Sheila after she's been uplifted, and she immediately stops and wonders why she's thinking such complex things. So not like her! She starts to sit down a read a mystery novel (now that the dishes are done), but then frowns and goes to pick up a "real" book instead, a well-worn one that belongs to Pete -- Lucky Jim.

Sheila sets the tone for the (very few) other women we're going to meet. Even the single working woman we encounter, Helga, who works at the Rossman Institute, isn't a scientist. She's a secretary. Useful, but only as a support for the real people men.

First Pete Corinth has to encounter our other main character, Felix Mandelbaum (it's nice to see a Jew), in the elevator. Felix has also figured out a difficult problem, though his has to do with how to organize labor unions. They note this odd coincidence, and then separate as they leave the building.

Pete rides the subway to work at the Rossman Institute, meanwhile ruminating over his past -- his work on the Manhattan Project, his useless time trying to organize scientists after the way, his brief period in academia. What's the point, he thinks, and then, like Sheila, wonders why he's thinking all this.

He also thinks about the Rossman Institute, and how it's the only way to get science done. Governments and universities can't do science, Pete knows: the former because governments interfere with scientists and the latter because of all the politics and back-biting. (The government seemed to have done science with the Manhattan Project, but okay.)

The elevator man in the Institute is also uplifted. He and Pete have a conversation which leads to Pete suggesting the elevator man should go back to college.

Pete works in his lab. He gets a call from Lewis, who has noticed something strange in his lab. They go to lunch to talk about it, and Helga shows up.

She was a tall, rangy, handsome woman, her long blonde hair drawn tightly around her poised head, but something in her manner -- an impersonal energy, an aloofness, perhaps only the unfeminine crispness of speech and dress -- made her less attractive than she could have been.

Worse, we soon find out that Helga can't keep a man. Horrors! Not only not as attractive to men as she could be, she also has not been able to marry. What a terrible fate!

Helga tells them that the institute's computer (yes, there's only one, this is 1954) isn't working right, and also that everyone in the institute has suddenly had "bright ideas" that they want to try out, via the computer and other technology, so everything is a mess.

Lewis tells them about his own lab, where he's finding that the neurones (nerve cells) he's been studying all of a sudden are reacting much faster than before.

This is the key to the uplift: electromagnetic transmitters transmit more quickly, including those in the brain. So everyone is thinking faster, and apparently this makes them more intelligent. (I'm not sure this is how it would work, but okay.) It will take our Heroes, despite their new brilliance, quite a while to reach this conclusion.

Chapter Three

We're on a farm, with one of the characters from Chapter One -- Archie Brock, who was a mentally-challenged farmhand before the uplift. Like Lennie from Mice and Men, who he seems to have been modeled on, he was just bright enough to work at manual labor so long as he had someone telling him exactly what to do.

The person telling him what to do is Mr. Rossman, the one who funds the Rossman Institute.

Here on the farm, all is chaos. The chickens, pigs, horses, and other livestock have all gotten smarter, and they are using their intelligence to escape from their pens and (in the case of the horses and pigs) rebel against their oppression.

The dog is still loyal, though.

We learn that Mr. Rossman lives alone of the farm, since his daughters have all married and his wife is dead. We also learn that the wife of one of the other farmhands washes and mends Archie's clothing. Women live to serve men.

Will the uplift cause women to become other than adjuncts to men? Will they, like the other livestock, rebel?  I'm betting not, but maybe Anderson will surprise me.

Archie notes that his head feels funny. He figures out that he's getting smarter, just like the animals.

He could see how people would be scared if the animals started getting smarter. If they were really smart, would they keep on letting humans lock them up and work them and castrate them and skin and kill and eat them?

He goes to talk to Mr. Rossman, who tells him what's happening -- how everyone is getting smarter, and how the government is trying to keep that news from getting out, so that people won't panic. "They'll hang on to their stupidity to the very end in Washington," Rossman declares.

Rossman says he's heading to the institute, to see what they're learning about the event. Archie is afraid of being left alone on the farm, but he gets over it very quickly, and asks Rossman for a book. He thinks he can read it now.

This cheers Rossman up, and he takes Archie into the library to look for something simple-minded enough for Archie to read.

That's enough for today. So far, aside from the sexism and ableism, this is pretty good. I like Anderson's point that enhanced intelligence leads not to happiness but to existential despair. Archie gets happier (not yet, but soon), because he's been uplifted into normal intelligence; everyone else begins to suffer from anxiety, dread, and despair.

More soon!