Brain Wave

WHAT IF.... since the development of humanity, the earth was stuck in a field of space in which conductors became more insulating, inhibiting the functioning of neurons in the brain. WHAT IF... the earth finally escaped that field, and the average IQ of all mammals nearly quadrupled? WHAT IF... the human brain wasn't designed for such an intellect, and many humans suffered existential dread from their new found understanding of our place in the universe. Would our species rise the occasion, shifting our role in the cosmos to become greater than the sum of our parts? Or would our more primitive instincts kick in, would our unchanged behaviors get in the way of our changed intelligence, leaving us in much the same place we were before. Following mainly an already intelligent scientist, his stay at home wife, and an intellectually disabled farm worker, Anderson attempts to answer these questions.

Inherently, this novum and central narrative isn't a bad one. I can see this premise being written in the new wave, even though it was actually first serialized in 1953. Anderson does unfortunately introduce all of his characters at once, which made the opening of the book kind of a mess. He's a decent writer though. I didn't really have an major qualms with the prose itself, beyond thinking that was at worst unremarkable.

The real problem is that no one is ACTING like they are four times as intelligent. Anderson doesn't affect enough change onto his characters outside of their dialogue. One of the ways he does this is through a weird, tedious use of parentheses to show that humans now communicate mostly through subtextual body language, but all this does it slow my regularly sized brain down and makes me annoyed. People have the same occupations, the same neuroses, the same social and workplace dynamics. Society crumbles in much the same way that it does in many a generic dystopia, except more people simply go insane. There's not enough inventive thinking for a narrative about hyper intelligent humans. Half of them are stuck trying to claw back the status quo, a really disappointing obsession in an uplift story. It's only at the very end of the book that we actually see much tangible change in the direction of humanity, though the constant bloviation from all the characters unfortunately continues.There's a part of me that enjoyed the Adam and Eve allusion at the end. But I can't help but think that I was just glad something actually happened.

It's suspect that the only visible character that suffers greatly from her increased in IQ is one of only two women characters. There's some very overt misogyny that, being a housewife, her poor little femoid brain just couldn't take the strain. There's also some very out of place distractions in the form of brief summaries of events in other parts of the world. These weren't nearly fleshed out enough to provide anything of value to the novel.

Brain Wave is really short though, so if you decide to try it out at least you won't be wasting too much of your time.