This was Poul Anderson’s first novel. It was a toss-up between reading this book and Tau Zero, which is considered his other classic contribution to science fiction. I went with Brain Wave because I prefer neurology to space, but this book foreshadows Poul’s amazing ability to make hard science fiction accessible and enjoyable to everyone.
Brain Wave makes heroes of a moron, a pair of chimpanzees, and an escaped circus elephant. I never would have imagined such characters to be appealing, but I loved them in this book. As a book of the fifties, Brain Wave has a domestic sensibility that reminded me of I Love Lucy in places – not necessarily a bad thing, just different. In places, conversational points got long in the tooth. However, the minimal flaws evaporate in the wake of very pleasing reading.
The lesson to writers is: give your readers the ability to see things they have not seen before. His gift to writing is giving us things we couldn’t ordinarily imagine, and giving them to us thoroughly, using beautiful heart-rending descriptions so that we can own those ideas. Every concept is developed and evolved, and each step described, pulling us deeper into these new worlds of thought, at the amazing pace of about three per page!
Brain Wave makes heroes of a moron, a pair of chimpanzees, and an escaped circus elephant. I never would have imagined such characters to be appealing, but I loved them in this book. As a book of the fifties, Brain Wave has a domestic sensibility that reminded me of I Love Lucy in places – not necessarily a bad thing, just different. In places, conversational points got long in the tooth. However, the minimal flaws evaporate in the wake of very pleasing reading.
The lesson to writers is: give your readers the ability to see things they have not seen before. His gift to writing is giving us things we couldn’t ordinarily imagine, and giving them to us thoroughly, using beautiful heart-rending descriptions so that we can own those ideas. Every concept is developed and evolved, and each step described, pulling us deeper into these new worlds of thought, at the amazing pace of about three per page!
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