Available Surfaces: Essays on Poesis

Brain Wave and the End of Science Fiction

41 Brain Wave and the End of Science Fiction Mr. G. handed out an assignment: something mimeographed. The odor of fresh mimeograph ink is still a tangible presence in my memory, indelible. The assignment had that reek, part chemical and part sexual. But we were juniors in high school; everything was sexual. In a school full of abysmally bad teachers, Mr. G. stood out. It was not that he was a better teacher than any of the others; he wasn’t. He was lazy and often ill-­ informed. But he was younger than the rest. He had just turned thirty a couple of months before , and that had been a shocking day; it was 1966 and our trust, rumor had it, was not to extend to anyone over thirty years of age. Not trust Mr. G.? Not trust him to do what? The truth is that, having turned thirty, Mr. G. suddenly seemed unspeakably ancient, like all his colleagues. Before that, he had been ours somehow; now he was theirs. What Mr. G. had that the others lacked was an element of hipness . He was blandly handsome, slightly moon-­ faced but clear-­ eyed, with a sort of transparency about him: very white skin, blond hair kept close-­ clipped but not buzz cut like a coach’s. He cultivated a blasé irony that eleventh graders recognized and appreciated. He wore his own mediocrity lightly and forgave mediocrity in others, but he abhorred outright stupidity and was merciless in hostile pursuit of it. He was, in short, a sort of meta-­ highschooler himself, a big man on a small campus who had outlived his time. About the high school I attended, I want here to say as little as possible. It was wretched in and of itself, and its wretchedness was compounded by the fact that during the eon I attended 42 it (1964–­ 1968) it was completely and adamantly segregated—­ was, in effect, locked down where African Americans were concerned . In Mississippi, there was a war going on. Nobody said so, but that is the truth. Our school was a citadel in the conflict; we had our battlements and our cannonade. Enormous mental and spiritual energy that might otherwise have been expended on our education went to the war effort. Enormous resources also went to the maintenance of two “separate but equal” school systems in a community that could scarcely support one. It is not surprising that the school was, as I have said, abysmally bad. For me, though, in ways I would spend years coming to comprehend , it was a disaster. The science fiction writer Poul Anderson wrote a novel called Brain Wave, which I somehow encountered in the tenth grade, in the course of living through a serious obsession with science fiction novels that was thoroughly and nakedly escapist. The thesis of Brain Wave (I recently re-­ read the novel out of curiosity , and it holds up reasonably well) is that millennia ago the earth drifted into a region of space where a huge force field was located. The force field was fundamentally harmless, but it turned out to affect all earthly intelligence. As life evolved, intelligence was damped down by the action of the force field: every brain was one third as intelligent as it might have been otherwise . None of this caused any noticeable effect on the planet, of course, as every intelligence was equally reduced, and no mind had experienced any other condition. But then one night in the early 1960s the planet finally exited the force field, and in seconds the intelligence of every remotely thinking entity on Earth—­ human, animal, bird, fish, insect—­ was tripled. The majority of the novel is given over to the consequences of this radical alteration in mentality. Anderson cleverly and densely imagines how the world changes for people as well as, oh, say, pigs (pigs become very smart and very dangerous). Looking back on my teenaged self, I realize that what I was obsessed by (I probably read this little book half a dozen times) was the unconscious sadness of things before the change. I identified with the characters whose intelligences had a governor on. The world inside the force field: that was my world; indeed, that was the school I attended. Later on, through my twenties, I would live 43 the other part of the book, the lifting of the inhibitor. But that was in the...