RE: The Baen library - & Fictionwise.com

From: Damien Broderick (thespike@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed Dec 18 2002 - 23:25:47 MST


John K Clark recalls Poul Anderson's BRAIN WAVE nostalgically:

> Gee, that brings me back, that was the second science fiction book I ever
> read, the first being "What Mad Universe" by Fredrick Brown. At the time I
> thought they were both quite wonderful but I'm a little scared to reread
> them today because I was pretty young and I don't know how well they would
> hold up.

Fredric Brown's book was a comic farce sending up pulp sf clichés and
fandom, which possibly escaped your youthful notice. It surely escaped mine;
I thought it was terrifically exciting in its own right, and blushed later
on seeing what he'd really been up to. Good fun, though.

But Poul's novel holds up surprisingly well as a serious extrapolatory
novel. His prose is cleanly wrought, his projections of a world where IQ
keeps soaring in humans and animals alike is rather well thought through,
his device of using an uplifted retarded man as his by-our-standards
ordinary genius viewpoint character is effective. If there's a major
problem, it's with the compression entailed by novel length in those awful
days when sf books had to fit inside 60,000 words or less (and even that
looks like a virtue compared with much of today's shameless bloat). I
suggested to Poul a couple of years ago that it would be a wonderful book
for him to revisit and develop in his late maturity; alas, he was even then
sinking into his final illness. Reading the book now conveys the sense of
what it must have been like to be a brilliant young sf writer in the early
1950s, when the groundwork had been laid by the Golden Age geniuses and now
sophistication and a deeper insight lay beckoningly ahead. Ah...

Damien Broderick



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