Jul 11 2009
Mid-20th century science fiction
This month for the book group we’ve both been reading science fiction stories. I had Foundation by Isaac Asimov and Helen read Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. My book was quite short so I ended up reading them both.
I’ll have to give my thoughts to the group next Sunday so I have to work out what they are!
Foundation seemed very old-fashioned, even more old-fashioned than Swallows and Amazons. It really seems to be true that nothing dates faster than our idea of the future. The truth is, Foundation was mostly a Victorian adventure story set in the future — men with moustaches arguing things out over brandy and cigars and taking Science and Religion to the Heathens. For a book about the collapse of a galactic civilisation it really seemed like all the action took place in a single room, like it was really a stage play rather than a drama set across the full length of known space. Each scene was a set-piece where the Protagonist meets the Antagonist and subdues him with Superior Intellect.
The book is a collection of short stories in the lifetime of a small planet at the periphery of the aforementioned galactic empire. The empire is collapsing and various planetary warlords and tinpot dictators are appearing out of the anarchy. Each chapter was published as a self-contained story, each taking place a generation or two after the previous one. The central conceit of the whole series is the invention of “psychohistory”, a statistical method of predicting the behaviour of extremely large groups of people (ie, quadrillions of people). At the start of the first story the inventor of psychohistory predicts the imminent collapse of society and records a series of further predictions which are played back at appropriate points along the thousand-year lifetime of the planet, to coincide with the society overcoming some new problem that threatens that their lives.
Each story takes place as some slow-burning problem comes to a head and just in the nick of time some Übermensch steps into the breach. Every single damn time it looks like their society is about to come a cropper someone with amazing intellect and wit and guile manages to manipulate the situation so the threat is deflected and the force of the attack is used against the attacker. It’s interplanetary political judo, innit?
I read another of the ‘Foundation’ books when I was younger but don’t remember liking or disliking it particularly. It’s strange that it seems so silly when given a fresh reading now that I’m old enough to understand it. I didn’t dislike the stories but they were rather juvenile and not very well written. The characters were interchangeable and I found it fairly difficult to determine who would turn out to be the central character in each story. They were all rather boring people.
The second one was Flowers for Algernon. It’s set in the “present day”, which I guess was some time in the sixties. The story is told through a series of diary-style reports written by Charlie Gordon, a retarded man who later undergoes an experimental procedure to increase his intelligence. The simplicity of this approach is devastatingly effective in the opening chapters. We see the events of Charlie’s life through his eyes, but can infer all the details which he misses from the narration. It’s a really saddening experience to watch Charlie stumble through things and having people who he thinks are his friends take advantage of him.
The Algernon of the title is the lab mouse who was made super-intelligent and which led the scientists in the story to try the technique on humans. Charlie becomes more intelligent but remains emotionally immature, while Algernon begins to regress. By this stage Charlie is clever enough to understand the experiment he was put through and discovers why Algernon — and ultimately Charlie — only had a short-lived brilliance.
The closing chapters of the story follow Charlie’s own regression. It’s sad and sickening, like watching someone lose their faculties to dementia over the course of a dozen pages. The frustration is palpable, as the books around him become harder to understand, his writing skills deteriorate, his concentration drops and his memory fades. It’s a book with many questions and no answers — and it’s hard to even know if the questions are good — but it’s well worth your time.
Flowers for Algernon was also a TV drama in 2000. I remember it quite well as it had quite an emotinal effect on me.
Was it a serialisation or did you see the film, Charly?
My memory is suspect on this one. I knew Robin Williamdsand Robert de Nero were the main characters. After checking it with IMDB I found it was a film called “Awakenings” where patients in a catatonic state were brought out of the condition and one of the characters in particular (Robert de Nero) became highly intelligent but just like in the Charly and Flowers for Algernon he regressed to his old self. The story line is very similar. I think this version was based on some truth, or as much as you get in a movie.