#181 Think fast: Brain Wave (1954) by Poul Anderson

The influential classic of enhanced intelligence with a breakneck pace

An early novel by Poul Anderson, Brain Wave (1954) is also a landmark science fiction story on the topic of intelligence enhancement. Unlike in the later Flowers for Algernon (1966) - see episode 148 - an explosive rise of brainpower is not the work of human scientists. Instead, the whole world gets a huge intelligence boost, as the Earth exits a vast cosmic field which for millions of years had inhibited "certain electromagnetic and electrochemical processes". Can society survive this colossal, overnight shift? And if so, what does it mean for the human future?

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Transcript

In the opening to Poul Anderson’s Brain Wave (1954), a rabbit becomes caught in a trap. At first, it is paralysed by panic just as every past rabbit would have been in every past trap, since the first one was laid by humans long ago. This rabbit, however, is different. Its little brain works faster, more efficiently, than had ever been possible before. Soon, the rabbit has thought of a way to escape, and scampers out into the woods.

Animals everywhere slip their nets, jump their fences, and nose open gates they had never thought to challenge. Elsewhere, a young boy fascinated by numbers and bored at home, picks up pen and paper and is soon well on his way to re-inventing differential calculus. These are not isolated cases, not flukes of random genius. In every creature with a brain, intelligence is suddenly on the up - way up.

One of Anderson’s earliest longer works, Brain Wave was initially to be serialised in the short-lived magazine Space Science Fiction. The publication folded after just eight issues, leaving the story incomplete. The full version, still startlingly brisk, emerged as a book in 1954. While dated in some ways, Brain Wave is a major and memorable novel on the topic of intelligence, and one which inspired better-known later works by Daniel Keyes and Vernor Vinge.

Intelligence unleashed

Brain Wave crams many plot developments into its modest span. It becomes clear early on that all species with a brain have received a tremendous boost to their intelligence. At a privately funded institute in New York City, a group of scientists including physicist Peter Corinth use their newly enhanced brainpower to identify the cause. For hundreds of millions of years, the Earth passed through a vast field which inhibited “certain electromagnetic and electrochemical processes”. Now that the Earth has emerged from the field, these processes have accelerated dramatically. This most directly affects the performance of neurons in the brain, which explains the intelligence increase.

Within days, human and animal life shifts. Workers walk off jobs that no longer fulfill them, people cannot bring themselves to slaughter livestock, ecosystems are disrupted, theoretical breakthroughs come thick and fast, and governments are toppled. Humankind undergoes a radical and painful transformation, which causes deadly chaos in the short term but may propel a changed species into the stars.

Triumph and disaster

One striking aspect of Brain Waveis that the intelligence boost is presented primarily as a disaster, at least in the short term. On a social level, the sudden change is one that established systems cannot absorb, and the disruption is massive. Mass unemployment, loss of faith in government, and the emergence of new cults combine to shred the social fabric. On a more personal level, some people cannot cope with a whole new experience of the world. Corinth's wife, Sheila, is one of those who enters a kind of shocked psychosis. 

Gradually, the situation is stabilised by masters of bureaucratic wrangling, who balance the new social forces at work in the unraveling United States. There are triumphs made possible by the change. Scientists and mathematicians rapidly dispense with problems that once seemed insoluble and technological progress is lightning-fast. The Soviet Union develops nuclear-tipped ICBMs and launches a first strike on New York, only to find that American scientists have developed a means to project a massive energy field that neutralises the attack. Amusingly, this is only a minor episode in a plot which is as supercharged as Anderson's new brains.

A physical view

Brain Wave reflects Anderson's particular background as a physics-trained SF writer working in the early 1950s. The novel suggests that incredible technical advancements are made possible almost solely by genius-level intellects. It largely neglects the complex systems, skills, and structures necessary to run the basics of society, let alone design and launch a starship. 

Similarly, Anderson’s approaches to psychology and gender leave something to be desired - for example, seemingly only women are unable to cope with rising intelligence. A brief episode in Africa in which colonised people join forces with now-intelligent animals to rise up against oppression is hardly a landmark of cultural sensitivity.

Down on the farm

The strongest parts of the novel actually constitute its B-plot. Far from the big city, Archie Brock is a farmhand who was not too bright before the change. After it, he becomes what used to be thought of as a genius. Unlike his colleagues, he refuses to abandon the farm. Staying on, he bonds deeply with the animals, especially the loyal dog Joe, and later chimpanzees and an elephant who escaped from a zoo. 

Anderson's best writing is concentrated in these sections and his treatment of Archie is humane and sympathetic. At one point, the farmhand reflects memorably on how enhanced intelligence has affected animals:

“...the other beasts had lived in a harmony, driven by their instincts through the great rhythm of the world, with no more intelligence than was needed for survival. They were mute but did not know it; no ghosts haunted them, of longing or loneliness or puzzled wonder. Only now they had been thrown into that abstract immensity for which they had never been intended, and it was overbalancing them. Instinct, stronger than in man, revolted at the strangeness, and a brain untuned to communication could not even express what was wrong.”

In a novel of breakneck shifts, always juking, here Anderson pauses for a time and addresses quite movingly something of what intelligence is, and where its limitations lie. 

Scaling down and scaling up

While Brain Wavewas not the first novel about intelligence enhancement, it seems to be a clear precursor to two notable later works. Each of these approaches a similar phenomenon at a different scale.

Daniel Keyes' much-loved novel Flowers for Algernon (1966) - also set in New York - focuses on just one character whose intelligence is hugely augmented. Charlie Gordon is readily comparable to Archie Brock, but Keyes' novel is far more focused and powerful in emotional terms. Algernon does not mirror Brain Wave’s transcendent climax, due to the crucial tragic fact that Gordon’s uplift is not permanent.

Much later, Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) initiated his “Zones of Thought” sequence, which posits a galaxy in which the operation of brains and computers is determined by location, from the minimally intelligent “unthinking depths” to the superintelligence of the “transcend”. This is a very similar concept to Anderson’s intelligence-inhibiting field.

While these later novels are better known today, Brain Waveis an important and interesting early novel by Anderson - one which the SFE describes as “very nearly his finest”. Its influence is testament to its thought-provoking central conceit, which like the books it inspired leads us to consider what value should be placed on intelligence.