The influential classic of enhanced intelligence with a breakneck pace An early novel by Poul Anderson, Brain Wave (1954) is also a landmark science fiction story on the topic of intelligence enhancement. Unlike in the later Flowers for Algernon (1966) - see episode 148 - an explosive rise of brainpower is not the work of human scientists. Instead, the whole world gets a huge intelligence boost, as the Earth exits a vast cosmic field which for millions of years had inhibited "c...
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The influential classic of enhanced intelligence with a breakneck pace An early novel by Poul Anderson, Brain Wave (1954) is also a landmark science fiction story on the topic of intelligence enhancement. Unlike in the later Flowers for Algernon (1966) - see episode 148 - an explosive rise of brainpower is not the work of human scientists. Instead, the whole world gets a huge intelligence boost, as the Earth exits a vast cosmic field which for millions of years had inhibited "c...
#167 The thing itself: science fiction and its aesthetic
Classic SF with Andy Johnson
9 minutes
5 months ago
#167 The thing itself: science fiction and its aesthetic
Science fiction is famously difficult to define. In 1952, the writer and editor Damon Knight famously wrote that "science fiction is what we point to when we say it." But what if what we point to is just the surface, just an aesthetic, and what really matters is what is underneath? This episode is a brief exploration of what I see as the important gap between two linked, but different things: the living, breathing genre of SF, and the host of images that it has spawned and carried with it thr...
Classic SF with Andy Johnson
The influential classic of enhanced intelligence with a breakneck pace An early novel by Poul Anderson, Brain Wave (1954) is also a landmark science fiction story on the topic of intelligence enhancement. Unlike in the later Flowers for Algernon (1966) - see episode 148 - an explosive rise of brainpower is not the work of human scientists. Instead, the whole world gets a huge intelligence boost, as the Earth exits a vast cosmic field which for millions of years had inhibited "c...
